“Hello in There” (John Prine)

Today’s classic sad song of the day is a real tear jerker, one of the first important songs from fabled songwriter John Prine. “Hello in There” was track number three on side one of his first solo album, the self-titled 1971 album, John Prine.

That album included several songs that both established Mr. Prine’s career and became instant classics that are still recognized as such today. We’re talking songs like “Illegal Smile,” “Sam Stone,” and “Angel of Montgomery,” incredible songs all. Other artists would kill for a debut album like John Prine.

“Hello in There” is about an old married couple dealing with the fact that they’re growing old and their world is getting emptier. Prine wrote the song when he was just 22 years old and working as a mail carrier for the United States Postal Service. In his words:

“I delivered to a Baptist old people’s home where we’d have to go room-to-room, and some of the patients would kind of pretend that you were a grandchild or nephew that had come to visit, instead of the guy delivering papers. That always stuck in my head.”

The song encapsulates all that is great about John Prine, especially his ability to truly live inside the people he’s writing about. Observe how he describes the increasingly empty lives of this elderly couple with sensitivity and understanding:

Me and Loretta, we don’t talk much more
She sits and stares through the back door screen
And all the news just repeats itself
Like some forgotten dream that we’ve both seen

Someday I’ll go and call up Rudy
We worked together at the factory
What could I say if he asks “What’s new?”
“Nothing, what’s with you? Nothing much to do”

You know that old trees just grow stronger
And old rivers grow wilder every day
Old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say, “Hello in there, hello”

Maybe it’s because I’m starting to get old myself, but this song just tears me up. You feel for that lonely old man, and it’s amazing that such a young man as Prine in his prime could paint such a vivid and profound picture of old age. It’s a remarkable song that itself stands the test of time.

John Prine wrote a ton of songs that he sang himself and were sung by other people. Over the course of his long (but not long enough) career he won five Grammy awards (Best Contemporary Folk Album in 1991 for The Missing Years; Best Contemporary Folk Album in 2005 for Fair & Square; Best Roots Performance and Best American Roots Song in 2021 for I Remember Everything; and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020) and his songs were covered by folks like Nanci Griffith, Amos Lee, Dwight Yokum, George Strait, Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette, Iris DeMent, Bette Midler, Kim Carnes, Brandi Carlisle, the Avett Brothers, Miranda Lambert, Nathanial Rateliff, and Bonnie Raitt. That’s not a bad life.

Unfortunately, John Prine was one of the first casualties of the COVID pandemic. He died on March 19, 2020, aged 73—old enough to be pals with the couple he wrote about in “Hello in There,” even if his own life was far from empty.

As a bit of a bonus, here’s a clip of John Prine performing “Hello in There” in 2001, thirty years after the original recording. Prine is older and wiser in this clip, his voice a little more ragged, but that just makes the song that much better. Damn, I love this song and I miss John Prine.