As a title for John Prine's latest CD, the word Souvenirs could hardly be more arresting. Three years ago, he was suffering from cancer and word was filtering back from Nashville that, even if he lived, he would never sing again. The disease had attacked his throat and, one way or another, it looked as though we might lose one of America's great voices. But thankfully, John Prine is still very much with us. Not only is he back on the road, but there have been two new recordings in those intervening years.
In Spite of Ourselves, released last year, was a Jim Rooney-produced gem, with Prine duetting with his favourite women singers - among them Iris de Ment, Emmylou Harris and his wife, Fiona, who is from Donegal. And now, yet more treasure with the release of Souvenirs - reworkings of 14 of Prine's classic songs from his very extensive back-catalogue.
To hear him sing these songs again, on CD or in concert, is a delight we feared we had lost. "Yeah, it was my neck and they had to do the radiation all across the throat area. They were going to try to be careful about it but I told them I'd rather that they just went in and did it. I said I'd figure out a way to sing afterwards - I had to figure out a way to sing the first place! I mean, I wasn't born like Pavarotti, so I said - well, if I can talk then I can sing.
"It looks pretty much like the doctors got all the cancer of that particular kind. They said that after two years, if that particular kind didn't come back, the chances are slim that I would get it back again. And it's been almost three years now."
Prine was born in Maywood, Illinois, in 1946. Like many people living in the suburbs of Chicago, his parents had moved from rural Kentucky in search of a better life. And although his father was happy to swap a job in the coal mines for a job in the steel works, the family never lost touch with its Kentucky home - a town called Paradise where Prine spent his summers and took to playing guitar. The roots remained strong as Prine discovered his own music, and the encouraging information that his grandfather, Granddaddy Ham, had played with Merle Travis.
"He had a thing where he'd half yodel and half cry - it was a kind of a neat sound. Apart from that, it was all on the radio, and my dad played the radio really good. They played a lot of rockabilly on the country stations and there were also these great r 'n' b stations, so we were getting the pure stuff before it all ended up under the banner of rock 'n' roll." Prine wrote his first songs while still in his teens, and two of them, The Frying Pan and Sour Grapes, eventually turned up on his second album, Diamonds in the Rough. It seemed it might be an early start to an impressive career but there was still much to be done. The Postal Service years saw him deliver mail all over the Windy City and drafted to a US base in Germany. Draft done, he got up the nerve to approach an open microphone at a folk club called The Fifth Peg.
`I was writing from the time I was 14. I learnt three chords and it wasn't too long after I found it was easier for me to make up my own words than to try to learn the words of my favourite songs. And the folk scene was basically the only way of performing the songs - either that or starting a band.
"There was an audience for country music in Chicago but it was for visiting acts and so you weren't going to break into the country music scene there. So the folk clubs were important in that they offered people what they offer today. In order to be a singer-songwriter, you could go along with an acoustic guitar and sing your songs. It was more or less a place where anybody - and I mean anybody - could come along and get their chance at the microphone."
Prine's reputation grew very quickly indeed. Steve Goodman (the writer of City of New Orleans) was a singer-songwriter on the local scene and perhaps the first to take a real interest in the new arrival. He sang one of Prine's songs for Kris Krisofferson and then suggested they both go to hear Prine at the Earl of Old Town. Kristofferson was seriously impressed by what he heard and, a short time later in New York, he invited Prine to sing with him at The Bitter End. Suddenly Prine, who was only in New York to make a demo, found himself singing to an audience which included Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, who signed the young songwriter the next morning. "Nobody could have been more generous than Kris Kristofferson. After that first night of hearing my songs, he spread the word about me everywhere he went. He just introduced me to all the right people and let it go from there." Almost immediately, Prine entered an elite group of songwriters who were being designated as the next Bob Dylans - among them Kristofferson himself, Louden Wainwright III and Steve Forbert.
The first album, John Prine, appeared at the end of 1971 and contained many of his biggest songs - Sam Stone, Illegal Smile, Spanish Pipedream and Hello in There - and it introduced a new, engaging, funny, sensitive, heartbreaking, plain-speaking blue-collar poet who simply made you want stop and listen. Even the real Bob Dylan got excited. "Only about the second time I played in New York he wanted to come up and sing. At the time he wasn't doing any shows, so when I introduced him about three people applauded. They thought I was kidding. I remember Dylan asked if anybody had a harmonica and some guy ran out and opened his music store and brought back one in every key! My record was only out about a month and it was really wild."
A string of albums followed, among them Common Sense (1975), Bruised Orange (1978), German Afternoons (1988), The Missing Years (1991) and Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings (1995) - all of them further confirming Prine not just as cult hero, but also as a popular songwriter of popular songs.
With everyone from Bonnie Raitt to Alabama 3 to Daniel O'Donnell taking a shot at a John Prine song, there is no disputing the appeal of Prine's consistently intelligent take on how to tell a story. Souvenirs is a stunning reminder of that.
"I have to nail myself down in order to write a song, and I still kind of like to wait until I feel like it, because I can write behind a stairwell as well as I can behind a guitar. I trust the songs more that come to you, and that you absolutely have to write down, rather than just sitting there really trying to work at it. And I got all these empty notebooks I carry around!"
Souvenirs by John Prine is on Oh Boy! Records