Bonnie Raitt’s favourite John Prine song
“I am an old woman named after my mother”—this wasn’t the kind of opening line you heard very often from a male vocalist in the 1970s or any other period in pop music. Taking the perspective of another gender was rare enough, but choosing to do so through the eyes of a character who was also past their prime and embittered took the guts and imagination of one of the great songwriters of his era.
That man was John Prine, and the song was ‘Angel From Montgomery’, a country-folk classic from Prine’s self-titled debut album in 1971. He was just 24 years old when he recorded it and still reliant on his day job as a postal worker in Chicago, but Prine’s heartfelt portrayal of a frustrated woman in a dead-end marriage made a lasting impression on a new audience.
Within a few years of its release, several artists, including Carly Simon and John Denver, had already covered’ Angel From Montgomery’. The song found its ideal pairing, however, in 1974, when Bonnie Raitt recorded her fourth studio album, Streetlights.
“As a young feminist,” Raitt later told Uncut, “The idea that this young man [Prine] could inhabit the world of a middle-aged woman in a thankless marriage really resonated with me.”
Raitt, like Prine, was just 24 when she first sang ‘Angel From Montgomery’, but her voice always carried a maturity and world-weariness well beyond its years. Though the song’s opening line identifies the speaker as an “old woman,” Prine explained that this was more of a commentary on how the woman—someone more likely in her 40s or 50s—had come to see herself.
“I had this really vivid picture of this woman standing over the dishwater with soap in her hands and just walking away from it all,” Prine said, as quoted in the book More Songwriters On Songwriting. “I just kept that whole idea image in mind when I was writing the song, and I just let it pour out of that character’s heart.”
There’s flies in the kitchen, I can hear ’em there buzzing
And I ain’t done nothing since I woke up today
How the hell can a person go to work in the morning
And come home in the evening and have nothing to say?
As decades passed, ‘Angel’ remained a regular part of the performing repertoire for both Prine and Raitt. And even though Raitt enjoyed an unlikely breakthrough into mainstream pop stardom in the late ‘80s, she had also grown into the age of the character in the song, making it all the more meaningful to perform for her now expanding fan base.
“‘Angel From Montgomery’ has probably meant more to me and my fans than any song I’ve ever done,” Raitt said before inducting Prine into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019. “It’s a masterpiece. And I’ve dedicated it to you, as you have to me, and to so many women working to try and get lives that have more choices than the woman in that song. As we get older, the grey areas are what come to the fore, and that’s what you write about, the complexities, in such a beautiful, simple way.”
John Prine died less than a year after that induction ceremony in April of 2020, one of the early victims of the Covid pandemic. He was 73.
