Six,
John Prine would be relegated to the ranks of great songwriters no one has ever heard of, except that, well, nobody really does his stuff any better than he does his own; and he does it very, very well; consequently, he may not be a household name, but he's still very well known, and can fill a concert hall pretty much anywhere on earth.
Yes, that is true. John Prine has done a clever thing and got out of the music industry into the John Prine industry and has developed his own niche.
'A good song takes you far' and even some of these more obscure songwriters have done very well financially without every really being known. For example, Fred Neil wrote 'Everybody's Talkin' which is the most played piece of music to which royalties are attached. To date 5 million royalty checks have been written to his estate. I remember in the late 60's when Don Mclean issued 'American Pie' he was asked by a journalist 'what do the words mean?' He answered, 'They mean I will never have to work again'.
Some were ahead of their time and were at the station before trains were invented, Nick Drake for example. His albums never sold more than five thousand copies, yet in recent years younger musicians have rediscovered him and his songs are finally getting listened to. Nick was a friend of mine and we knew at the time that something special was happening, so did the industry, but the public were not. You will find musicians like Richard Thompson, Danny Thompson, John Martyn all sessioning for him on his albums. They knew what was happening.
At one stage Armet Ertigun (Atlantic Records) shortlisted two songwriters for their inhouse team, Danny O'Keefe and Jimmy Webb. Of course Jimmy won the day and Danny was pretty much beached for years on the banks of musical history. Sometimes, fate takes a hand.
Nick Drake - 'River Man'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEAsZa4Qz2Y
HS