Thursday, August 21, 2003

The song "Dear Abby" flowed into the mainstream in the early '70s, and I heard it on the radio and thought the guy singing it was a country-and-western comedian and I hated country-and-western. After I heard it a few times and smiled at some of the lines, I didn't hear it anymore.

Fast-forward more than a decade, and I'm walking in Tulsa with my friend Ruth, and we're talking music and musicians. She says something about John Prine and I say, "John who?" and she stops as if there's a 50-foot hole right in front of her. She slaps her hand over her heart and says, "You don't know who John Prine is?" and I say, embarrassed, "Well, I think I've heard of him," remembering, just barely, that he was the guy who sang "Dear Abby."

"Girl," she said, "I'm turning you on to John Prine."

I thank Ruth, among other friends in the '80s, whose influences wooshed me from my safe little music stream into the mouth of a wide, fast-flowing river -- The New Orleans funk of the Meters and their kin, the Neville Brothers, old doo-wop and jump blues, reggae and ska, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, Victoria Spivey and Tampa Red on scratchy tapes and that wonderful world of John Prine.

I was one of the thousands who massed to hear him at Hartwood Acres last Sunday.

He will be 57 in October. He has survived cancer that was two years along when it was discovered in 1999. Doctors cut part of his neck out, and his voice rattles and scrapes the baritone ground like a rusty can when he talks, but when he sings, it grabs hold of a quirky air stream, his personal musical air stream.

I found a couple of friends near the sound guys, close enough that I could see his face, the weathered face of a son of Kentucky who was born near Chicago and was a mailman before he stepped away from a job and devoted his life to music.

He started about a half-hour late and apologized before he started, alluding to road detours. He played for about two hours, without a break, backed exquisitely by a man on stand-up bass and a man who played guitar and mandolin. In the middle of the show, they took a break and he played solo.

In the last part of the show, he sang two of his most moving songs, "Sam Stone," a painful song about a war veteran's brief life after his return home, and "Hello in There," an anthem to the effects of loneliness.

I feel as if I heard some of his songs thoroughly well for the first time that night, got nuances I hadn't before, realized a little better his magic weavings of lyric and tune.

In the beauty of the moment when he sang, "There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes," his pace slowed, the sweep of thousands up and down the hillside gone silent, and I thought, here before us is one of America's great troubadours. I watched the people around me. Many of them were mouthing the words, as I was. Maybe they were lucky enough to have discovered him early, or maybe they were like me, prompted by a loving friend years after he had begun building a following. Either way, we were seeing him live, still alive, a legend-to-be in a dark suit and tie, with hair receded on the sides, a lyrical wordsmith swelled with great humanity and humor.

After several encores, he finished with a bow and waved with a sweep of his arm, saying, "Thanks a lot. Sorry we were late."

I walked up the hill to my car, carrying my cooler and my folding chair, not having minded the wait, happy that in connecting with John Prine, I hadn't been too late.

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