Irish Examiner View: John Prine 1946-2020 - A true original

The American singer-songwriter John Prine, who died this week aged 73 because of Covid-19 complications, would have bucked at the idea that he, out of the near 100,000 pandemic deaths, should be singled out for particular tribute.

His who-me? reticence would have been genuine and it would have highlighted the rootedness, the empathy with humanity in all its wild and wonderful iterations, that made his work so beguiling, relevant and reassuring.

In his wonderful songs, he looked life and death in the eye, loneliness and the ravages of age and illness too.

Bob Dylan compared him to Proust, Bonnie Raitt to Mark Twain, and in a career spannning half a century he saw his songs covered by artists as diverse as Proust and Twain.

That diversity, that ability to appeal beyond imagined but porous frontiers, meant Prine brought many people who might not have an immediate affinity with his genre to a warmer happier place.

He knew that honesty and wickedly subversive humour could be the greatest balms. He enriched our world and our culture. What more can we ask?