Living in the Present with John Prine
By Tom Piazza
A Review by Dwight A. Moody
Tom Piazza made the best of the short time he had with John Prine.
Two years before John died, Tom initiated contact with John expressing interest in writing a piece about John (whom he had admired for years). John was halfway through his 72nd year and had no reason to think he had but a short time to live. Tom and John hit it off, and their time together in Sarasota, Florida, turned into an article with the same title as this book, published in the Oxford American. But what began as a professional assignment evolved into personal friendship, as John’s widow Fiona Prine wrote in the Forward to this book: “Piazza is a writer, yes, but he is also a musician, an oracle of folk, country and old-time songs, and he has stories for days. John, for is part, had a brand-new audience of one for the incredible stories he liked to tell and retell about his more than fifty years as a touring musician… He had found a kindred spirit…In the months before John died … John and Tom agreed that together they would write John’s memoir.”
And so they did. Or so they started, completing two recording sessions wherein John just talked about his life. The first, on February 27, 2020, is now transcribed as chapter six in the book, beginning with the sentence, “I didn’t start performing until 1970.” The second on the following day, was in the rebuilt recording studio of the late Cowboy Jack Clement, and that comprises chapters eight and nine of this book, launched by his memory of John, “The first time I came to Nashville, in the early 1970s, my buddy Lee Clayton took me to the Grand Ole Opry and brought me backstage.” All of that is Part II of this book.
A month later, John was taken to the hospital in Nashville to be treated for COVID symptoms. He never left, and on April 7, he died. There were no more recording sessions, no more conversations, just a few texts, the last one being “Yea I can’t wait for Chapter Two Tell Herman I said Land Ho !” I don’t know about “Herman” and if the book explains that, I missed it.
Part III gives the familiar narrative of John’s last days, and it is strikingly similar to the last days of so many others, here and around the world: symptoms, hospital, death, cremation. No funeral. In those days, there was nothing going on: no school, no church, no recording, no traveling, no nothing, just people dying without proper notice, with only the promise of some future tribute. That happened, I suppose, with the first of four “You Got Gold” celebrations in the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. I was there for the first two, and maybe Tom was also, but I don’t know.
Part III features Tom’s trip to the Chicago suburb of Maywood, to John’s boyhood house (whose current owner knew nothing about John Prine and the song with the lyric “My father died on the porch outside on an August afternoon”) and to the home of John’s only living brother, Dave. Tom ends this book, this memoir that is shorter than we all wanted, by quoting “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman, ending with a line from the poem, “Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d …” And his 48-word benediction: “So the words, ‘the End’ don’t really seem to fit, here. John’s spirit—everything that is just beyond the reach of words—remains. We are so lucky that, by hearing his voice or singing his song, we can summon that spirit. Loving, while we can, in the present.”
The book ends with a sweetness that is so embedded in the way that everybody remembers John. I did not know John—actually, never heard of him until two months after he died—and I do not know Tom. But this book, like John’s music, makes me think I would like Tom, just as I like John. Which is why, here and there, now and then, we are all singing “Hey, how lucky can one man get!”
