When John Prine was 14 or 15 his brother Dave took him down to the Old Town School of Folk Music. John’s problem, his brother figured, was a lack of direction. He was interested in gymnastics and art but otherwise just hung around the pool hall. Little by little, Dave was getting him into folk music, teaching him a few chords and playing him Carter Family records. In the early ’60s, the Old Town School was located in a ramshackle storefront on Chicago’s North Avenue, but it had already hosted legends like Pete Seeger, Mahalia Jackson, and Big Bill Broonzy. “The building had a vibe like that’s where people met from the blacklist and pulled the shades down,” Prine told writer Tom Piazza. “Like if Lenny Bruce had known about the Old Town School he would have showed up there.” He fell in love with the place immediately.
Prine owed his career to the Old Town School, not only for getting him out of the pool hall but for putting him in front of an audience. When the School moved from North over to West Armitage in 1968, there was an open mic night at a bar across the street called the Fifth Peg. The story goes that one evening Prine was unimpressed with the talent and said as much. When another School of Folk student asked him if he could do better, he got up on stage to prove it. Prine had never sung in front of people before and he took the utter silence as a bad sign. Then the applause erupted. The owners asked him to play weekly sets, and that’s where Roger Ebert gave him the review that made him a local hero. Prine had been working as a mailman, but Ebert’s review gave him enough notoriety to draw the attention of Kris Kristofferson and, later, Atlantic Records.
And so it was always a big deal when Prine played the Old Town School. On the night of March 6, 2010, when Live at Old Town School of Folk was recorded, he was going to give the audience a show. “We ain’t got nowhere to go so we’re gonna stick around here as long as we can,” Prine says early on. He means it, too; over the course of three hours, he plies them with jokes, anecdotes, and a career-spanning set of some of his best songs. This is the first entirely unedited Prine concert recording, including all the stage banter that was so important to his performances—the closest thing to the real thing that we’re likely to get after his death in 2020.
After Prine underwent radiation treatment for throat cancer in 1998, his voice dropped an octave and, over time, took on a gravelly quality that matched his elder statesman status. By the time of this concert, he was having trouble hitting the high notes on songs like “Crooked Piece of Time,” originally written in 1978, when his vocals had a nasal, Dylanesque quality. But what Prine lacks in polish he makes up for in panache; he sings with the unmistakable exuberance of someone who, looking out over his audience, really can’t believe his own luck. Other songs benefit from his mature style. The devastating track “Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow),” also from ’78, is about an altar boy who was killed by a train (an event that Prine witnessed). Its chorus is a bittersweet mix of resignation and acceptance: “You can gaze out the window, get mad and get madder/Throw your hands in the air, say ‘What does it matter?’/But it don’t do no good to get angry/So help me, I know.” These are lines of startling insight from the young songwriter; here, they sound like hard-won wisdom.
Despite the pervading sadness of many of his lyrics, Prine was never a melancholy performer. In between songs that could make you weep, he cracks jokes, as if to remind us that none of this is all that serious. Take this one, which he tells before the heartbreakingly sentimental classic “Souvenirs”: “In a lot of my early songs, I don’t know why, but I was always anxious to kill the main character off. I guess it was for the drama,” he quips. “I find now when I write songs I don’t always kill ’em. Kinda praying I can write a sequel.” A lot of his anecdotes are familiar to the point that the audience requests them. Quite a few people call out “Enchilada!” and Prine obliges with the story of the fan who asked him to play “The Happy Enchilada Song.” After much consideration, he realized that she had misheard the chorus of “That’s the Way the World Goes Round”—“It’s a half an inch of water/And you think you’re gonna drown.”
Prine’s concert was a much deserved victory lap after a career as the quintessential songwriter’s songwriter. (He acknowledges his lack of chart success with a wink on “Ain’t Hurtin’ Nobody”: “Six million seven hundred thousand and thirty-three lights on/You think someone could take the time to sit down/And listen to the words of my song”). If he was a star anywhere, it was at the Old Town School of Folk. Prine muses on his early days at the School and tells the story of that fateful night at the Fifth Peg, winding down the set with the three songs that he played then: “Sam Stone,” “Hello in There,” and “Paradise.” You could hear a pin drop during each performance. This time, though, Prine knows his audience is rapt.
