Latest news with #JohnPrine
Irish Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Bonnie Raitt in Vicar Street: a healing night of welcome warmth and real soul
Bonnie Raitt Vicar Street ★★★★☆ 'Ireland in any weather is beautiful to me.' Bonnie Raitt is telling Vicar Street about the nine-day break she took here, surrounded by sheep, before playing Belfast on Sunday night. The rest surely did her good because she's in rare form tonight. She hits an early highlight with the rattling, barrelhouse groove of Thing Called Love, a song originally on John Hiatt's Bring The Family. That album featured the slide guitar of Ry Cooder but even he'd have to bow to Raitt's playing as she tosses off an effortless swamp porch solo, knife blade sharp and smooth as molasses, from the battered Stratocaster she apparently bought for $120 back in 1969. And she's got that voice to go with it. Take Mabel John's 1966 classic Your Good Thing (Is About To End). Raitt, brimming over with pleading soul, stretches out vowels, holds notes until her vibrato is on the verge of cracking, and when that voice has finally had enough of the uncaring man in the lyric, her slide guitar takes over to show him the door. An almost supernaturally intuitive interpreter of songs, Raitt delivers an achingly beautiful take on Richard Thompson's Dimming Of The Day, a called-for Angel Of Montgomery by John Prine ('Nobody cut through like John'), and twists Dylan's Million Miles inside out with a glint in her eye as she implores her baby to 'rock me for a couple of months'. Then she bests them all by bringing the house to its feet with the encore's I Can't Make You Love Me, a tale of broken love familiar to every knocked-about heart. READ MORE Raitt makes several bows to old friend Paul Brady , in the audience having the same good time as the rest of us. First she claims she's nervous with him watching, then declares it an honour. When asked to sit in he allegedly replied, 'You can't afford me,' but with the greatest respect to the man from Strabane, she doesn't need him as she commandeers his Not The Only One and Steal Your Heart Away, making them her own. Raitt calls her show 'a healing experience in this suffering, hard-assed world' and that's what it is But Raitt also knows how to write a song. Nick Of Time, the title track from the 1989 album that finally made her an overnight success 18 years after her debut, is one thing with its great lyric about getting on a bit ('Those lines are pretty hard to take when they're staring back at you'). Just Like That is something else entirely. To the surprise of many, including the other nominees and Raitt herself, she won the Grammy for Song Of The Year with it a few years back but the judges were right, for once. A woman who lost her son is visited by the man who lives on thanks to her child's transplanted heart. It's moving on record but it's devastating live. In that inexplicable way a song you've heard before can sneak back up on you, Raitt gets to the line where she lays her head on his chest and she's with her boy again and you're gutted by the lyric's power. 'They say Jesus brings you peace and grace, well he ain't found me yet,' has a similar effect. Raitt calls her show 'a healing experience in this suffering, hard-assed world' and that's what it is, whether she and her superlative four-piece band are transforming the room into a rambunctious roadhouse or a hushed confessional. A night of welcome warmth and real soul. There aren't many like her.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Introducing the Lantern series ‘No Kentucky Home'
John Prine, whose statue overlooks Festival Square in Central City, is part of the rich musical heritage that sets Muhlenberg County apart. Local concerns about a rise in homelessness and conflicts over how to respond give it something in common with many other places. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony) Driving from the Lantern's office in Frankfort to my house in Lexington, I'm often snagged by a couple of red lights, where I avoid eye contact with the person standing on the corner holding a cardboard sign asking for money. One of the luxuries of city life, I suppose, is keeping some people no closer than your peripheral vision — and thoughts. That luxury is less available in small towns, where the person on the street is not anonymous but someone you once worked beside on the line at the poultry plant. Or someone who reminds you of your child or mother. Or someone who's sleeping in your church's parking lot. Today we begin a series of stories from one such Kentucky place. It's a small place that looms large in the imagination because of its musical heritage. It inspired John Prine to sing 'Oh, daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County' in his anti strip-mining anthem 'Paradise.' Not much more than 30 miles from the cradle of bluegrass music, Bill Monroe's Rosine, Muhlenberg County contributed a guitar style — thumb-picking — made famous by native son Merle Travis, who also wrote the GOAT of coal mining songs: 'You load 16 tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.' Don and Phil Everly — the chart-topping Everly Brothers — trace their lineage to Central City. Muhlenberg County is not extraordinary, though, in another respect: The struggle to come to terms with what it owes the people who many of us (me included) conveniently keep on the far outskirts of our minds. I'm confident we'd find similar stories and conflicts across Kentucky, in state capitols and all the way to the debates raging right now in Washington, D.C. These