John Prine still delivers the mail 50 years on

Since the 1960s when he was an Illinois mailman singing his songs in a folk club to an audience of 10 or 12 people who didn’t even applaud, John Prine has been a survivor.

John Prine returned to Sydney after 25 years away for a one-night concert. Picture: Rich Fury/Getty Images for The Recording Academy

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Since the days in the 1960s when he was an Illinois mailman singing his own songs in a folk club to an audience of 10 or 12 people who didn’t even applaud, US singer-songwriter John Prine has been a survivor.

Two of the songs he wrote, Sam Stone and Paradise — the first about a Vietnam War vet whose post-traumatic stress makes him turn to drugs and the second chronicling the disappearance of an idyllic childhood haunt through industrialisation — caught the ear of Kris Kristofferson who persuaded Prine to give up his day job and start recording.

Those two songs are survivors as well — both of them featured in a sprawling two-hour set in which the 72-year-old folk-country legend unfurled 20-plus old and new examples of his unique brand of storytelling which can make you laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time.

With his trusty sidesmen guitarist Jason Wilber and bassist Dave Jacques, both of whom have put in two decades, and brilliant multi-instrumentalist Fats Kaplin, Prine mixed up several songs from his debut eponymous 1971 album with a few from the newly-released Tree of Forgiveness, his first studio collection of all-new material for 13 years.

MOVING

Highlights of the night included the obligatory Angel From Montgomery — his most covered song, almost guaranteed to be played in a bar somewhere in the world any night — and the moving Hello In There, a prescient tale of old age and empty nesters, here given some sensitive pedal steel from Kaplin and mellow stand-up bass lines.

From the new album Caravan of Fools and Summers End were standouts, the latter a heartbreakingly simple song which tells the story of how the opioid crisis is tearing American families apart.

Prine hasn’t lost his dry and apt sense of humour — he plans to smoke a cigarette ‘nine miles long’ when he gets to heaven

Also a knockout track from the new album, When I Get To Heaven, saw the return to the stage of Kentucky singer-songwriter Tyler Childers, who opened the show acoustically with his blend Appalachian bluegrass guitar work and tales of love, moonshine whiskey and cocaine laced with a broad dash of humour.

Prine’s voice is more gravelly since he had radical neck surgery in the 1990s which almost stopped his singing career. That was before he survived removal of a cancerous lung, ending his smoking career and almost wrecking his show business one at the same time.

Despite all his travails Prine hasn’t lost his dry and apt sense of humour — he plans to smoke a cigarette “nine miles long” when he gets to heaven — as Crazy Bones, also a new one, showed.

But it was the staples of Illegal Smile, Spanish Pipe Dream and Six O’Clock News that went down best with the predominantly bald and grey-haired audience.

Proof that just as old trees just get stronger and rivers grow wilder by the day, we all love a survivor.

DETAILS

● CONCERT: John Prine

● WHERE: State Theatre

● WHEN: Saturday, March 9, 2019