THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Wednesday, April 8, 2020 |A
Haley Walker, at top left, with her
sisters and parents in Vermont. Her
mother, Adele Walker, below left at
her remote work station. Below right,
Michaela Bushkin is now in Phoenix.LIFE&ARTS
FROM LEFT: HALEY WALKER (2); MICHAELA BUSHKINFAMILY & TECH| JULIE JARGON
Nope, Your Parents’ Home
Isn’t the Best Place to Work
leased on the label, which remains
independent.
Though Mr. Prine never had a
commercial hit, his songs have been
recorded and covered by a who’s
who of country, folk and rock: the
Highwaymen, Johnny Cash, Bette
Midler, Paul Westerberg, John Den-
ver and Bonnie Raitt.
He wrote “I Just Want to Dance
With You,” which hit No. 1 on Bill-
board’s country chart when George
Strait released it in 1998, the same
year Mr. Prine was diagnosed with
skin cancer.
While being treated, he under-
went surgery to remove a piece of
his neck that severed nerves in his
tongue and radiation that damaged
his salivary glands. After a year of
rehabilitation, he was able to per-
form again, with a gravelly vocal
tone. Fifteen years later, he lost his
left lung to cancer. Within sixmonths, Mr. Prine was back to
touring.
He was also a prolific collabora-
tor, beginning with Steve Goodman
in his earliest days in Chicago,
though he favored women as sing-
ing partners.
“I’ve always been a sucker for a
duet, you know?” said Mr. Prine in
a 2016 interview with The Wall
Street Journal discussing “For Bet-
ter, or Worse,” his second collection
of duets, which included Miranda
Lambert and Kacey Musgraves.
The album’s 1999 predecessor,
“In Spite of Ourselves,” along with
the track of the same name, is
among his most celebrated recorded
works and saw him team up with
Emmylou Harris, Trisha Yearwood
and Iris DeMent, among others.
Mr. Prine was nominated for 11
Grammy Awards, and won best con-
temporary folk album twice, for1991’s “The Missing Years” and
2005’s “Fair & Square.” This year
the Recording Academy awarded
him a lifetime-achievement award.
Before the novel coronavirus
swept across the world, Mr. Prine
had a theater tour scheduled for
May through February from Ken-
tucky to England. Mr. Prine’s wife
and manager, Fiona Whelan Prine,
was diagnosed with the virus ear-
lier in March, and the couple had
been self-quarantining and isolated
from one another.
He is survived by his wife, who
recovered from the virus; sons
Tommy and Jack; stepson Jody
Whelan; and his brothers, David and
Billy.
“In my songs,” Mr. Prine told Mr.
Ebert in that 1970 review, “I try to
look through someone else’s eyes,
and I want to give the audience a
feeling more than a message.”T
hey say you can’t go
home again, but
that’s exactly what
many 20-something
New Yorkers did
when it started to
look like their adopted city would
become a coronavirus hot spot.
Many young adults are finding
their childhood homes aren’t tech-
nologically ready for the work-
from-home mandate issued by
many businesses. The problem is
compounded when multiple gener-
ations are trying to keep their jobs
or schoolwork going simultane-
ously. And much of the ancient
technology that the younger gen-
eration likes to laugh about over
the holidays suddenly becomes a
real, daily pain.
(All of the people I interviewed
left the city before the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention ad-
vised residents of New York, Newaround each other: Ms. Walker’s
parents, her fiancé, her two sisters
and one of their boyfriends. The
family set up folding tables around
the house. Ms. Walker is working
from a sitting room outside her
parents’ bedroom, where an actual
plug-in-the-wall telephone rings all
day. “I’ll be in the middle of a
meeting and the landline will ring
and I have to apologize to every-
one,” Ms. Walker said. “Everyone
on the meeting will laugh and go,
‘Who has a landline?’ ”
Ms. Walker has considered un-
plugging it, but is worried she’ll
get in trouble.
“I’m pretty IT-challenged,” said
Adele Walker, Haley’s mom. “I
have a cellphone, but they joke
with me all the time about not
checking it.”
Adele threw the whole household
into chaos one evening when no one
could log into Netflix. She had resetWi-Fi router.
Mr. Mangel said it has been
hard to maintain a consistent work
schedule in his new-yet-familiar
environment, although he finally
persuaded his dad to let him use
the home office sometimes. The
upside has been home-cooked fam-
ily meals that include his grand-
parents, who also came back to
Dayton from Brooklyn to ride out
the pandemic with his parents.
John McNamara, a 28-year-old
head of sales at an office-furniture
company in New York, was follow-
ing a new morning routine at his
parents’ house in western Massa-
chusetts for a while. “After break-
fast it was directly to Geek Squad
support to help my parents and
their clients connect via videocon-
ferencing,” he said, referring to his
role as an instant on-site help
desk. “Sometimes they hit the
wrong button and lost the connec-
tion and I’d get the call: ‘Zoom!
Zoom! Johnny, I lost them!’ ”
“Having my son here really
helped assist me and my wife in the
ins and outs of sharing your screen
with a client,” said John McNamara
Sr., who manages a retail sales team
that had to forgo in-person sales
calls and switch to virtual ones.
“Some customers didn’t understand
how to click on the invite link and
turn the mic on.”