very personal stories introduce us to people who don't avoid eye contact, who see the 'campers' and couch surfers and evicted as neighbors. And, most emphatically, not as eyesores or threats. These stories are about a shortage of services and housing, made worse by a surplus of untreated addiction and trauma. Reporter Liam Niemeyer and I are sorry that some officials were unwilling to talk to him. Liam reached out via email, phone messages and dropping by. And it's not too late. Their perspectives are important; we need to hear them, especially those of people who hold elected office. I recognize that solutions are not obvious, simple or inexpensive. We are able to tell such intimate stories because Liam has spent a lot of time getting to know the people and the place. We weren't sure what the story would be in the summer of 2023 when, pursuing an idea sparked by a report in a local newspaper, Liam spent a day with several people in Muhlenberg County who lacked housing. He also began to meet local people who wanted to help. As he stayed in touch by phone and in person, we knew we had a story worth telling even as we wrestled with how to tell it. I hope you will find our efforts worthwhile as you meet Mallie and Gwen, Courtney and Jennifer, Zachary and the cantankerous but lovably philosophical John Paul. We hope these personal stories will inform and inspire policy discussions and the search for solutions.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Posthumous John Prine covers EP released to benefit fund supporting Nashville immigrants amid ICE arrests
On May 16, Nashville's Oh Boy Records released a posthumous collection of cover songs by John Prine to benefit The Belonging Fund, which supports immigrants in Nashville in moments of crisis. The EP release follows a week-long operation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Nashville that resulted in the arrest of 196 immigrants. "Oh Boy Records is proud to call Nashville home, and we're also proud to be a record label that's run by immigrants," it says on the Oh Boy Records' bandcamp. "We wanted to do something to help support the immigrant community here, and to also hopefully spread some joy to fans of John." The country-folk hero died in 2020 due to complications related to COVID-19. Oh Boy Records was co-founded by Prine in 1981 and is now run by the Prine family, including Prine's wife Fiona Whelan Prine, who was born in Ireland and immigrated to the U.S. in 1993. "Oh Boy Records is announcing the release of 'The Belonging EP Vol. 1' a collection of cover songs by John Prine. "Available for a limited time, and sold exclusively on Bandcamp, all proceeds from the sale of the EP will be given to The Belonging Fund." The label suggests buying the record for the suggested price of $10, but if listeners are able to afford more, Oh Boy says the funds are going directly to families in urgent need. The Belonging Fund was launched by the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee (CFMT) and the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County to support immigrants through a variety of needs, from housing instability and child care to transportation and food insecurity. To learn more about Prine's EP, visit ICE's operation in Nashville included 468 traffic stops made in a joint operation with the Tennessee Highway Patrol on May 8. ICE spokesperson Lindsay Williams said the operation focused on identifying those with criminal histories and that of the 196 arrested, 95 had prior criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. Speaking from detention: Nashville immigrant, 19, went out for ice cream, ended up detained by ICE and sent to Louisiana. 'We're not criminals,' he says ICE has released limited information on seven of the 196 arrested. They did not provide the names of anyone. The Metro Nashville Council Immigrant Caucus has condemned the "tactics, scope, and narrative" used by the Department of Homeland Security. "While we all share a commitment to public safety, true safety is never achieved through fear-based enforcement that harms entire communities under false pretenses," the caucus said in a news release on May 13. "Let us be clear: Accountability must never come at the expense of due process, human dignity, or community trust." 1. 'My Old Kentucky Home'2. 'All My Love (Oh Boy!)'3. 'Loretta'4. 'I Just Called to Say I Love You'5. 'Sweet and Dandy' Contributing: Craig Shoup This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: John Prine covers EP to benefit immigrants amid Nashville ICE arrests
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
What John Prine's Music Reminds Us After the Cancellation of Our NEH Grant
Singer-songwriter John Prine performs at Atlanta Symphony Halll on April 23, 1975 in Atlanta, Ga. Credit - Tom Hill—Getty Images 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, Tenn., 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? Read More: What DOGE Is Doing Across the Federal Government 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.' Contact us at letters@
New York Times
15-03-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Five Years On, Ghosts of a Pandemic We Didn't Imagine Still Haunt Us
