John Prine was an American folk rock singer born in 1946. He passed in the first wave of Covid in the US. He wrote nearly 150 songs, ranging from sad hymns to sweet, almost spoken word poetic ballads dedicated to a date his wife and he went on years before. Called the Singing Mailman, he was a postal carrier in Chicago who would sing in dive bars and greasy spoon diners on the weekends, and after his shift.

He worked tirelessly to start his own record label, because he believed that singers and writers should see the bulk of the profits from their work, instead of managers and label execs. He began Old Boy Records in 1981. He suffered from cancer several times throughout his life.

The specific cultural work of John’s that I would like to highlight is the song Angel From Montgomery. John wrote and sang several songs from the point of view of women, and Angel From Montgomery is likely his most famous of these, and one of his most famous songs in general. The song is about an older woman, wishing to leave her marriage, asking the lord to make her an Angel, so she may leave Montgomery. It is a song about desires and wishes and wants. An old woman who has lived a life she sometimes wishes she could change, in a marriage with a “child that’s grown old.” John’s use of folksy, non-standard English, such as the line “When I was a young girl/ Well, I had me a cowboy/ He weren’t much to look at/ Just a free ramblin’ man” evokes images of older, rural Americans, and perfectly encapsulates the older woman from whom the song’s point of view is sung. It touches on regrets and the troubles that marriages can have, such as in the verse “How the hell can a person/ Go to work in the mornin’/ Come home in the evenin’/ and have nothin’ to say.”

John Prine had a way of capturing something intangible in his music. Souvenirs is my favorite Prine song, and sometimes I feel like it was written for me personally when listening to it. He wrote that one while driving on the way to a venue. But Angel From Montgomery is a song that forces the listener outside of themselves. In Souvenirs, and many other songs, the work has a way of bringing you in, of making you feel like this story could be about you. Angel, on the other hand, because it is a song sung by a relatively young man from the point of a view of an older woman, forces the listener outside of themselves. To really consider this other person, and how her life has been. It embraces the need in life for empathy, for really considering someone else’s lot in life, and the regret that comes with age. In this song, the question really being asked is can you really, truly consider life from another angle? By creating this mix of a young man singing, and an old woman’s point of view, how well can you empathize? Can you be the old woman, just for a day?

I think the big questions that prompted John to write this song were his politics, notoriously liberal and very feminist, but also the question of regrets and age. The time period that John wrote the song in was during the early days of second wave feminism, and that almost certainly influenced his decisions, but regret, age, and empathy, those are questions we have always, and likely will always, grapple with. As a cultural work, as a song, as a few moments out of the day to listen to it, Angel represents, I believe, something rare and special and precious. A timeless song, that is just as relevant today as it was in 1971, and will be relevant for as long as anyone gets to the end of their lives and has regrets.

John wrote nearly 150 songs, he sang far more. That desire to express himself is innate in humanity, whether its songwriting, political pamphlets, books, or graffiti on ancient walls in Pompeii, humans wants to express themselves. But in Angel John tapped into the desire to express for another, unnamed, old woman. A desire to express humanity rather than the individual human.