John Prine’s Sam Stone Essay, Research Paper

John Prine s Sam Stone

There s a hole in Daddy s arm where all the money goes.

Jesus Christ died for nothin I suppose.

Little pitchers have big ears.

Don t stop to count the years.

Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.

–John Prine, Sam Stone (1971)

On the liner notes to John Prine s self-titled debut, Kris Kristofferson writes about the late-night morning when Steve Goodman introduced him to the artist who many at the time thought would be the next Bob Dylan. Prine sang about a dozen songs in an empty bar, among them Sam Stone, and Kristofferson describes the experience as One of those rare, great times when it all seems worth it, like when the Vision would rise upon Blake s weary eyes, Even in this Dungeon, & this Iron Mill. Kristofferson was spellbound– Twenty-four years old, and he writes like he s two-hundred and twenty. He and Goodman went away believers, reminded how goddamned good it feels to be turned on by a real Creative Imagination.

Whenever I think about Vietnam, amidst the dense cluster of emotions, images, and memories which that enchaunted word summons, I hear Prine singing Sam Stone. I bring this up because J.W.T. Mitchell s characterization of CNN and JFK as bookends of 1991 describes cultural events which similarly mark boundaries within my own life. I was born less than a year after JFK s assassination, and the specter of the conflict overseas (as Prine names the war) haunted my childhood. I remember not understanding the news reports on television, and I remember initially knowing my uncle only by his absence and his uniformed photograph enshrined on my grandparents endtable. On the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait, I was a young man hiking in the mountains of California with a friend who, less than 24 hours later, was on an airplane headed for Saudi. Just as CNN and JFK marked 1991, Vietnam and the Gulf mark my own childhood and emergence into adulthood.

For years, I have been puzzled by the line in Prine s song, Little pitchers have big ears. I used to interpret it as something of an oxymoron, as a reference to the ear-shaped handle of a pitcher. Prine is fond in many of his songs of playing around with nonsense and sound for no apparently meaningful purpose. (For example, in Sweet Revenge, Prine sings I caught an aisle seat on a train/And drove an English teacher half insane/Making up jokes about bicycle spokes and red balloons. ) That explanation never really satisfied me, though, because Sam Stone is anything but a playful song. It is unique among protest songs of the era because it brings the war back home, and shows the devastating, soul destroying effects of the violence to innocents (Sam Stone s children) who know Vietnam only as I knew it, as an often heard but little understood signifier of somewhere so far and distant from our lives (yet somehow also constantly present) that it could just as easily be Oz, or Hell. Then one day, two or three years ago, I heard the line differently. I heard Prine, a native of Western Kentucky just like my family, sing the word I always heard pronounced as pitcher but learned to spell as picture. Little pictures have big ears, just like the pictures of my short-haired brothers and I from childhood. To me, the song–with its old-timey Hammond organ arrangement–is a memory of a sad and distant childhood, of a time when kids my age never knew the fathers who went away seemingly whole, and either never returned or came back soulless, with monkey s on their backs and gold flowing in their veins. Sweet songs, indeed, never last too long on broken radios.