NASHVILLE — John Prine, a consummate storyteller who rose from the 1970s Chicago folk scene to become one of a generation’s most celebrated and prolific songwriters, died Tuesday at age 73.

Prine died from COVID-19 complications at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, nearly two weeks after being hospitalized for the virus, his family confirmed to The Tennessean.

The songwriter’s songwriter, Prine penned his five-decade legacy with gut-wrenching honesty and a simple, timeless wit that drew comparisons to Mark Twain and praise from Bob Dylan.

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Prine’s songbook transcended era and genre, earning him a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and place in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. His dedicated showmanship and candid humor drew audiences from Bonnaroo to the Library of Congress and back to the Grand Ole Opry House, where he often celebrated New Year’s Eve with a foot-stomping performance.

"If God's got a favorite songwriter," Kris Kristofferson shared in 2003, "I think it's John Prine."

Midwestern beginnings

John Edward Prine was born Oct. 10, 1946, in Maywood, Illinois, to working-class parents William Prine and Verna Hamm, who escaped coal mining in rural Kentucky for unionized factory labor in suburban Chicago.

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A self-described “terrible student in high school,” he began playing guitar around age 14, learning a few chords from his older brother, Dave Prine. A few years later, he’d study the instrument at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music.

Prine spent his formative years in the Chicago area, working as a mailman before getting drafted in 1966 by the U.S. Army. He served two years as a mechanical engineer in West Germany before returning to delivering letters in the heartland.

While on his mail routes, Prine began crafting songs — early versions of “Hello in There” and “Sam Stone,” compositions that would impact decades to follow.

In 1969, he played his first show — an open mic night at the Fifth Peg in Chicago — on a dare.

“I made a remark about the people that were getting up to sing: ‘This is awful,’ ” Prine told the Chicago Tribune in 2010. “So the people I was sitting with said, ‘You get up and try.’ And I did.”

He’d take up a regular shift at the Fifth Peg. At that short-lived nightclub, Prine said that Roger Ebert, a young local film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, stumbled into one of his sets after leaving a nearby cinema because the popcorn was too salty.

Ebert wasn't a practicing music writer, but Prine's songs moved him to publish an article. That story “busted things wide open,” Prine later said.

He became a rising talent in Chicago’s reviving folk-rock scene.

“He appears on stage with such modesty he almost seems to be backing into the spotlight,” Ebert wrote in the 1970 story. “After a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics. And then he has you.”

It was in Chicago, playing a regular gig at folk hot spot Earl of Old Town, where fellow musician Steve Goodman insisted that Kristofferson hear Prine's music. Kristofferson would soon invite Prine to play in New York City, helping bridge the Midwesterner’s first record deal.

Hearing Prine the first time, Kristofferson recalled to Rolling Stone that “by the end of the first line, we knew we were hearing something else.”

“It must’ve been like stumbling onto Dylan when he first busted onto the Village scene.”

‘John Prine’

Prine released his self-titled debut in 1971, a body of work gifting the world some of his most lauded efforts: "Paradise," "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore," "Angel From Montgomery" and "Sam Stone," a haunting composition that captured the darkness soldiers battled after serving time in Korea and Vietnam.

On “Sam Stone,” Prine delivered realism that spoke to a generation devastated by a wartime brutality that doesn't end when soldiers return home.

"There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes/

Jesus Christ died for nothin' I suppose," Prine sings.

“Sam Stone” captured Prine’s ability “of saying the thing without ever saying the thing,” songwriter and Prine collaborator Amanda Shires told The Tennessean in 2019. “I know that sounds abstract, but because he uses pictures to tell the story, we can all visualize it in our minds.”

With the release, Prine found a fan in a folk hero of the time, Bob Dylan. Visiting New York City a few months before his record came out, Prine attended a party at Carly Simon's house, where Dylan and others would soon be passing around a guitar and sharing songs.

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Unbeknownst to Prine, the label slipped Dylan an early copy of his debut. Prine nearly fell off his seat when Dylan began singing along to "Far From Me," Prine told Oxford American in 2018.

"The entire time that first meeting, I felt like I was in a dream," Prine said. "Except for Kris I had never met anybody whose records I owned.”

Prine once said that it wasn't until hearing Dylan and Johnny Cash collaborate on the former's 1969 "Nashville Skyline" album that he saw where he fit as a songwriter.

He drew comparisons to Dylan early in his career, but Prine would inevitably cut his own songwriting path.

“Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism,” Dylan shared in 2009. “Midwestern mind-trips to the nth degree, and he writes beautiful songs.”

The album invites listeners to rural Paradise, Kentucky, where he spent childhood summers drenched in bluegrass music. On “Paradise,” Prine frames the coal mine industry’s destruction of his family’s hometown with an authenticity that would become a hallmark of his music.

“And daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County/

Down by the Green River where Paradise lay/

Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/

Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away," he sings.

The song would become a country standard, covered by the Everly Brothers, Johnny Cash, Roy Acuff, Dwight Yoakam and others.

And it was on the same debut album, in the opening lines of “Angel From Montgomery,” that a 20-something kid from Illinois would sing from the perspective of a Southern housewife: “I am an old woman, named after my mother.”

"He's taken ordinary people and made monuments of them, treating them with great respect and love,” former U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser said in 2005.

