'You Got Gold' week festivities preserve John Prine's peerless singer-songwriter legacy

John Prine's ability to tell us about ourselves in song made us all feel like we knew him.

Of course, we didn't.

But for four days this week, a former singing postman from Chicago was celebrated in Music City.

At the "You Got Gold" showcases at the Basement East and Ryman Auditorium, somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,500 people knew every song by the singer-songwriter of the same caliber as Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson — although he lacked that quintet's mega-marketed hit material.

Prine, who died in 2020, would have turned 77 this week. Oh Boy Records — his independent label that specializes in critical acclaim, whisper campaigns and touring appeal for music that supersedes stardom and lands in folklore — marks the occasion each year, allowing listeners to shape Prine's songs around a fractured society and prove that he may have been wrong about one of his most profound notions in 1971's "Sam Stone."

Sweet songs can last forever on broken radios.

Here are a few takeaways from "You Got Gold" week in Nashville.

Musical legends and their children appear

Forthcoming Country Music Hall of Fame inductee Tanya Tucker, Grammy winner Rodney Crowell, plus recent Americana chart-topper Lukas Nelson (Willie Nelson's son) all appeared at The Ryman Auditorium during Tuesday night's "You Got Gold" event.

For Tucker, who is recovering from neck surgery, the event marked one of her first public appearances in recent memory — and one just two weeks before being inducted into the hall of fame.

Tucker performed Prine's 1986 track "I Just Wanna Dance With You."

How did the "Delta Dawn" singer regard her friend Prine's work?

When she cut her 1978 album "TNT," Prine's "Angel From Montgomery" was included alongside work from Buddy Holly ("Not Fade Away"), Elvis Presley ("Heartbreak Hotel") and Chuck Berry ("Brown Eyed Handsome Man") as cover material on the release.

Any statement that puts Prine in the same category as any singer-songwriter of any level of commercial and critical acclaim is valid. When you hear how well his material strikes at the earnest heart of those reinterpreting it, the reverence he's already held with feels like it's somehow inadequate.

Devon Gilfillian sings 'Sam Stone'

An underrated part of Prine's legacy is that he admired the work of soulful post-blues and pre-R&B vocalists like Arthur Alexander. While yes, we often ascribe limiting notions to Prine's catalog as solely being the domain of guitar-slinging folk heroes (the event is named for a bluesy Prine track performed well by his frequent collaborator, guitarist, singer and songwriter Pat McLaughlin), it's valuable when a soulful crooner weaves his voice around his material.

"Sam Stone" is one of the great anthemic songs about how the Vietnam War tempered the belief that the "American dream" was perpetually achievable by all Americans.

That song's seemingly endless well of depression has been tapped by many great guitar-driven performers.

However, when a song interpreter with Gilfillian's growing reputation (for a night, he was not also holding a guitar) takes the stage, the pain of the "hole in daddy's arm where the money goes" becomes a shared experience where listeners can wade in and soak in the well of sadness Prine describes.

This event deserves a food festival

Prine's music resonates best amid tryptophan-inspired comfort.

That is to say, more often than not, the performer's best music was created and performed either as or after he ate incredible meals at Nashville eateries, including Arnold's Country Kitchen, Big Al's Deli, Brown's Diner and Wendell Smith's Restaurant.

Anyone can also now make Prine's beloved pork loin. The recipe is available in Holly Gleason's just-released collection of Prine articles and features, "Prine on Prine: Interviews and Encounters with John Prine."

There may be other Prine recipes and favorite Nashville-related foodstuffs that he loved and deserve more celebration.

Moreover, in a town where the type of music Prine made and the neon honky-tonk type acclaim we reserve for some songmakers feel out of touch with each other, something great, yet approachably opulent — like, say, a food festival — feels apropro.

A Prine concert deserves wide, bemused grins, moments of deep pondering and "food coma"-induced revelry rather than standing ovations as a show of approval.

Couple this with the idea that the Nashville Prine arrived in, then eventually transformed a corner of into a blue-collar-to-middle-class Shangri-La, is being impacted by a rise in construction and redevelopment.

