Born and raised in Maywood, Illinois, Prine learned to play the guitar at age 14. He attended classes at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music. After serving in West Germany with the U.S. Army, he returned to Chicago in the late 1960s, where he worked as a mailman, writing and singing songs first as a hobby and then as a club performer.
A member of Chicago's folk revival, a laudatory review by critic Roger Ebert built Prine's popularity. Singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson heard Prine at Steve Goodman's insistence, and Kristofferson invited Prine to be his opening act, leading to Prine's eponymous debut album with Atlantic Records in 1971. The acclaim Prine earned from his first LP led to three more albums for Atlantic. He then recorded three albums with Asylum Records. In 1981, he co-founded Oh Boy Records, an independent label where he released most of his subsequent albums.
Widely cited as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation, Prine was known for humorous lyrics about love, life, and current events, as well as serious songs with social commentary and songs that recollect sometimes melancholy tales from his life.
Prine was the son of William Mason Prine, a tool-and-die maker, and Verna Valentine (Hamm), a homemaker, both originally from Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. He was born and raised in the Chicago suburb of Maywood. In summers, they would go back to visit family near Paradise, Kentucky. Prine started playing guitar at age 14, taught by his brother, David. He attended classes at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music, and graduated from Proviso East High School in Maywood, Illinois. He was a U.S. Postal Service mailman for five years and was drafted into the United States Army during the Vietnam War era, serving as a vehicle mechanic in West Germany before beginning his musical career in Chicago.
Prine is widely regarded as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation. He has been referred to as "the Mark Twain of songwriting".
Johnny Cash, in his autobiography Cash, wrote, "I don't listen to music much at the farm, unless I'm going into songwriting mode and looking for inspiration. Then I'll put on something by the writers I've admired and used for years—Rodney Crowell, John Prine, Guy Clark, and the late Steve Goodman are my Big Four ..."
Roger Waters, when asked by Word Magazine in 2008 if he heard Pink Floyd's influence in newer British bands such as Radiohead, replied, "I don't really listen to Radiohead. I listened to the albums and they just didn't move me in the way, say, John Prine does. His is just extraordinarily eloquent music—and he lives on that plane with Neil [Young] and [John] Lennon." He later named Prine as among the five most important songwriters.
Prine's influence is seen in the work of younger artists, whom he often mentored, including Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires, Brandi Carlile, Sturgill Simpson, Kacey Musgraves, Margo Price, Tyler Childers, and Robin Pecknold.
The last song Prine recorded before he died was "I Remember Everything", released on June 12, 2020, alongside a music video. It was released following the two-hour special tribute show, A Tribute Celebrating John Prine aired on June 11, 2020, which featured Sturgill Simpson, Vince Gill, Jason Isbell, Kacey Musgraves, Bonnie Raitt, Rita Wilson, Eric Church, Brandi Carlile and many other country artists and friends.[45] On the first night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, Prine singing "I Remember Everything" was the soundtrack to the COVID-19 memorial video.
My Old Kentucky Home Goodnight
John Prine Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
'Tis summer, the old folks are gay
Where the corn top's ripe and the meadow's in the bloom
While the birds make music all the day
Weep no more, my lady
Oh, weep no more today
We'll sing one song
For my old Kentucky home, far away
Well the young folks roll all around the cabin floor
They're merry, all happy and bright
By-and-by hard times will come a-knocking at my door
Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight
Weep no more, my lady
No, weep no more today
We'll sing one song
For my old Kentucky home
For my old Kentucky home, far away
Weep no more, my lady
Oh, weep no more today
We'll sing one song
For my old Kentucky home
For my old Kentucky home, far away
For my old Kentucky home, far away
The first verse of John Prine's song "My Old Kentucky Home Goodnight" describes the beauty of Kentucky during the summertime. Prine marvels at how the sun shines brightly on his old homestead in Kentucky, where the corn is ripe, and the meadows are in full bloom. He also recognizes the music that the birds create throughout the day, indicating a time of great joy and prosperity.
The second verse, however, acknowledges that hard times may be ahead. Prine reflects on how the young people in the cabin are rolling and having fun, but knows that by and by, hardship will come knocking at his door. He then bids farewell to his old Kentucky home.
The refrain of "weep no more, my lady" calls for the end of tears and sadness, declaring that a song will be sung instead. Prine concludes by stating that the song is for his "old Kentucky home, far away," reminding listeners of the nostalgic tone of the song, depicting a place that can never be returned to in the same way.
Line by Line Meaning
Oh, the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home
The sun shines brightly on the place where I grew up in Kentucky
'Tis summer, the old folks are gay
It is summertime and the older people are happy
Where the corn top's ripe and the meadow's in the bloom
The corn has grown tall and the meadow is filled with flowers
While the birds make music all the day
The birds sing beautiful songs all day long
Weep no more, my lady
Please do not cry, my lady
Oh, weep no more today
You do not need to cry today
We'll sing one song
Let us sing a single song
For my old Kentucky home
In honor of my beloved Kentucky home
For my old Kentucky home, far away
For my Kentucky home that is distant from now
Well the young folks roll all around the cabin floor
The young people are playfully rolling on the cabin floor
They're merry, all happy and bright
They are in high spirits and full of joy
By-and-by hard times will come a-knocking at my door
Soon, difficult times will come and challenge me
Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight
So, I say goodnight to my nostalgic Kentucky home
Weep no more, my lady
Please do not cry, my lady
No, weep no more today
You do not need to cry today
We'll sing one song
Let us sing a single song
For my old Kentucky home
In honor of my beloved Kentucky home
For my old Kentucky home, far away
For my Kentucky home that is distant from now
Weep no more, my lady
Please do not cry, my lady
Oh, weep no more today
You do not need to cry today
We'll sing one song
Let us sing a single song
For my old Kentucky home
In honor of my beloved Kentucky home
For my old Kentucky home, far away
For my Kentucky home that is distant from now
Lyrics © MUSIC SALES CORPORATION, Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner Chappell Music, Inc.
