When some look toward the U.S. semiquincentennial and consider what examplar might best represent American achievement or the nation’s character, only one thing inevitably comes to mind: wrestling. Fortunately, there were others who put their heads together and came up with an alternative choice: John Prine. The leadership at Wolf Trap, the concert venue/national park in Virginia just outside of D.C., had the idea to have some of the late troubadour’s fellow songwriters salute him in a concert loosely tied in with the country’s 250th birthday. And as Prine’s songs of empathy, careful observation, pathos and droll humor rang out into the warm, Washington-adjacent night, it’s safe to say that not even Lee Greenwood could have ever made an audience feel prouder to be an American, current circumstances notwithstanding.

Produced as a benefit for the Fiona Prine-founded Hello in There Foundation, the show featured 10 singer-songwriters each doing one song of their own and at least one song of the honoree’s. The bill, put together jointly by the Prine family and the Wolf Trap Foundation, included Emmylou Harris, Margo Price, Allison Russell, I’m With Her, Patty Griffin, Lucius, Hayes Carll, Fancy Hagood, Jobi Ricco and Prine’s sons, Tommy and Jack Prine, plus a special spoken-word recitation by poetically inclined CBS newsman John Dickerson.

One’s flag decal won’t get one into heaven, as has been oft-noted over the last 55 years. But as it turned out, a ticket to “Songwriters Salute John Prine” could, and did, for three hours. It helps that a lot of Wolf Trap’s regular summer patrons already think of the semi-roofed amphitheater as adjacent to heaven’s gates, and on top of everything else being celebrated, it was clearly also a tacit tribute to the bond that can form between veteran artists and the few concert venues that hold a certain emotional magnetism in fans and performers’ arts. With its woody setting, where actual park rangers direct arriving cars, Wolf Trap is certainly that kind of place: Prine had played there 20 times over the years, going all the way back to 1972, and had been scheduled for a 21st when COVID hit and he was struck down in 2020. His being heralded in the 2026 season sent the message most music fans know: that death and grief are no impediment to the power of song.

The Wolf Trap tribute followed four years of shows produced in Nashville under the “You’ve Got Gold” banner in 2022-2025 (followed by a feature documentary of that same name). “It is our first big event outside of Nashville,” said Fiona Prine in a conversation just before Tuesday’s concert, “so that is significant. A lot of people, I guess, have looked on from afar and seen the kind of events that we do and how we do them. There is that long, long friendship between Wolf Trap and the Prine family, and so they called and said, ‘Look, we want to do something for America 250 to recognize songwriting, and we would love to do that through the lens of John’s catalog.’ So we said yes, and then the great surprise was that our two teams worked together seamlessly. … John has a beautiful audience up in this part of the country, and a Wolf Trap audience is kind of unique anyway. First of all, they’re really committed to the venue, with different generations of families that come back and support it financially, a bit like Tanglewood and those other iconic venues that are very unique in lots of ways.” Together, they had gold.

Harris had in common with Prine the exact number of times they’d headlined Wolf Trap prior to the pandemic, though she has obviously overtaken his figure since. “Is there anybody not excited when they’re in the company of Emmylou Harris?” said Prine. “She’s iconic, she and John were friends going way, way, way back, the audience here loves her, and she’s one of the most generous women I know in all kinds of ways. One of the oother ones I’d single out that I have a great affection for are I’m With Her. And then we have a couple of people that John would not have met but were absolutely influenced by him — Joby Riccio, for instance, who I think is just such a talent. John would have loved her.”

Riccio had the honor of opening the show with “Summer’s End,” the latter-day song (off Prine’s Grammy-winning 2018 album “The Tree of Forgiveness”) that ended up being one of his most popular anthems, against all odds for a performer by then in his fifth decade of releasing music. There was the irony of starting with a tune anticipating the end, and literally just before the start of summer. Greater irony, perhaps, in how the “Come on home” refrain feels in an America where “home” can now feel like a moving and elusive target. Although shifting political undercurrents were rarely spoken out loud during the concert, they were clearly being felt by many, even without the D.C. proximity. And for those of a certain like-minded mindset, Prine’s catalog may offer a kind of musical comfort food, in anxious times — that someone who has written of sadness can also make it sound like everything is going to be all right, and that “you don’t have to be alone.”