Oh Boy Records reopened Arnold's Country Kitchen for three-hour stretches this week for events to benefit Prine's "Hello In There" Foundation.

At some point, 605 Eighth Avenue South will have a new tenant and might be unable to host a restaurant event again.

However, from personal experience, the meatloaf meat-and-three is a delight worth experiencing.

Prine remembered everything. And Prine's fans deserve to share in the memories he so fondly recalled.

Kelsey Waldron, Tré Burt and Joy Oladokun highlight the heart at the center of Prine's work

Burt, Waldron and Oladokun — like many of the artists who appeared around Nashville celebrating Prine's legacy for the past three days — are the types of performers that are your favorite musicians' favorite musicians.

However, "You Got Gold" week is one where indie credibility is worth the price of gold.

Kelsey Waldon is from Monkey's Eyebrow, Kentucky, and her self-made success shines through in her vocal delivery. You fall into the cracks of her voice and become a fan of hers forever. To wit, she was the first artist not named John Prine to release music on Oh Boy Records in a decade via her 2019 release "White Noise/White Lines."

Similarly, Bay Area folk-soul performer Tré Burt is three years removed from his Oh Boy Records debut.

The tandem singing Prine and Iris DeMent's hilarious but honest duet "In Spite of Ourselves" was faithful to the original but offered a "community theater" sense of warmth and earnestness that took the song down like a heirloom on a shelf, dusted it, regarded it lovingly, then placed it back where it belonged.

Moreover, Joy Oladokun's blend of wisdom and wit shined through in their take on Prine's "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore." The critically acclaimed singer-songwriter's whimsical take on attempting to humanize and deconstruct the modern music industry with dry, subversive wit was on full display.

At no point during the weekend did the continuance and evolution of Prine's legacy feel more safe.

Aaron Lee Tasjan and Susan Tedeschi's powerhouse performances

Two years before becoming a prodigal teenage jazz guitarist and folk singer, Aaron Lee Tasjan was 14 years old and given a copy of Prine's debut album, from which he was told he needed to hone his craft. For the near quarter-century that's followed, he's chased after that standard.

Onstage at The Ryman, Tasjan sang Prine's "Lake Marie" as if he had imbibed its spirit and had been inebriated in it for over 20 years. He's six albums, five EPs and a decade of living in Music City into a vaunted career. It was a reminder of the power of great music in redefining lives.

Similarly, Tedeschi's a Grammy Award-winning blues talent herself, who, via her husband, Derek Trucks, has connections that dive into the Allman Brothers Band. Her performance of "Angel of Montgomery" wrenched beneath the palpable pieces of Prine's songwriting and somehow allowed their gravitas to impact the song's composition. It somehow felt astonishing and commonplace — kind of like Prine himself.

John Prine's jukebox has a new home

Prine died before he could serve as the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's artist-in-residence in 2020.

Now, via his 1942 Wurlitzer jukebox being donated to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's collection by his family, Prine's legacy will be enshrined there forever.

The jukebox, now on display in the museum, was gifted to Prine by singer-songwriter Steve Goodman for co-writing "You Never Even Called Me by My Name," which became a hit for David Allen Coe in 1975.

About the hit, Coe once said the following in a live performance of the song:

"A friend of mine named Steve Goodman wrote that song and told me it was the perfect country and western song. I wrote him back a letter and told him it was not the perfect country and western song because he hadn't said anything about mama or trains, trucks, prison or getting drunk."

Prine noted in a 1987 interview that he and Goodman wrote the song in 1971 after their manager at the time, singing star Paul Anka, allowed the tandem to stay in a grand luxury suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. While there, after raiding the suite's minibar of Dom Perignon, brandy, Jack Daniels, Wild Turkey, vodka, gin, punch and 7up," they wrote a parody of "every country song" they had ever heard.

In an appropriate to Prine mix of gravitas buoyed by light-hearted entertainment, he refused to take credit or accept any royalties for the song, regarding the top-10 country chart hit as a "goofy, novelty song" he felt was "[offensive to] the country music community."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: 'You Got Gold' week festivities preserve John Prine's peerless singer-songwriter legacy