John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.” youtube/watch?v=eXqFFfVpnhQ It’s a classic, though not a radio hit. From Prine to Carly Simon to Bonnie Raitt to someone on Lower Broadway later today, people have been singing it for 40 years now. He wrote it when he was in his 20s, far too young to be writing wise songs about aging and desperation. He wrote it while picturing a woman standing over dirty dishes, hoping for miraculous escape while attending to unrelenting mundanity. I’m a Prine fan. I knew all that stuff I just wrote long before I just wrote it. What I didn’t know until visiting a new Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum exhibit, called “It Took Me Years to Get These Souvenirs,” was that he wrote it in red ink. I always thought red ink was for correction, not creation. From now on, I shall write only in red ink. There it is, in the museum’s second-floor gallery: red ink that begins with a line Prine still sings convincingly, “I am an old woman, named after my mother.” Then he wrote, “My old man is another kid that’s grown old.” But Prine crossed over red ink with black, and in the left margin of the notebook page he wrote the word “child.” Not “kid that’s grown old.” “Child that’s grown old.” Means the same thing. But it’s different. Peter Cooper
Posted on: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 17:33:11 +0000
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