“John was an incredible songwriter — we all know that — but I think what really made him unique was just how humble, down-to-earth, helpful and how kind he was,” Fiona Prine said before the show. “He didn’t take himself too seriously. He took his art seriously, but he was very skeptical of celebrity and of that kind of fame and never sought it, really, to be honest. So I think the man was approachable, you know, and his catalog is also approachable.”

Highlights of the show included Allison Russell being joined by partner JT Nero for “Everything Is Cool,” which has become almost kind of a Christmas standard, in the way that songs about breaking up over the holidays can be in the 21st century — followed by being joined by I’m With Her to premiere a more willfully rousing original, “Really Real,” from her forthcoming July release.

I’m With Her proved to be MVPs of the evening, as they do at almost any all-star gathering they attend, between their acoustic multi-instrumental dexterity and three-part harmonies. The trio joined up with Lucius to turn that duo’s signature concert original, “Dusty Trails,” into a luscious exercise in five-part harmony. But first came Lucius’ Prine cover, the one that his eventual charitable foundation was named for, “Hello in There,” a song written by a fellow in his early 20s about the lonesomeness of the elderly. The two women of Lucius almost always sing in harmonic solidarity, but for this number, they took the unusual-for-them step of breaking the verses up into solo lines. Because when you’re doing a song about old people living in heartbreaking isolation, the fully choral approach may suddenly be a bit counterintuitive.

A few other singers worked above and beyond their two-song duties. Margo Price sang two of Prine’s most famous songs, the tender “Angel From Montgomery” and more topically pointed “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” plus a heretofore unreleased original that spoke to the tangier side of Prine, “Screw You and the Horse You Rode In On,” before reappearing with Hayes Carll to make “Illegal Smile” into something doubly sly.

Carll was getting his duets on in a big way, joining Emmylou Harris for the title track from Prine’s album of male/female vocal collabs, “In Spite of Ourselves.” “I did not have singing ‘In Spite of Ourselves’ and dancing with Emmylou Harris on my bingo card,” said Carll, as if it wouldn’t have taken a sneaky mastermind to engineer such a thing. Harris, for her solo part, sang her own “Red Dirt Girl” as the complement to Prine’s “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness,” a self-effacing song from the ’80s about a red devil of a guy who eschews the comfort of relationship to be “out there runnin’ just to be on the run.” (Prine knew all about men who need to “come on home” a long time ago.)

Patty Griffin got what could easily have served as an end-point song for the concert, the posthumously released “I Remember Everything,” if the show was not predestined to end with a full-cast group-sing of the tune he always ended his shows with, “Paradise.” If you want someone to sing a song that is apparently coming from the other side — or at least that we interpret that way, after the mournful way in which it came to us — then you couldn’t pick a better channeler than Griffin.

But the most emotional moments may have belonged to Tommy Prine, who first sang a song his dad had written as a worldly teenager, “Far From Home,” and then provided his own sort of answer song with “Ships in the Harbor,” an elegy for all that is transitory in life, before it’s specifically about his father. “It must be the morning again / The sun through the window felt good on my skin / So, it must be leaving soon as it should,” the son sang, eventually concluding: “When I’m by peaceful waters, it’s harder and harder / I’d do anything just to talk to my father / But I guess he was leaving soon as we do / And yeah, I guess he was passing through, and I am too.”

The senior Prine is someone that lovers of singer-songwriters will inevitably drift toward when they think about loss. But John Dickerson, who had profiled Prine for a CBS News segment, was on hand to speak to how the singer-songwriter could bring people together.

“Almost to the day, I first saw John Prine 35 years ago in Charlottesville. I was dating a girl who was a waitress in a bar in Tennessee, which almost sounds like a John Prine song, but this waitress friend had seen him in the club in Tennessee and said we must go see him in Charlottesville.” He talked about that woman became the mother to ther son, who used to be put to sleep singing Prine songs like “Paradise” as a lullaby, a boy that ended up seeing Prine at Wolf Trap when he was a teenager, with “John singing those walk-the’floor songs from here, and that 16-year-old was singing them right back to him. And sitting next to him was his mother, that waitress from 35 years ago.” He added, “We have a younger son who also wrote me a couple years ago from college and said, ‘You know, when I’m doing laundry or I’m cleaning up or something and there’s no music playing, the songs that play in my head that I sing to myself are John Prine songs. And I have you to thank for that.’ You may not believe this,” Dickerson told the audience, “because what child writes home from college? Or does their own laundry? But this is a sign of the magic of John’s music.”

