In this post, I celebrate the 80^th birthday of the late, great American songwriter and singer John Prine; and the wonderful stories and melodies he shared with us.

On October 10, 2026, the 80^th anniversary of the birth of American songwriter and singer John Prine, a group of 20 area musicians gathered at The Brewhouse Gallery in Palm Beach County, Florida, to celebrate John’s music and benefit The Hello In There Foundation.

It was a small venue – intimate and relaxed. And although there was a larger celebration in Chicago on October 8, Souvenirs: 80 Years of John Prine, to commemorate his life and legacy, I like to remember John in the smaller setting – you know, just sittin’ on his back porch strumming his guitar with the screen door closing in the background. (Prine fans will definitely know what song inspired that image.)

Known for “his unique ability to distill complex emotions into everyday language,” Prine won his first Grammy Award in 1991 and was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2003. His 1971 self-titled debut album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014, and he was honored with the PEN New England’s Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence Award in 2016.

Prine was named Artist of the Year by the Americana Music Association in 2017 and he released his final album, The Tree of Forgiveness, in 2018. A two-time cancer survivor, Prine was honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020 and passed away that same year from complications of COVID-19.

His songs were varied but all managed to connect with the lives of every day Americans – Paradise written for his father about the damaging surface mining in his parents’ Paradise, Kentucky hometown; Far from Me (said to be John’s favorite song) about lost love; Sam Stone about the post-traumatic stress of a Vietnam veteran; Six O’Clock News about fatherless children; Hello in There about the elderly and the effects of aging; and more.

Prine’s music was insightful, compassionate, satirical, loving, nostalgic, amusing, and more, and he was often referred to as the Mark Twain of songwriting. He appeared in Billy Bob Thorton’s movie Daddy & Them in 2001 and wrote his song, In Spite of Ourselves, at Thornton’s request to play with the credits at the end of the film. He sang the duet with his good friend Iris DeMent.

Bob Dylan said Prine was one of his favorite songwriters, and Johnny Cash said he listened to John Prine music for inspiration when writing new material. It simply doesn’t get much better than that.

Prine’s song, When I Get to Heaven, appeared on his last album and told the story of the celebratory party Prine anticipated on his arrival. That must have been some incredible gathering, for sure.

John’s family established the Hello in There Foundation in 2021 in his memory. To date, the foundation has provided nearly $1.4 million in community grants to more than 100 organizations to address issues including food insecurity, housing, mental health, immigrant and refugee justice, addiction recovery and more.

REMEMBER

◊ “The best way to write a song is to think of something else and then the song kind of creeps in,” John Prine said. “Ignorance is bliss as a writer, I think….In my songs, I try to look through someone else’s eyes, and I want to give the audience a feeling more than a message.”¹

◊ “I think if you write from your own gut, you’ll come up with something interesting,” Prine added, “whereas, if you sit around guessing what people want, you end up with the kind of same schlock that everybody else has got….I try to write about things that actually happened so that I know it’s real before I put it down on paper. It’s usually drawing on personal experience. I don’t think I could dig deep enough trying to get into somebody else’s life.”²

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1. Prine, John, BrainyQuote, www.brainyquote.com/authors/john-prine-quotes ↩︎
2. Prine, John, BrainyQuote, www.brainyquote.com/authors/john-prine-quotes ↩︎