Snapshot: Bruce Springsteen, John Prine, and Bob Dylan

Three significant American songwriters in one photograph. The occasion is not documented here; the image is the subject.

John Prine

John Prine is the least famous of the three figures in this photograph, which is one of the persistent embarrassments of the mainstream American music conversation. His first album, released in 1971, was produced by a committee of Chicago producers that included Kris Kristofferson and Paul Anka, who had heard him playing in small Chicago clubs and recognized immediately that something was happening.

The songs on that first album — Sam Stone, Hello in There, Angel from Montgomery — are the work of a writer who understood that the job of a song is to tell a truth about human experience in a form that makes the truth bearable. Dylan named him as one of his favorite songwriters almost immediately. That endorsement has followed Prine's career ever since, rightly.

Prine's career ran from 1971 until his death in April 2020 from complications of COVID-19 at seventy-three. He was ill for about two weeks. He had been in good health and working.

Dylan in the frame

Dylan's presence in this photograph connects it to the entire conversation about American songwriting. He is the reference point that most of the other figures are navigating, whether toward or away from.

The relationship between Dylan and Prine is interesting precisely because Prine is not a Dylan derivative. He absorbed the same folk and country sources and arrived at something distinct. The two share an ear for specific human detail, for the concrete particular rather than the abstract general, but they use it differently.

Springsteen in the frame

Springsteen occupies a different position than either Dylan or Prine in the songwriting tradition. His roots are the same but his presentation is the rock arena. The three of them together suggest the range of what the American songwriter tradition can contain.

For more on these artists: Bruce Springsteen Goes Twang, Artists index, and the full Snapshots index.