What John Prine's Music Reminds Us After the Cancellation of Our NEH Grant

Time​ Magazine

25-04-2025

On April 11th, we were made aware that our National Endowment for the Humanities grant, ''Boundless Love': Changing Understandings of the Sacred in Americana Music,' had been terminated—only one year into its two-year plan.
Our grant of nearly $150,000 was aimed at developing the skills of undergraduate college students to conduct interdisciplinary humanities research about religion and culture, then translate that research for a public audience. Our goal for the project was to explore how Americana music has occupied a borderland in our culture's sonic landscape and has captured the American experiment in song. By examining Americana artists and their music, we intended to help students explore how aspects of American culture, our religion and spirituality, and our political fissures might be explored via our country's roots music.
Our grant was modest, less than $75,000 a year—not even a drop in the bucket compared to the over $38 billion in funding DOGE architect Elon Musk and his businesses have received in 'contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits' from the federal government. But even that small amount has thus far afforded our students significantly more enrichment than they would typically receive in a class: collaborative teaching, outside consultants who bring top-tier advice and insights, licenses for professional software, access to archives, and face-to-face interviews with top names in Americana music. To date, we have received no official explanation as to why our funding has been terminated.
Nor are we alone. DOGE has now issued termination notices to nearly two-thirds of NEH staff members and has cancelled funding for approximately 1400 projects and organizations that rely on the NEH. And though recent cuts to the NIH, CDC, USAID, EPA, and the National Parks Service have rightly been in the spotlight for imperiling public health, diplomacy, and the environment, these smaller cuts to smaller agencies are devastating in their own right.
As professors in English and Religion at Belmont University, a mid-sized ecumenical Christian university in Nashville, Tennessee, grant work has been new to us. Unlike our colleagues in the sciences at research institutions, our work is rarely deemed important enough to warrant outside support. But the NEH—which supports schools, universities, and humanities councils throughout the US with funds appropriated by Congress on a bipartisan basis—is 'prestige blind,' which means they award grants to high-quality projects regardless of institutional profile.
This past year alone, for instance, our students have done extensive archival research using primary documents housed at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Archives in Nashville. They've completed interviews with multiple Grammy-nominated and Grammy-winning artists, including Molly Tuttle, Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show, Amythyst Kiah, Tammy Rogers of The SteelDrivers, and many others. A key feature of the project was to develop a radio documentary series, tentatively titled 'Halfway to Heaven,' inspired by a line in the John Prine song, 'Paradise,' to address the evolution of American spirituality as it has been expressed in this uniquely American musical genre.
Our project used John Prine as a touchstone because his career, from his initial smash review by Roger Ebert in 1970 to his death in 2020, neatly frames a 50-year window into the great American conversation. 'Paradise' is a cautionary tale that recalls a once-beloved small town in Kentucky bulldozed and strip-mined in the name of profit; when the song's narrator asks to go back to Paradise, his father reminds him that it's been hauled away by a coal train. Whether capturing the futility of the Vietnam War in 'Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore,' bemoaning the deadly bigotry of post-9/11 politicians in 'Some Humans Ain't Human,' or presaging our current political division in 'Caravan of Fools,' Prine provided a consistent voice of moral clarity, capturing the zeitgeist in a way that was empathetic, wry, and above all, humane.
Our students have examined how Prine and his fellow Americana artists harness what religious scholar Christopher Partridge calls the 'boundary-crossing power of music' in pursuit of community. Through their research and interviews, students have discovered that Prine was not just a musician or storyteller, but something else too: a sort of folk theologian, packaging philosophical treatises in three-minute narratives and preaching the gospel of conscience through, in the words of songwriter Harlan Howard, 'three chords and the truth.'
To an eye trained on 'government efficiency,' perhaps cancelling humanities grants seems like a shrewd move. But to us it seems akin to strip-mining a town called Paradise: marginally profitable in the short term, but at what cost in the end?
These relentless assaults by the Trump administration have been overwhelming in a way that feels intentional–every day news that another agency, endowment, or institute has been defunded. Regarding the loss of our grant, we have felt a mix of sadness and anger. Having now spent an academic year with twenty remarkably smart and creative students doing the work of this grant has been a sheer gift. But now, our work, which had been slated to continue next year with a new batch of students who would benefit from the grant, is now entirely in jeopardy. Without grant funding, we will not be able to replicate the quality of the experience our first year of students had, will not be able to hire the consultants we need, nor will we be able to produce the rest of the project to the degree that we had intended.
If we are not careful, the overwhelm can render us numb and apathetic. And history often reminds us that apathy is a dangerous path. Some are beginning to stand up. Harvard University, for instance, is leading in this respect, resisting many of the Trump administration's overreaching and inappropriate demands, a decision that has resulted in the federal government freezing over $2 billion of funding for the university. Harvard's faculty union and the American Association of University Professors have filed suit against the government's review of a total of $9 billion in funding. As academics, we are heartened that more institutions—not just those with deep pockets— are joining Harvard in standing up against these assaults on our freedoms.
As citizens, we must resist these cuts however we can, even if only by remaining clear-eyed about the destruction they have wrought. Like an excavator pushing aside topsoil for the vein of minerals underneath, these cuts are violent and indiscriminate, devastating individual livelihoods and scarring communities. We may not be able to stop the machine as it strip-mines Paradise, but we can tell the truth about what has been lost.
It's the necessary good work of the arts and the humanities to document, dissect, and analyze the current cacophony of our American moment. After all, what becomes of a country that does not recognize its own history, music, art, and culture—indeed, its own humanity—as a worthy pursuit? Well, to borrow a title from another John Prine song: 'That's How Every Empire Falls.'