For the younger Mr. McNamara,
getting his own work done has
been a challenge in his parents’
century-old house: The thick plas-
ter walls can block the Wi-Fi sig-
nal. The spot with the best con-
nection, he found, is at the dining
room table. But when 6:30 p.m.
rolls around, his mom makes him
pack up so she can set the table
for dinner. In the evening he often
watches network TV with his par-
ents—something he hasn’t done in
years. “I actually like ‘Jeopardy!’ ”
he said. “It’s ‘Wheel of Fortune’
that kills me.”
When Michaela Bushkin moved
back in with her dad and step-
mother in Phoenix, the 26-year-old
New York fashion editor ordered
groceries online. Her dad, who
wanted to reimburse her, refused
to use a digital payment app. He
insisted on going to the bank and
getting cash, but she told him that
paper bills could carry the corona-
virus so she showed him how to
do an online bank transfer.
When her stepmom was on a
WhatsApp group chat trying to or-
ganize a virtual happy hour with
colleagues, there was mass confu-
sion. “No one had ever set up the
meeting,” Ms. Bushkin said. “I of-
fered to set up a calendar invite
using her Gmail account, but I
said, ‘I can’t help you get on a call
that doesn’t exist.’ ”
It isn’t always the parents who
need tech support, though. The TV
in Ms. Bushkin’s bedroom requires
three remote controls, and she has
no idea how to operate them.
“Every time I want to watch TV,
Ihavetohavemydadhelpme.”the password because she had for-
gotten it after months of not logging
in and failed to tell anyone.
Lazer Mangel, a 26-year-old
marketer for a health-care-tech
company, left his home in Brook-
lyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood
in such a hurry that he forgot to
bring his second monitor, mouse
and keyboard. He has been work-
ing on a laptop from bed in his
parents’ Dayton, Ohio, basement,
and sharing low bandwidth with
his dad and three siblings.
“My first day back my dad came
downstairs and said, ‘What are we
going to do about this internet
connection? It’s too slow for us,’ ”
said Mr. Mangel, who was assigned
to call the internet service pro-
vider to upgrade the speed.
Even with an upgrade, Mr. Man-
gel said it’s still too slow. He’s now
considering jumping up to gigabit
service and possibly buying a NestJersey and Connecticut not to
leave the area for two weeks.)
Haley Walker, 24, a senior prod-
uct analyst at a commercial-real-es-
tate startup, decamped for her par-
ents’ house in rural
Vermont only to be met
with a chore when she
arrived: set up her
mom’s new remote
workspace.
“Since I work at a
tech startup, my family has come
to believe I’m some kind of IT per-
son. So I was designated to help
set up the monitor, the printer, the
keyboard and the mouse because I
can presumably put it together in
five minutes,” she said.
Sure enough, it took her only
about 15 minutes. When she was
done, there were some extra cables,
but everything seemed to work.
The house now consists of
seven people trying to navigateTOM HILL/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES
John Prine performed last year with Bonnie Raitt, one of the many stars to cover his work. Right, the artist in 1975.John Prine, a country-folk music
icon whose witty and heartfelt
songs of love, protest and social
commentary helped shape a genera-
tion of songwriters, has died from
complications related to the novel
coronavirus. He was 73 years old.
Mr. Prine had been hospitalized
with Covid-19 symptoms at the end
of March, and his condition quickly
deteriorated.
A master storyteller with Mid-
western roots, Mr. Prine was widely
regarded among five
decades of contem-
poraries from the
1970s until his death
as one of the most
influential artists in folk and coun-
try music. His poetic turn of phrase
elevated simple lyrics and plain
melodies into profound statements
about love and life, current events
and society. He survived cancer
twice.
The son of a tool and die maker
and a homemaker from Kentucky,
Mr. Prine was born and raised in
Chicago suburb of Maywood, Ill.,
where his older brother taught him
to play guitar at age 14. He worked
as a mailman and served in the
Army in Germany during the Viet-
nam War before beginning his mu-
sic career.
He had been singing his original
songs at open mic nights when
Roger Ebert, then the Chicago Sun-Times movie critic, heard him and
in his first review described a “sing-
ing mailman who delivers a power-
ful message in a few words.” “He
sings rather quietly, and his guitar
work is good, but he doesn’t show
off. He starts slow,” wrote Mr. Ebert
in 1970. “But after a song or two,
even the drunks in the room begin
to listen to his lyrics. And then he
has you.”
Mr. Prine’s underground reputa-
tion grew alongside Chicago’s folk
revival as he performed across the
city’s clubs. After being discovered
by Kris Kristofferson, his debut self-
titled album was released with At-
lantic Records in 1971, including en-
during classics “Illegal Smile,” “Sam
Stone,” “Angel From Montgomery,”
“Paradise” and “Hello in There”—a
song that went on to be covered
many times over.
After releasing three more al-
bums with Atlantic, and a subse-
quent three with Asylum Records,
Mr. Prine decided to leave the ma-
jor label system, which he felt ex-
ploited artists. He started indepen-
dent record company Oh Boy
Records in Nashville, Tenn., with his
longtime manager, the late Al Bu-
netta, in 1981—decades before the
notion of artists owning their work
became normalized with the digital
era. The rest of Mr. Prine’s studio
albums—another 12, starting with
“Aimless Love” and ending with
“The Tree of Forgiveness” in 2018—
plus three live albums, were re-Singer-SongwriterLifted
PlainTalesIntoPoetry
OBITUARY
JOHN PRINE
1946-BYANNESTEELETHEO WARGO/GETTY IMAGES FOR SONGWRITERS HALL OF FAME