I first saw John Prine perform in December 2016, at New Orleans’ Saenger Theatre. I had known his songs and his records for years, and the mental image of him that I carried into the Saenger was somewhere between the wistful-looking, beardless young fellow sitting on a hay bale on the cover of his 1971 self-titled first album, and the cocky desperado of two years later on the cover of his album Sweet Revenge, wearing a denim shirt and jeans, a beard, and aviator shades, smoking and reclining on the front seat of a convertible.
But that December night at the Saenger an old man took the stage—patchy filaments of gray hair on a head the size and shape of a slightly deflated soccer ball, and a dark blue suit with the jacket buttoned over a bulging stomach, the head cocked downward slightly to one side. He might have been an aging Mafia don, or an organizer for the longshoremen’s union, playing a Gibson jumbo guitar that looked almost as big as he was. Accompanied by a small group, he played through some of his well-known songs and some of his lesser-known songs. It was a good show, although he seemed a little tired.
At one point the band left him alone onstage in front of the sold-out hall to sing “Mexican Home.” The song originally appeared on Sweet Revenge, with Prine’s raspy voice belting it out over a bump-and-grind arrangement played by a full band. But the version at the Saenger was a different song entirely—quiet and haunting, delivered in a rocks-and-gravel voice to a dark hall that had gone dead silent. Sharp images flashed through the lyrics—nighttime heat lightning, headlights from passing cars, the fan in the window, the door propped open by a broom, the air “as still as the throttle on a funeral train.”
It all cast a deep spell, and you had to wait until the final verse to know that the song was a tableau of the day the singer’s father died in 1971. At one point I realized that tears were running down my cheeks. That lone figure onstage, ravaged by time and circumstance, yet standing there delivering this painful beauty into the cavernous theater, alone…It occurred to me right then that I might want to write something about him, although I wasn’t sure just what, or why.
I hadn’t written a profile of a musician, or of anyone, for twenty-two years, since I’d spent a couple of days in Nashville with the bluegrass singer and hell-raiser Jimmy Martin, culminating in a wild climax at the Grand Ole Opry. That article, which appeared first in the Oxford American, had subsequently come out as a little book titled True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass. Generally speaking, I don’t enjoy pointing a microphone at people and asking them questions. What there was to know, I thought, was in the experience of them, not in any answer they put forward to a question. But a year after that Saenger concert, word came that John Prine would be returning to New Orleans, in February 2018, this time to play the Orpheum Theater, and through his management we made arrangements to meet.
At the Orpheum, Prine played with a vigor and humor that was a world away from the show I had seen in December 2016. The band was slightly enlarged—now including multi-instrumentalist Fats Kaplin along with guitarist Jason Wilber, bassist Dave Jacques, mandolinist Pat McLaughlin, and drummer Kenneth Blevins—as was the show, which ran a full two hours and included two new songs, “The Lonesome Friends of Science” and “Summer’s End,” which would appear on his soon-to-be-released record The Tree of Forgiveness, his first album of original songs in almost thirteen years. Prine emitted funny anecdotes and commentary between songs, and on the closing number, “Lake Marie,” he went into full rockabilly mode, knocking his knees together with the band riffing behind him and finally taking off the guitar, setting it on the stage boards in front of him, and doing some unnameable ritual dance around it before strutting offstage slowly in time to the music, grinning and soaking in the screams and hollers from the standing audience.
After the show, John’s wife and manager, Fiona Whelan Prine, greeted my partner Mary and myself out in the audience rows and brought us back to meet John. Fiona was gracious and friendly, and also clearly alert and observant—we were, after all, being checked out. We stepped over the cables and past the stagehands moving crates and wheeling speakers around, and into a snug, cozily lit dressing room, where John was standing, waiting for us. He had changed into a dry black T-shirt and jeans, and he was smiling in a peculiar, disarming way, as if we were somehow both in on a joke. Warmth came off of him, and also the sense of someone inside watching from a few rows back.
From Living in the Present with John Prine. Copyright © 2025 by Tom Piazza.
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