Here in TheBackwoods we’ve been on a John Prine memory walk tonight for a number of personal reasons, not the least is because he left us 2 years ago last week (April 7, 2020).

Here’s something newer for us:

He worked up the courage to play “Sam Stone” for his brother Dave. “It was just like wow, where did this come from?” said Dave. “Because he’d shown absolutely no singer-songwriter tendencies at all before that. This was clear out of the blue. And evidently he had a bunch of stuff he had done. One of his stories was, on the mail route, they had a central collection box you put your stuff in. And he would get in there and shut the door and work on songs. And it just blew my mind.”

Prine soon got onstage at an open-mic night to test out the songs he’d written while delivering the mail. He was offered a job on the spot. That year, Roger Ebert, who was working as a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, walked in and saw Prine for the first time. Ebert wrote a column that ran with the headline “Singing Mailman Who Delivers a Powerful Message in a Few Words.” “I didn’t have an empty seat after that,” Prine said. “Cause of Roger Ebert.”

Donald Trump has made it clear that he’s not a fan of the U.S. Postal Service. He’s called it “a joke,” blocking emergency funding for the service during the Covid-19 pandemic — and in May he installed Louis DeJoy, a wealthy Trump campaign donor, as the new postmaster general. DeJoy has put an end to overtime for postal workers, ordered the removal of sorting machines from post offices, and shuffled the USPS leadership, leading to mail delays and widespread outcry. In his eulogy for civil rights hero John Lewis, former president Barack Obama said Trump was attacking voting rights “with surgical precision, even undermining the Postal Service in the run-up to an election that is going to be dependent on mailed-in ballots so people don’t get sick.”

Prine isn’t here to weigh in on the subject; he died of Covid-19 complications in April. But he often discussed the way that working as a postal carrier gave him the freedom and security to hone his craft as a songwriter. He was just one of countless hard-working Americans who have found a steady job with the USPS, serving a crucial function in our democracy and building a life of dignity for themselves. “I knew until I decided what I wanted to be, it was a good place to be,” Prine said. “Because I didn’t have to worry about any bills or anything. The post office didn’t drive me crazy. I could handle it.”

rollingstone.com