Tuesday, July 02, 2024

John Prine & Steve Goodman

Another Bob S, from the 3rd Street Coffee House in Roanoke, just proposed the idea of naming a section of street there for John Prine.  I don't know much about Roanoke, and I've never made it to that coffee house, even though it's only an hour or so away, but the street-naming campaign it sounds like a fine idea...

I didn't get to John's last concert there in November, 2019. I forget why. And I forget whether I apologized for missing the show when I ran into him a month later at a guitar shop in Nashville. 

But we did talk about the first time I saw him forty-some years earlier, and the pictures I took of him and Leon Redbone that day. John died of covid a few months later, before I could get back to Nashville to give him one of those pictures. 

Meanwhile, if Chicago hasn't already done it, that City should name a bunch of places after the great singers and songwriters it has produced... They could start with two intersecting streets so folks can gather at the corner of Prine & Goodman ... Maybe put a diamond shaped park there, and make the opposite corner of the intersection of Sam Stone & Flag Decal. 

And Chicago should have a footstep trail named for Steve, leading from Wrigley Field, where he watched the Cubs play, to Union Station, where he boarded the City of New Orleans.

Maybe it already does.