Thank You, John. You Made Me a Writer

“Oh Daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County, down by the Green River where Paradise lay…”

When I was a kid, that Mr. Peabody and his smelly old coal train was Public Enemy #1. I learned the song at summer camp, it rooted in my brain and sprouted some crooked assumptions.

I figured every river was the Green River, and Muhlenberg was just a mispronunciation of Mecklenburg, the county where I lived, in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I had no idea where the song had come from, figured it was probably written by the same guy who wrote Amazing Grace. You know, God. Or somebody else who’d been around since the beginning of time. 

It wasn’t until I was ten, that I learned it wasn’t God, but John Prine.

Every year, my Aunt Charlotte and Dan drove 1870 miles roundtrip from Lake Norman to Tyler, TX to celebrate Thanksgiving with Dan’s sprawling family. My musical education began on the bench seat of a 1980 Ford 150 during those trips.

Aunt Charlotte may have been an unusual choice as a role model, being a firm believer in the adage that if you remember the 60s, you weren’t there, but she had excellent taste in music.

She didn’t just put something on. She demanded that you really listen, dissect the words, determine the message. She was particularly fond of slightly lewd lyrics – the kind that winked suggestively without outright licking their lips. 

I distinctly remember driving down a deserted New Mexico highway as Charlotte pointed at the tape deck, stared meaningfully at me, and sang along:

Adam and Eve and Lucy and Ricky
Bit the big apple and got a little sticky
Esmeralda and the Hunchback of Notre Dame
They humped each other like they had no shame
They paused as they posed for a Polaroid photo
She whispered in his ear “Exactly Odo Quasi Modo”

I thought she might be a little sex-obsessed, but I got what she was trying to teach me – words together can be so much more than the sum of their parts. After all, depending on context, sticky can mean a lot of different things. 

Charlotte used Angel from Montgomery to point out how powerfully you can paint loneliness with a simple line like “how the hell can a person/ go to work in the morning/ and come home in the evening/ and have nothing to say.”

There’s a portrait of whole life in that silence. 

I didn’t know it at the time, just like I didn’t know the river we crossed was actually the Catawba, but those lessons from those lyrics were sinking in, changing the soil of my subconscious, and creating fertile ground for a writer to grow. 

Years later, I’d go to Berklee College of Music, major in songwriting, and try to tend that field. I was only ever a middling songwriter, and I certainly benefited from the influence of many other artists, but it was Prine who first showed me what was possible.

Here’s just a sampling of what John Prine taught me:

• There are a hell of a lot more things to write about than love.
• Love will find its way in anyhow.
• Big words aren’t necessarily better, but if you can fit in “Beaujolais,” go for it.
• It’s ok to say the unthinkable. As an example, “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes, and Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose.”

Last night, my 16-year-old daughter delivered the news that John had died while we watched the last episode of the pandemic-favorite Tiger King.

She blurted it out as teenagers reading news alerts off their phones are prone to do. There was a woosh like the world was sucking in as much oxygen as it could to fuel the coming explosion, and then there was…nothing. 

Nothing except me crying silently on the couch, thinking about Texas and tape players and standing shoulder to shoulder with other people around a campfire singing and damning Mr. Peabody to hell.

My husband and two teenagers gawked at me, waiting for me to say something. But I couldn’t. Still not sure I can. What words can describe losing something so good to something that has already made everything in the world seem so bad?

I don’t know. But then again, I’m not John Prine.