Written by: John E Prine, Stephen Collins Foster, GREGORY GLEN MARTIN, DOUGLAS PHELPS, RICKY LEE PHELPS, FRED K. YOUNG, RICHARD OREN YOUNG
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind
Dr. Johnny Lake
Rest In Peace John Prine. From Tennessee.
MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME
The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song By Emily Bingham
It is an old, old song, written in a discredited age and made infamous in blackface, but every spring it rises from the bluegrass and bad hats and bourbon fog, and the people of the Commonwealth sing it alive again. As the beautiful racehorses stomp and shy toward the starting gate, a marching band sounds across the storied turf of Churchill Downs and 150,000 rise to sing a song about a slave torn from his wife and children and sold downriver to Louisiana, into an even deeper hell. And they begin to weep, a lot of them, not because of the evils of chattel slavery, but because that old song, its lyrics and very meaning altered and whitewashed over time, is such a part of their sense of place, of home, that they hear something else. People who love the song say there is, in that moment, a kind of serenity, a sweet longing for something lost over the passing years, even if they cannot put into words what that something is.
How this came to be, how the song so captured these people and a wider world, is the haunting question that the native Kentuckian Emily Bingham answers so thoroughly and forcefully in “My Old Kentucky Home,” her history of an American song. It tries to explain how Stephen Foster’s iconic work, one that paints chattel slavery as wistful, warm and deeply lamented, could become the anthem of a place, sung with the reverence of a hymn. But this book is more than just a kind of archaeological deep dig; it attempts a reckoning, a kind that many Southerners, especially, will recognize and understand, because they have long been searching for something like it themselves.
For many Kentuckians, the song would become part of their very hearts. Changing times forced alterations in its lyrics, but removing the offensive words did not change its genesis. It was published in 1853, belying a popular myth that its lyrics are about homesick troops in the Civil War. It was inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the story of a slave ripped from his family in Kentucky and sold south, where he is eventually whipped to death. But Foster would paint slavery as sentimental; it was the kind of thing Americans would sing in their parlors. “The time has come when the darkies have to part, / Then my old Kentucky home, good night!”
Wildly popular, it would be performed by white men in blackface in crowded halls in New York and minstrel shows as far away as Tokyo Bay. It was sung by Bing Crosby and Bugs Bunny and John Prine, and in black-and-white movies, the kind where Shirley Temple tapped across the screen hand in hand with an old Black gentleman in servant’s clothes (played by the legendary Bill Robinson). The song is a thing from antiquity, yes, but in 2022, in an America at war with itself, this book seems to arrive just in time. Bingham, in her words, scrubs off some of that burned cork to see what is underneath.
For Bingham herself, a Harvard-educated child of white privilege whose ancestors owned slaves, it would present a personal contradiction. She wore the big hats, too, and wept when the song played, but would come to realize the sin was not in loving a song but in failing to understand it. And understanding it, knowing its beginnings and long, tortured journey into a third century of painted-over suffering, she reckoned that it did not belong to her, but to those wounded most by it; they should decide its future.
Her book offers its readers the same choice, between understanding and sweet nostalgia, between the splinters and thorns of history and about the worst thing people can do to one another, and a smooth, thin, polished veneer.
dawgmum
I can't bear to know that he's gone
Oh but he's still here, he'll always be John
He had to heed Gabriel's trumpet call
He sings in the tempests; and as the tears fall
Even in paradise, he sings to us all
Paradise is only 5 miles away. ♫
Amanda Jose
I played this song sitting with Daddy when he was dying and he was patting his feet as it played. He knew I would do all I could to get him back to Kentucky to lay beside his brothers once the time came. It has been 6 months now and it still hurts just as it did when he left me. As the tears ran down my face as I held his as he drew his last breath I sang this part to him in his ear, for my ole Kentucky home, for my ole Kentucky home far away... I will see him again I am sure ❤️
Antonio Petisce
Sorry for your loss.
💙Directioner4ever💙
I’m sure he proud of you and may your father rest in peace. 🫶🏻
The Covenanter
The sheer simplicity John put into his music and his vocals are nothing short of sublime,rest easy brother 😢
Peter Greenwell
We played this song for my father when he was dying in hospice. Dad used to sing a few lines of this song to us kids. He was an Kentucky boy from Uniontown KY.
dilligaf
I volunteer at hospice. Hello in there was my song to decompress, cry and try to move on. I am sorry for your loss.
Nicholas Kuqali
Thank you for sharing. That’s fantastic.
Theresa Beville
God bless the Greenwells. Good folks.
The Guitologist
I know a lot of Greenwells from Union County. Went to school there.
William West
I'm sorry for your loss. 😢