The Blue-Collar Blues

It was an ordinary Chicago mailbox, the kind mailmen use for stashing their extra loads while making rounds. But what were those shuffling and humming sounds coming from within? Curious or startled passers-by probably never found out, but they were made by Mailman John Prine, scrunched up inside the empty box to escape the icy wind, eating his lunch and composing his mournful songs.

That was two years ago. Since then, Prine, now 26, has quit the post office, launched into a career as a songwriter and singer, and emerged from his box, so to speak, as one of the nation's most striking new folk talents. But he is still singing the blue-collar blues. His leisurely, deceptively genial songs deal with the disillusioned fringe of Middle America, hauntingly evoking the world of fluorescent-lit truck stops, overladen knickknack shelves, gravel-dusty Army posts and lost loves. In a plangent baritone that makes him sound like a young Johnny Cash, he squeezes poetry out of the anguished longing of empty lives.

In Donald and Lydia, one of the tracks on Prine's recent Atlantic LP, Donald is a lonely Army private living in a "warehouse of strangers with 60-watt lights," and Lydia is a small-eyed fat girl reading True Romance magazines up in her room and feeling "just like Sunday or Saturday afternoon." When they make love to each other it is "from ten miles away." In Hello In There, Prine sings of an elderly couple who live together silently in the city. She stares through the back screen door, while he ponders calling up a friend:

We worked together at the factory But what could I say when he asks,

"What's new?"

Nothing, what's with you?

Nothing much to do.

Prine's balladeering also includes social comment, as in Sam Stone, a song about a veteran returning from "the conflict overseas with a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back." The chorus is a quasi lullaby from a child's perspective: "There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes . . ." Another song tells of a man killed in a car accident because he had covered his windshield with flag decals: "Your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore/They're already overcrowded from your dirty little war."

One of Prine's most yearning songs is Paradise, which is not about heaven but a place named Paradise, Ky. "Until I was 15 I didn't know that the word paradise meant anything other than the town in Kentucky where all my relatives came from," explains Prine. The relatives migrated to the Chicago area where John was born, raised (with summers back in Kentucky) and given a high school education of sorts. "But we never took much to the city," says Prine, whose twangy accent, parted-in-the-middle haircut and beltless blue jeans mark him as a Chicago hillbilly. After high school there was the post office, the Army, marriage and the post office again. He had lots of time to "file away material in my mind until I could compress it all together into one song."

From his grandfather and older brother, Prine had learned to play a $28.95 mail-order guitar. Later he moved up to a $217 model purchased with money he earned working as a pew duster in an Episcopal church on Saturday nights. At 14 he began writing songs modeled after Hank Williams' why-don't-you-listen-while-I-tell-you-this-tale-of-woe style. At 24 he walked into one of the coffeehouses in Chicago's Old Town district and sang in public for the first time. "People were very responsive," he recalls. "If they hadn't been, I'd of never done it again."

It was in an Old Town club a year ago that Kris Kristofferson and Paul Anka heard Prine and decided that he was ready for national exposure. Their joint boost has brought him not only his recording contract but also a string of packed-house appearances at such folk meccas as Manhattan's Bitter End and Los Angeles' Troubadour.

Still, Prine is not about to let success coax him away from the physical and emotional neighborhood that has nurtured him and his music. He and his wife continue to live in the same apartment they had when he was a $90-a-week mailman. He has lost his mailman's feet only to develop a case of ulcers. And he is still writing lyrics like Rocky Mountain Time:

Christ, I'm so mixed up and lonely I can't even make friends with my

brain.

I'm too young to be where I'm going But I'm too old to go back again.

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