John Prine's Sam Stone

A detailed Summary of 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.

Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.

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

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 emerge

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Approximate Word count = 625
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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John Prine's Sam Stone

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