jmjiloveyou

<h1>John Prine Always Found the Right Words</h1><p>He wrote about what was there, but also what wasn’t there.</p><p>By <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/john-dickerson/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">John Dickerson</a></p><p><br></p><p><img src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/OqvtWJ8d7yNBBrVT5NSJE8jEKXA=/0x85:3035x1792/960x540/media/img/mt/2020/04/GettyImages_115822405/original.jpg" alt="John Prine" height="540" width="960"></p><p>Tom Hill / WireImage / Getty</p><p>April 8, 2020</p><p><br></p><p>I have never been on the porch that John Prine sings about in “My Mexican Home,” but I feel like I could tell you about it. How it smells in the rain and how I’d get splinters when I’d walk on it barefoot. That fan in the window has a cracked nob. When you set it all the way to three, it rattles and squeaks like a honeymoon couple.</p><p>This is what happens with a John Prine song. It works its way into your head until it feels like your own memory.</p><p>“In writing, there is always a right word,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “and every other than that is wrong.” If the right word can open a doorway to galaxies, Prine was a Buck Rogers.</p><p>For me, John Prine first started delivering these memories in 1991. My college girlfriend had been a waitress in a Tennessee club where he played. She had a bootleg cassette tape. It interfered with my education. If I put it on while I studied, I couldn’t study, because I kept listening to the words.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>“Mexican Home” (1973)</strong></p><p><br></p><p>Prine’s father Bill was a factory worker and union president who introduced his son to country music. The younger Prine says he always wrote with hopes of impressing his father, which he finally did on “Paradise,” about his parents’ Kentucky home. But Bill Prine didn’t live to see his son’s success; just before Prine’s first album came out on Atlantic Records, he died of a heart attack on the front porch in Maywood, Illinois. John had been with him earlier that day.</p><p>Just like he did with every trauma in his life, John wrote about it. Over several verses he evokes the helplessness, anxiety and pain he was feeling: “The cuckoo clock has died of shock and the windows feel no pane,” Prine sings, “The air’s as still as the throttle of a funeral train.”</p><p>After an ominous series of observations, only in the last verse does Prine tell us who the song is about: “My father died on the porch outside on an August afternoon/ I sipped bourbon and cried / With a friend by the light of the moon.”&nbsp;<em>P.D.</em></p><h2><br></h2><h2><br></h2><h2><br></h2><p><br></p>