He’d get WSM on a Saturday night listening to this old radio. And I remember this old radio my dad had electric black tape all over it. There was a book came out around ’69 called Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, and that started me thinking that I really like the idea of a broke-down radio. I don’t know why I was able to write a song like that. And you wonder if they’re perceiving any of that. And so I got to thinking about- I was probably high at the time – singing into a hollow log or something going: “Helloo, hellooo, is anybody in there? Helloo in there.” And it all came out of that idea, so I thought of “Hello in There.” I get this vision of older people and you’re right up in their face and you see em, but they almost look invisible. When I got around to writing “Hello in There,” it was directly because of “Across the Universe.” The first time I heard John Lennon sing that, he had a lot of reverb on his voice. They didn’t get many visitors, so they acted like you were coming to see them, not just bringing the newspaper to them. After a while, I found out that some of the people were introducing you to their neighbors as if you were a nephew of theirs, or a grandson. And one of the places on the route was this Baptist old peoples’ home, and you had to deliver the newspapers to the individual rooms of the people. I had a buddy when I was about 12, and he had a newspaper route, and he was making pretty good money, so he asked me if I could help him out a couple days a week and would get it done in record time.
I always had an affinity for older people, partially because of my grandparents. I wrote “ Hello in There” and a good part of “Sam Stone” on my mail route in my head. I always loved Bonnie, and Bonnie put her name on that song and she got it out there for the world to hear. A lot of them I hear are doing Bonnie Raitt’s version. A lot of women do “Angel From Montgomery” and it’s always interesting to hear. I could say “she is lonely, or she doesn’t wash the pots and pans,” you gotta write her from the person that you’re singing about, you know? When I had all that pointed out to me many years later, I thought, wow, ignorance is bliss as a writer, I think. I thought that if you were a writer then you come up with a character, you should speak in first person, or whenever. I wrote “Angel from Montgomery” from a woman’s perspective, only because nobody told me you weren’t supposed to. I found those two songs on a tape and the third song was “Twist and Shout.” I knew I didn’t write “Twist and Shout,” so these other two songs were my earliest writing. One song, Hank said, “This is about a poor fella who comes home and there’s nothing on the dinner table for him, and his wife’s left a note in the frying pan.” So I wrote a song called “The Frying Pan.” And the other one was called “ Sour Grapes,” and that was my big, “Here’s my outlook on life,” that it all sounds like sour grapes, but it’s true. I’d perform the Hank Williams show for my dad in the sequence on the album.
I wrote a song called “The Frying Pan,” which is modeled after Hank Williams.
When I was 14, I wrote two songs that ended up on Diamonds in the Rough ten years later. Here’s a guide to some highlights, with commentary from the man who wrote them.
It’s a good time to play John Prine music around the house. Prine is currently in a Nashville hospital suffering from Covid-19, and his family has asked for fans to their send love and support. It was the first of many future interviews with Prine, and the more recent songs here pull from those later interviews. Our interview was for a 2017 feature tracing his journey, but there was a lot of great material that didn’t make the piece. Prine tackles all these subjects with empathy, humor, simplicity, with an eye for “the in-between spaces” – moments people don’t talk about. “Paradise” was about his parents’ beloved Kentucky hometown that was strip-mined beyond recognition. They all pull from his life: 1971’s “Hello in There” was about the lonely people he met delivering newspapers. Prine has been writing songs since he was 14, a skill that really took shape on his route as a mailman in suburban Illinois.