John Prine’s connection to the metal stamping industry

Country folk legend John Prine, who died this week from COVID-19 complications, has a family connection to the metal stamping industry. Getty Images

Heading into the extended Easter holiday weekend, the World Health Organization confirmed more than 93,000 deaths worldwide, including more than 16,000 in the U.S., due to COVID-19.

One of those deaths hit the music industry particularly hard this week. Country folk legend John Prine died of coronavirus complications at the age of 73 on April 7 in Nashville. It’s a sad and unfortunate ending for someone who had battled and defeated cancer on two separate occasions, squamous cell cancer in his neck and lung cancer.

It just goes to show how scary COVID-19 is and how susceptible cancer patients and folks with weakened immune systems are to the virus.

After learning of his passing, I went down a YouTube rabbit hole and started binge-listening to nothing but John Prine. Yes, even Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy covering “In Spite of Ourselves.” I also listened to a 2016 interview with Prine that comedian Marc Maron re-released on his WTF podcast to honor the late musician and Chicago-area native.

Prine was genuinely warm, humble, and funny. And early in the interview, Prine mentioned his family’s connection to the stamping industry. His father, William Prine, was a tool- and diemaker for the now defunct American Can Co. in the Chicago suburb of Maywood, Ill.

Like many, Prine’s father made his way to the Rust Belt to find work in the region’s robust manufacturing industry ahead of World War II. “He moved up [to Chicago] in the ‘30s from western Kentucky to get factory work. Unless you wanted to work in the mines or your family had a little business, there wasn’t a lot of manufacturing work in that part of Kentucky,” Prine said in the interview. “So, him and a lot of his cousins drifted up towards Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago for factory work.”

In its heyday, American Can Co., which had facilities all over the country, was a massive operation and was considered one of the most important corporations to the value of World War II military production contracts. Known as the birthplace of the beer can, the company employed thousands on a campus covering almost 20 acres in Maywood before shutting down in 1975. It was one of the first industrial casualties as the decline of Rust Belt manufacturing crept into the 1980s.

So, if you’re a tool- and diemaker, throw on a John Prine album and lift a can of beer to his contributions to country folk and his father’s stamping work during World War II.