Prine is back

"Like stumbling onto Dylan when he first busted onto the Village scene."

That's what Kris Kristofferson thought when he heard folk artist John Prine sing for the first time in 1971. Things were different back then, of course; America was in the middle of a war in a country where many citizens believed it did not belong, with a president some thought should be impeached.

Oh, wait. I guess a copy of Prine's self-titled vintage album is just as appropriate now as it was when it first came out.

With his twiney voice and his simple yet profound rhymes, Prine's sound shivers with the dust of country pines and coughs from the heart of America.

The most blatantly political song on this album, "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You into Heaven Anymore", pokes fun at the many American flags people frequently carry and wear during wartime. Pine even goes so far as to claim he joined the Christmas club to get ten flag stickers for free, which he then stuck "all over my car and on my wife's forehead". Sadly, Pine says, there are so many flags plastering his windshield that he crashes his car in a fatal accident, only to be denied access to the "pearly gates" for the reason explained in the song's title.

Another favorite that is as applicable to college students at Tufts as it was back at Woodstock is the first song, "Illegal Smile." This song explores the musings of a young man who enjoys the simple pleasures of cheap marijuana. Despite bemoaning his low-down existence and the fact that all his good friends turned out to be insurance salesmen, he returns faithfully to the refrain:

"And you may see me tonight

with an illegal smile

it don't cost very much

but it lasts a long while

won't you please tell the man

I didn't kill anyone

I'm just trying to have me some fun"

This is the kind of wholesome encouragement that transcends all generations.

But Prine is not all about satire. He writes about love and tragedy as well, spanning topics with which he, at the young age of 24 years (when he produced the album), had no first-hand experience.

One of his most famous songs, "Hello in There," is a strikingly tender depiction of the aging process. "Sam Stone" is about a war veteran whose morphine addiction slowly slips away his family's assets, a phenomenon Prine poetically sums up in the line "There's a hole in Daddy's arm/where all the money goes."

"Far From Me," "Angel from Montgomery," and "Donald and Lydia" are all love songs, pure and sweet. And "Six O'Clock News" shows the folk artist's ingenious ability to divulge all but his main point -- to merely build us a cabin in the woods and let us fill it with our own ideas, dreams, and prejudices. As it did in the '70s and always will, folk music makes us ask ourselves, perhaps for the first time, in which of those categories our values actually belong.