Five years later, the everyday has returned to the pleasant New Jersey town of Maplewood. About the only visible trace of what was endured is the urgent plea that still adorns the caution-yellow marquee of the old movie theater. There for the last five years, ever since the theater closed at the dawn of the dread, it says: STAY HEALTHY. The letter L is tipped slightly, like someone staggered by a blow. That letter L might as well be us, upright but still staggering from a pandemic that killed more than seven million people worldwide, including 1.2 million in the Maplewoods and metropolises of America. Time's passage has granted the illusion of distance. The veils of protection have dropped from faces, and crowds are once again bellying up to the bar, their conversations carrying echoes of what was being talked about at the start of 2020, as if the last five years had been excised from the calendar. But then something noticed, something heard, unearths something buried. A message on a closed movie theater's marquee. A face mask shoved in a drawer. A silhouette of footprints on a subway platform. The strains of a familiar John Prine song, maybe 'Angel From Montgomery,' which at first makes you smile because you love all things Prine, but then you remember that he died in 2020 of complications from Covid, and before the next chord plays your mind is back in that dystopian time. The collective impulse to compartmentalize and forget has kicked in before. The flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920 infected nearly a fifth of the American population, yet an early chronicling of the 1920s that is now considered a classic of its kind — 'Only Yesterday,' written by the journalist Frederick Lewis Allen and published in 1931 — made only passing mention of the Great Influenza: just three dozen words for a national disaster that killed anywhere from a half-million to 850,000 people. A century later, that impulse to suppress has returned, muddling our sense of time. The coronavirus pandemic can seem so safely submerged in the past that we sometimes have to stop and ask ourselves: Did that really happen? It did. Five years ago this month, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, the federal government declared a national emergency — and the United States all but lurched to a halt. Schools, offices, stores and places of worship closed, and sheltering in place, a concept antithetical to community, became an unnatural way of life. There was at first something sci-fi unreal about the coronavirus — an invisible enemy whose means of contagion remained mysterious. But then came the reality of death, by the thousands, the tens of thousands: so many that hospitals and funeral homes could not keep up; so many that bodies were stacked almost like cordwood in refrigerated trucks. The pandemic disrupted the ancient and sacred rituals of mourning, denying many the primal need to say goodbye. Unable to gather, we could not recite prayers together, or share comforting hugs or even toss a parting rose upon on a casket. We watched the burials of our loved ones from a distance, often in the cocoon of cars. Remember? As scientists raced to develop a vaccine, we lived in the uncertain, even the absurd, as government officials under pressure struggled to land upon the best course of action. Amid this life-and-death confusion, we slathered our hands with sanitizer whenever we touched a doorknob. We stood in line to walk like zombies through the disquieting stillness of supermarkets. We cotton-swabbed our noses while sitting in our cars, shoved the packed-up sample through a pharmacy's drive-up window — and waited to see if the touch of that doorknob, or the walk through that supermarket, had risked our lives. Nearly a year into the madness, a vaccine became widely available, and most of us, though not all, grasped how vaccinations would stem the contagion and save lives. New terms joined the Covid vernacular. In addition to waves and surges and hot spots, we had the three witches of variants: Alpha, Delta and Omicron. We asked one another a single question — Are you Pfizer or Moderna? — as we fretted whether we'd chosen the most efficacious vaccine. Finally, in April 2023, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed into law a resolution to end the coronavirus national emergency declared three years earlier. The pandemic storm, it seemed, was behind us now. Nonsense. We continue to live in its wake. The repercussions of Covid extend beyond the hundreds of people it still kills a week, beyond the many who still suffer from long Covid, beyond the ghostly restaurants and storefronts that could not withstand the sudden and sustained plummet in business. A cohort of adolescents and young adults missed out on the learning that occurs in and out of the classroom: the labs and proms and presentations and graduations. At the same time, many of their parents continue to work from the isolation of their homes, a virtual-first experience that frees up time at the expense of any creativity sparks from face-to-face contact. The pandemic turned us against one another. Were we pro-mask or anti-mask? Pro- or anti-vaccination? Did we believe in the sanctity of individual rights or in suspending certain freedoms for the communal good? The anger spurred by masks and other Covid-related rules and requirements helped to further fuel a distrust of government: a distrust embraced by those now in government. Vaccinations for the coronavirus recently saved millions of lives in this country, and yet the new head of the Department of Health and Human Services — the federal agency created to protect the health of the American public — has long been hostile to this tried-and-true method of immunization. At times it seems the collective impulse to suppress has worked too well. As though we never heard the hum of those refrigerated trucks. As though we have forgotten just how vulnerable we were, and are.
