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 Back To Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard is the story of personal loss and heartbreak told through a series of titular runaway updates, beginning with Barbara Lewis’ dramatic, total abdication of her personal finances, through to her drug use and religious obsession and mortification, and ending finally with her suggested residence as a rentable woman in a hotel “at the dark end of the hall.” Produced by Steve Cropper, the brash, young auteur whose guitar work on Green Onions stylized, with pulse quickening proficiency, the contemporaneous tempo of our sexual urgency for generations still to come, Come Back To Us haunts with its bizarre commonality, the all-American familiarity of its tragedy. Prine’s greatest strength as vocalist is generating instant rapport with his listenership, conveying sympathy and respect for his songs’ subjects with a singing voice that sounds as if it’s understood the verisimilitudes of human interaction for centuries. (Willie Nelson, whose voice Prine’s resembles, does something else entirely; his hard earned wisdom tells him to avoid verisimilitude altogether, reduce the world population to two, and set about seducing one of them.) It’s Cropper’s durable understanding of how prerecorded intimacy plays to a mass audience that helps shape Come Back To Us’ classic, radio ready scope, the calm assurance with which it declares itself both barometer of the American household in crisis and of the nation itself. The outside barometric pressure may leave you wanting to stay indoors all day, playing records.