The territory between art and advocacy is a complicated one. There are cases where artists advocating for an issue helped advance the cause, and others which led to little else than an audience grumbling, wishing the artist would just go back to doing what they do best. The Dixie Chicks’ controversial criticism of George W. Bush and the first Iraq War comes to mind. Such artists are almost always ahead of their time—others will come around to support the same cause a decade or more later, once it’s easier to do so. That kind of trailbreaking is, in fact, vital to a cause—the fact that someone “important,” with something (typically, popularity) to lose has been willing to put it all at risk. I’m reminded of Muhammad Ali, who gave up his heavyweight title and risked jail to oppose the Vietnam draft, and of how, back in the day, he was reviled for it.

Sometimes, though, artistic advocacy works, and folk musician John Prine is an example. I can think of few living American singers—Bob Dylan comes to mind, as do Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris—who have had more influence on American folk music.

Prine, whose current tour to showcase For Better, or Worse, his duet-centric album of 2016, is rumored to be his last, grew up in Maywood, Illinois. He served as a soldier in the army and then as a mailman, first writing songs for his dad. He went on from there to become an international folk star.

One doesn’t typically think of Prine as an activist, and that’s a good thing—he’s a troubadour, a balladeer, a jester, and town crier. And yet, now and again, his restless heart stirs with the moral force of quiet satire—unleavened or diluted by bitterness, much less anger. He wrote two of his more popular songs—“Sam Stone” and “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore”— in the ‘70s in opposition to the Vietnam War. In a recent interview in the Guardian, Prine agreed that the latter song could just as well be about Trump followers.

I often wonder when listening to his music, “What’s it like, inside his head?” Prine seems supremely satisfied and comfortable with his own sweet strangeness and eccentricity. I asked Texas musician James McMurtry—another great songwriter, and one hardly averse to penning a protest song now and again—what he admires most about Prine. McMurtry said he marvels at how Prine gets away with some things. “’Charley bought some popcorn, Billy bought a car’—what the heck does that mean?”

In his prologue to “Bottomless Lake” (from 2010’s In Person and Onstage album), Prine says he learned early on that a story-song either needed to have a really good ending or else a good moral. (And the moral of this song, he jokes…)

Yet while never preachy, Prine’s songs are, indeed, moral. “Quit Hollerin’ At Me”—released in 1995—compares the lines of consumer advertising with physical and verbal abuse. And there’s no mistaking, in any of his songs—political protest or otherwise—a good and huge heart. (A young man/in a small town/with a very large/imagination.)           

Trying to talk or write about one’s favorite John Prine song, just one, is ridiculous, right? And yet if one had to choose, as if for some silly parlor game, how could one not pick “Paradise?” Anyone who first hears it could be easily convinced he’s covering an old 19th-century gospel song or anonymous folk ballad, rather than another relic of the '70s (1971). It’s so timeless and smooth and plaintive, so honest and clean, yet also ragged in its grief that it seems to come from a time when we imagine people felt such things more deeply, powerfully.

Daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County,

Down by the Green River, where Paradise lay?

Well, I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking.

Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away. 

This is a song for anyone who has ever lost anything to a power corrupted, or even, simply and brutally, to the not-so-slow erosive forces of time. This is music to save mountains, communities. It’s a song that will be sung for as long as there are people singing.

In this alarming—some could say terrifying—and dark time, with Trump picking professional destroyers for his Cabinet, it would be easy to despair. What is needed, however, is voice. Prine’s is one I listen to again and again as I, like all of us, lean in to the hard work, the real work, no longer ahead, but here before us, now.

John Prine will be headlining at Santa Rose Beach, Florida’s 2017 30A Songwriters Festival on January 15.