At a coffeehouse in Ashland, Ky., 50 years ago this week, Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen continued their new mission to spread the good news about the work of young singer-songwriter John Prime.
As reported in an earlier article here, Charlie and Dave had been listening this this Chicago-based folk wunderkind ever since his 1971 first album. The two, later joined by Flood co-founder Roger Samples, quickly started learning Prine tunes to share and sing along with at the Bowen Bashes and at festivals.
The particular song featured in the above music video — one of the oldest audio files in The Flood archives — was only a couple of years old when Peyton and Bowen performed it on a February Friday night at The Catacombs coffeehouse at the Ashland Community College.
The Song
Charlie and Dave had heard “Please Don’t Bury Me” a year or so earlier on Prine’s third album, the wonderful Sweet Revenge,
The guys were tickled by its sassy irreverence, “a funny song about death,” Bowen commented in his introduction that night in Ashland. In his lyrics, Prine seemed to be reflecting on his own someday-long-in-the-future death:
Please don’t bury me down in the cold cold ground
I’d rather have ’em cut me up and pass me all around
Throw my brain in a hurricane, the blind can have my eyes
And the deaf can take both of my ears if they don’t mind the size.
Then When the Song Became Relevant…
The song came under poignant re-examination in the spring of 2020 when Prine became one of the first high-profile fatalities of Covid-19 in the first months of the pandemic. In an interview a few years before that, John noted that he had been 27 when he wrote those jocular lines.
“That song was originally about this character I had in mind called Tom Brewster,” said Prine. “He dies but he wasn’t supposed to, like that scene in those old movies. The angels have to send him back, but they can’t the way he is. So they send him back as a rooster, which is why his name is Brewster.
“I ended up trashing that whole part,” Prine added, “and came up with this idea of the guy just giving all of his organs away, and I made a whole song out of that. It’s the best organ donor campfire song I know of.”
More on Mortality
Later in his career, Prine frequently gave death further reflection. In 1975, for instance, Johnn penned “He Was In Heaven Before He Died,” inspired by the death of his father four years earlier.
And then decades later for what would become his final album Tree of Forgiveness (2018), he wrote “When I Get to Heaven.”
Inspired by his surviving cancer in 1998 and again in 2013, his song, the last track on the album, also will always demonstrate that time did not temper Prine’s quirky worldview (or otherworldview):
Ain't the afterlife grand?
I'm gonna get a cocktail, vodka and ginger ale.
I'm gonna smoke a cigarette that's nine miles long.
I'm gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl.
Yeah, this old man is goin' to town.
Flash Forward…. Waaaaay Forward
We can’t whisk you back to that coffeehouse night 50 years ago. But if you’d like the 2025 version of that evening, set your calendar for this Thursday night, destination: Huntington’s Bahnhof WVrsthaus & Biergarten, 745 7th Ave.
The Flood will be back at this wonderful establishment to play from 6:30 to 8:30. Join us for an evening of good food, good tunes, and even a bit of that good ol’ coffeehouse vibe.
Meanwhile, More John?
Finally, if you’d like a little more Floodified versions of John’s tunes, remember that the free Radio Floodango music streaming service has a randomized playlist of some of the band’s favorite Prine pieces.
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