Come Back To Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard. John Prine. 1975. Atlantic.
The details about rural life that John Prine lyricizes in his best work don’t have the gale force impact of experience distilled through language that makes the reading of poetry such an imaginative tour de force; instead, they’re filtered through the stylized singing voice of American pop, with its concentration on the commercial potential of our full bodied sensuality. The boldness of Prine’s songwriting vision required him to follow with temerity his songs’ characters to the no man’s land between genres, far from the stifling immobility at the center of genre conventionality. Like Hank Williams and Gram Parsons, Prine’s abiding interest was the duress of tension on the working class imagination as it struggled to cope with 20th century capitalism’s enforced integration of rural American societies into the larger, national fabric, threatening—among so much else—flourishing regional musical expression in the process. Taken from Prine’s fourth studio record, Common Sense, Come Ba...