fair and square at last

Last Sunday, Jimbo’s sister showed him an article in a magazine about a new CD by John Prine—his first one in nine years. I came home and went to the OhBoy records website and bought it right away. It came in the mail yesterday and I am listening to it right now and I like what I hear. The CD is entitled Fair & Square.

I started listening to Prine in my late teens or early twenties and I became a fan right away. It was difficult for me to decide who was my favorite folk-rock singer, Prine or Steve Goodman. They helped to make my conflict less of a problem in that they wrote music together, sang together and performed in concert together. I understand they were also close friends. I’ve seen them perform together or separately more than a dozen times.

I associate Prine with my salad days, and I am still a fan, even as I am finishing up the main course of my life and looking forward to dessert.

Goodman, of course, was the one with the most commercial success artistically, probably because he wrote one of the greatest and most recorded songs of all time, City of New Orleans, but Prine started his own record company, OhBoy Records, and has enjoyed considerable commercial success, himself. As a brief aside, on Steve Goodman’s live album, he says that he and Prine co-wrote City of New Orleans. Prine accepted the posthumous Grammy for the song a number of years ago. Goodman, of course, died at a very young age.

If you are familiar with John Prine, you probably remember songs like The Great Compromise in which he was critical of the handling of the Vietnam War. On Fair & Square he comments negatively on the war policy of the one we call Dubya. On the song Some Humans Ain’t Human he says:

Have you ever noticed
When you’re feeling really good
There’s always a pigeon
That’ll come shit on your hood
Or you’re feeling your freedom
And the world’s off your back
Some cowboy from Texas
Starts his own war in Iraq

Prine’s songs are stories with music playing along. You could argue he isn’t the greatest singer of all time, but you could also argue he may be the best wordsmith who ever picked up a guitar. On the many nights I saw Prine and Goodman together on the stage of the Uptown theatre, there was no doubt the best was on that stage.

My favorite song on Fair & Square is Morning Train, a song with a blues track and three-part blues harmony (with background singers Pat McLaughlin and Mindy Smith).

Hey, hey, brother Ray
What’d you mean by “what’d I say”

Some of Prine’s latest recordings have had a country-western tone to them, and although there are a couple of songs on Fair & Square to which you could cry in your beer, Prine has come back to his folk roots.

It’s good to hear from him again.

At least, that’s what we think here in Jimbo’s world.