Word: prine
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THAT PART of the country produced Loretta Lynn, innumerable professional athletes, and from Loundes Country in east Kentucky where my father went to high school, John Prine. For five years and four albums, Prine has been hanging in there as a cult figure. He was pretty much the originator of A.C.--alternative country--the kind of bent-out-of-shape country music that comes easy if you had to grow up with Roy Acuff and Porter Waggoner and WSL-Nashville and Martha White biscuits and their goddamn commercials. The best of John Prine's songs are about what...
Perhaps a better introduction to Prine would be his 1973 album Sweet Revenge, from which four of the 12 songs on this set are culled. Short as a two-minute warning is "Grandpa Was a Carpenter," a song about having relatives whom you love very much but really can't deal with. Prine's grandpa takes him to church, lets him listen to the radio, and then the chorus goes...
...Please Don't Bury Me" gives a classic country cliche a new twist. Woke up. Put on my slippers. Went into the kitchen. And died. Then Prine howls "please don't bury me in that cold, cold ground/No I'd druther have'em cut me up and pass me all around." The other songs are very nearly all just as inspired. There are paeans to rural drug use--"Illicit Smile": Please don't arrest me sir, I'm smiling because I feel no pain, not because I killed somebody--like one of you Babbitts. Probably has no meaning...
...Prine Time...
...Songwriter John Prine, whose tune Paradise tells of the "tortured timber and scarred land" that resulted from strip mining near his family home in Muhlenberg County...