John Prine

…singer-songwriters of artistic note included John Prine, a homespun comic fabulist and storyteller from Illinois; Tom Waits, a Californian who acted the role of raspy-voiced hipster and latter-day beatnik saint; and Waits’s female counterpart, Rickie Lee Jones, whose pop-jazz suites echoed Nyro’s effusions. In England, Richard Thompson wrote scathingly despairing