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Amidst all the overwhelming loss COVID-19 has created, it also recently took one of my musical heroes, John Prine.
Music has always been important to me and to my son, Aaron. To honor our mutual affection for folk singer-songwriter Prine, Aaron created and posted a video, playing the guitar and singing one of John’s most well-known songs, “Angel From Montgomery.” I wept, both for the love of my son and the special role that John Prine’s music and lyrics have held throughout our lives.
I expected that feeling, the grieving. I did not expect the other ripples to come.
When I heard of Prine’s death from COVID-19, it gave me the opportunity to deeply remember and pay homage to him. I streamed his concerts, music videos, interviews with him and his wife Fiona, tracked his obsessions with tobacco and alcohol, and his bouts with lung and jaw cancer. I listened to tributes from wide-ranging personalities including Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Stephen Colbert, Bill Murray and Hunter Thompson. I woke up listening to one of his Vietnam War Protest songs – “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” and I finished the day with “Hello In There,” written from the perspective of an old man, which I’m becoming.
Prine’s death gave me an opportunity to talk to many of my friends scattered across the globe who share my love of music and special affection for John. It also allowed me to introduce Prine to those who didn’t know him. Or, they thought they didn’t know him, but then immediately recognized his music when they heard it.
I realize, bittersweetly, that without COVID-19 and our isolation, these rekindled connections probably wouldn’t have happened. Everybody was (and is) home and doing what I was doing. We could take our time, reflect about a seemingly simple man who, through music, opened windows to our minds and helped us laugh and cry all at once.
My love of music started with my father. He was a banjo player, who in his twenties barnstormed throughout Western Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio with his band. His music and his bottle were always close at hand before he met my mother. When they met, the bottle had to go because she wouldn’t tolerate it. Sadly, so did the banjo. It now hangs on a wall next to his pictures in my study.
The banjo and the bottle were gone and yet, my dad filled our home with music. Ellington, Basie, Goodman and the big bands he loved played throughout my childhood, giving me musical roots in a love of jazz.
Music continued to play a strong role in my teens. My dearest high school friend Joann and I loved to dance. We cut a mean Lindy Hop, clearing the dance floor and leaving our peers watching us strut our stuff. Those were the days of American Bandstand, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bobby Darin. Whether riding in my car with the radio blaring and singing from the top of my lungs, or dancing cheek-to-cheek with Donna or Karen (both of whom broke my heart), the soundtrack included Bobby Vinton singing Tony Bennett’s “Blue Velvet,” Peter and Gordon singing Buddy Holly’s “True Love Ways,” and so many more. Music was always there.
And music has helped me make it through ever since. When Martin Luther King fell to a racist’s bullet, I fell back on the African American spirituals for comfort. Sung with such heart and great enthusiasm, those spirituals reminded me that the life I dedicated to social justice would bring satisfaction, that a purpose-driven life would carry me to a better, possible world beyond. I was inspired then, and continue to be inspired by the protest songs from Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Holly Near, Phil Ochs, and Crosby, Stills and Nash, to a modern-day folk singer from Connecticut – Lara Herscovitch, trying to right the wrongs brought upon people of color in the criminal justice system.
After John Prine’s death on April 7, singer-songwriter Jason Isbell wrote in an Op-Ed: “His songs sounded as if they had been easy to write, as if they had just fallen out of his mind like magic. John had the courage to write plainly about the darkest aspects of the American experience in songs like ‘Sam Stone,’ about a drug-addicted Vietnam veteran; ‘Paradise,’ about the devastating aspects of strip mining on a Kentucky town; and ‘The Great Compromise,’ about the disillusionment with his country. He had the ability to step so completely into someone else’s life. He had the gift and the curse of great empathy and vulnerability.”
So, it is with music… It helps us recall happier times, it helps us through difficult times, it makes us dance and fills us with joy, it enhances or challenges our beliefs, it builds friendship and helps us love better. It helps us take ourselves a little less seriously. It helps us to feel.
I’ll leave you with two examples. The first, from Jackson Browne in his song “Take It Easy:” Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy. And the second, from John Prine in “Hello in There,” reminding me to hang onto the rekindled connections as one silver lining amidst the storms:
So if you’re walking down the street sometime
And spot some hollow ancient eyes
Please don’t just pass ’em by and stare
As if you didn’t care
Say, “Hello in there, hello”
Hello in there.
Hello.
To reach Bob directly: robert.francis0212@gmail.com
This is just gorgeous, Bob! Thank you so much for sharing these stories of your father, son, and you. (Next time we see each other you will have to show me some dance moves!!!)
I appreciate your thought about the chance this pandemic is giving us to reconnect with people in our lives, and with the things we share in common that move us, help us make sense of the world (especially its darkness), and that keep us going and keep us hopeful — like music. These things: our relationships with others and what moves us, are the true treasures worth living for, and while the pandemic is certainly shining an even more stark light on the already present injustices in our world, in equal measure I think it has the power to bring us back to those things as well. Perhaps both of those things are valuable in their own right: while we must not shy away from the work to be done, now more than ever as lives are literally in danger, we also must draw upon these treasures to have any hope of accomplishing that work at all.
Yes, really quite lovely. Appreciations ~ Niyonu