Moved to Nashville

Prine continued throughout the 1970s and ‘80s to chisel songs with a dogged truth and provincial essence — “Souvenirs,” “Sweet Revenge” and “That’s the Way the World Goes ‘Round” among them.

In 1977, the Midwesterner with a Kentucky spirit traveled to Nashville for rockabilly sessions with storied rock ‘n’ roll producer “Cowboy” Jack Clement. They never finished the album, Prine told Rolling Stone, but the six-day-a-week sessions helped grow his adoration for Music City.

Free of stifling record contracts — “They didn’t know how to put their finger on it,” Prine said of labels handling his music in the ‘70s — he moved to Nashville in March 1980. He lived in a converted gas station 20 yards from Highway 100, where visitors more than 6 feet tall would be threatened by a low-hanging ceiling.

“I came here mostly as a fan,” he told The Tennessean in 2017. “I really loved rolling around this town and thinking about all the legends that played around here, the whole romance of it.”

And Nashville is where he launched independent label Oh Boy Records with longtime manager Al Bunetta in 1981. The Germantown-based label would be home for most of Prine’s career. In nearly 40 years, Prine, Kristofferson, Shawn Camp, Daniel "Slick" Ballinger, Dan Reeder, Todd Snider and Kentucky newcomer Kelsey Waldon all released music on Oh Boy.

Relentlessly dedicated to independence, it operates today as the oldest artist-owned label in Nashville.

Left with a voice to sing

Prine’s songwriting legacy grew through the decades, with covers of his music produced by celebrated acts such as Cash, Loretta Lynn, George Strait and John Fogerty.

Cash wrote in his 1997 autobiography that "I don't listen to music much at the farm, unless I'm going into songwriting mode and looking for inspiration. Then I'll put on something by the writers I've admired and used for years: Rodney Crowell, John Prine, Guy Clark, and the late Steve Goodman are my Big Four."

In 1974, Bonnie Raitt released a blues-rock cover of “Angel From Montgomery” that helped propel the song to further success.

She’d later describe the song as “a masterpiece” dedicated to women “trying to get lives that have more choices than the woman in that song.”

And Prine didn’t showcase perseverance with just words. He survived a battle with throat cancer in 1998 and lung cancer in 2013, the former culminating in a surgery and radiation therapy that severed tongue nerves and removed a piece of his neck.

Prine underwent speech therapy in the year after his 1998 surgery, unsure if he’d ever be able to sing again.

But he endured, returning to the studio in 1999 for “In Spite of Ourselves," a duet collection that yielded the show-stopping Iris DeMent title track, one of Prine’s most celebrated and bestselling contributions to folk music.

After more than a year of recovery, he returned to the stage in 1999 for a one-off theater show in Bristol, Tennessee.

"The crowd was with me. Boy, were they with me,” he told Rolling Stone. “And I think I shook everybody’s hand afterward. I knew right then and there that I could do it.”

In the months after his surgery, Prine adopted the gravelly croon that’d become familiar to listeners for two decades.

“At least (doctors) left with a voice to sing,” Prine told NPR in 2018. “I think it improved my voice, if anything. I always had a hard time listening to my singing before my surgery.”

'A true American treasure'

A Cadillac-driving, meatloaf-loving and “Archie”-reading torchbearer for the depth and resilience of modern Americana, Prine leaves an eccentric and unmatched impact on Nashville songwriters.

Kacey Musgraves once wrote in a song that her “idea of heaven is to burn one with John Prine.” Miranda Lambert said she strives to write songs that would make him proud. His influence stretches to corners of rock ‘n’ roll, country and soul music, with Nashville players Dan Auerbach, Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Margo Price and numerous others praising his withstanding influence and endearing friendship.

“John Prine is a true American treasure,” Musgraves told The Tennessean in 2019. “The eighth wonder of the world. I can’t think of anyonewho’s inspired more songwriters.”

This class of 21st-century storytellers adopted Prine as one of their own, often collaborating with — and paying tribute to — the Grammy Hall of Fame member. Prine told The Tennessean in 2017 that he’s “not sure how one approaches their legacy; mine seems to be getting built with or without me."

“These young people coming up that are so talented and they’re all citing me as a partial influence or (saying) they’d always followed my career, that’s pretty neat.”

On his last full-length effort, Prine entered Nashville's hallowed RCA Studio A with producer Dave Cobb to record 2018’s “The Tree of Forgiveness.” His first studio album since 2005, it tangled with “mortality and love and pork chops," Prine said. The album debuted at No. 5 on Billboard’s 200 chart, the highest-charting position of Prine’s career.

The album, as with all of Prine's best work, is rich with stories of human experience.

It ends with “When I Get to Heaven,” a fittingly raucous ragtime celebration performed by Prine with three generations of family and friends.

“When I get to heaven, I'm gonna shake God's hand/

Thank him for more blessings than one man can stand/

Then I'm gonna get a guitar and start a rock 'n' roll band/

Check into a swell hotel; ain't the afterlife grand?/

And then I'm gonna get a cocktail: vodka and ginger ale/

Yeah, I'm gonna smoke a cigarette that's nine miles long/

I'm gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl/

'Cause this old man is goin' to town”

He is survived by his wife, Fiona Whelan Prine, and three sons, Jack Prine, Tommy Prine and Jody Whelan.

In lieu of flowers or gifts, the family asks well-wishers to donate to local non-profit group Thistle Farms, Room In The Inn or Nashville Rescue Mission.

John Prine career achievements