This has been John Prine Week. What a good time for the man to die, a week ago yesterday. Mainstream media gave him lavish spreads, his music and poetry were all over the Internet, and cooped-up Americans had all the time in the world to do him justice.

This introductory tribute is copied from the back of Prine’s first album, “john prine” (1971):

“John Prine caught us by surpise in the late-night morning letdown after our last show in Chicago. Steve Goodman (who’d shared the bill with us that week) asked us to go to Old Town to listen to a friend he said we had to hear, and since Steve had knocked us out all week with his own songs, we obliged.

“It was too damned late, and we had an early wake-up ahead of us, and by the time we got there Old Town was nothing but empty streets and dark windows. And the club was closing. But the owner let us come in, pulled some chairs off a couple of tables, and John unpacked his guitar and got back up to sing.

“There are few things as depressing to look at as a bunch of chairs upside down on the tables of an empty old tavern, and there was that awkward moment, us sitting there like, ‘Okay kid, show us what you got,’ and him standing there alone, looking down at his guitar like, ‘What the hell are we doing here, buddy?’ Then he started singing, and by the end of the first line we knew we were hearing something else. It must’ve been like stumbling onto Dylan when he first busted onto the Village scene (in fact Al Aronowitz said the same thing a few weeks later after hearing John do a guest set at the Bitter End). One of those rare, great times when it all seems worth it, like when the Vision would rise upon Blake’s ‘weary eyes, Even in this Dungeon, & this Iron Mill.’

‘He sang about a dozen songs, and had to do a dozen more before it was over. Unlike anything I’d heard before. Sam Stone. Donald & Lydia. The one about the Old Folks. Twenty-four years old and writes like he’s two hundred and twenty. I don’t know where he comes from, but I’ve got a good idea where he’s going.We went away believers, reminded how goddamned good it feels to be turned on by a real Creative imagination.’

Kris Kristofferson

“P.S. Thanks to the people at Atlantic for making good things happen to someone who deserves it.”

And thanks to Kristofferson and Paul Anka for their parts.

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* From the chorus of “Spanish Pipedream.”