Living with John Prine
In the spring of 2018, Tom Piazza climbed into a 1977 Coupe de Ville with the great singer-songwriter John Prine to write an article for the Oxford American. Their Florida road trip ignited a deep friendship, full of tall tales over epic meals, long nights playing guitar and trading songs, and visits back and forth between their homes in Nashville and New Orleans. Along the way, Prine invited Piazza to work with him on a memoir, with John telling sprawling, often hilarious stories of his youth and family in Chicago and Kentucky, his breakthrough into the national spotlight, his riotous early years in the Nashville country scene, and much more. When Prine died suddenly of COVID in April 2020, that unfinished memoir evolved into an intimate and very personal narrative of the artist’s final years.
AUTHOR BIO
Tom Piazza is celebrated both as a novelist and as a writer on American music. His fourteen books include the novels
The Auburn Conference and City of Refuge, the post-Katrina manifesto Why New Orleans Matters, and the essay collection Devil Sent The Rain. His most recent book is Living in the Present With John Prine, a memoir of his friendship with the great singer-songwriter. He was a principal writer for the innovative New Orleans-based HBO drama series
TREME, a four-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing, and the winner of a Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey. He lives in New Orleans.