And, the newscaster added, “It is magic how one person’s imagination that comes up with lyrics on a mail route, or scribbles them in a bathroom in a Chicago club — or, like with ‘Sam Stone,’ writes them out on the insert to a pantyhose box — how that imagination creates a thing that goes into another human brain and then down and becomes knit in the life of their child. That’s magic.”

At a pre-show conversation held for hardcore members of the Wolf Pack crowd up the hill from the amphitheater, Allison Russell spoke to her own experiences with using Prine music in the aid of child-rearing.

Of Prine’s songs, Russell said, “I think we’re all striving to be that elemental, and that poetic, and that immediate, and that accessible, and that memorable all at the same time. The catalog is so vast. One of the things that we did in 2020 when we were all in mourning in many, many ways was go back through John’s entire catalog. JT just naturally started at the beginning, and I remember our daughter getting really involved in listening to the songs as well. She always had been on tour with us. Her favorite as a little baby was ‘Storm Windows,’ which she called ‘the baby down song,’ because of that beautiful refrain, ‘Don’t let your baby down.’ When we were playing something else that she didn’t like, she’d say, ‘That’s not my music. I want the “baby down” song,’ and we’d put that on instead. Literally the soundtrack of our lives, you know?”

Russell said that songwriters are “all striving” to reach something that approaches “the love that he had for humanity that comes through. Obviously we’re living through a time of extreme empathy deficit, and we are seeing the manifestations of that in horrific ways which have body counts I don’t need to tell y’all. You know, you’re living it daily. And I think that John’s songs have something to teach America, about ourselves and about each other — that we don’t have to fear each other, and that we don’t have to fear any differences, that we can celebrate what’s humorous and ridiculous about us and still love us, you know? And I think his songs just do that.”

Before the show, Fiona Prine told Variety about the nature of the work the Hello in There Foundation is doing, with $1.4 million given out in grants so far. “We’ve raised more of course, and we have to be fiscally responsible. We’re in the process of setting up an endowment, and I think it takes quite a number of years for a foundation to build the public trust. I really do feel like that that has happened this year, the last 18 months. People know the work we do and appreciate the kinds of folks that we help, so it’s very gratifying. I get so much from it. We spent the morning at a veterans’ facility in the city, in D.C., and just to look into these faces of these older people who’ve served… many of them knew who John was and just were so grateful that we showed up. It’s a win for everybody.”

She further explained the impetus for the foundation to the Q&A audience. “The initial mission statement was that we would look for the people who were in the smaller, quieter corners that needed a ‘hello in there.’ And it was not hard to do. There are many, many people suffering in small and in very big ways, be it from disruption, displacement, dislocation. If it’s veterans who are homeless; if it’s a young woman who wants to be the first in her college in her family to get a degree from college, and she has a child, she’s a single mother, she needs help, she needs resources in order to do that. So we’re nothing if we’re not imaginative, and I guess we’ve all become observant and observers of life, more so since we lost John.”

Will there be more such tribute-benefits like this, in other cities besides Nashville, now? There’s one happening in Chicago, Prine’s hometown, at the Chicago Theatre on Oct. 8, “Souvenirs: 80 Years of John Prine,” with artists including host John C. Reilly, Steve Earle, Ratboys, Margo Price, Alynda Segarra,Amos Lee, Jon Langford, Josh Ritter, Joy Oladokun, Kathleen Edwards and others. It’s a good start — so, selfishly speaking, how about L.A., next?

Prine doesn’t seem quite ready to promote a whole tour of her husband’s music, as some of us might wish, but she’s edging toward expanding what was previously done annually in Nashville nationwide. “We’re thrilled to do the next one in collaboration with the Illinois governor’s office, the city of Chicago and of course with the Old Town School of Folk Music where John had his start. So that’s gonna be very exciting. This is kind of our first time doing it outside of Nashville. I mean, we’ll see. I’ve been thinking about the Troubadour. It’s amazing because when we put out the call, so many artists sign up quickly and easily.”

Setlist for “Songwriters Salute John Prine” at the Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts, Vienna, Virginia, June 9, 2026:

Jobi Riccio, “Summer’s End”
Jobi Riccio, “Idaho”
Fancy Hagood, “I Just Want to Dance With You”
Fancy Hagood, “To the Moon”
Allison Russell, “Everything Is Cool”
Allison Russell, “Really Real”
I’m With Her, “Bruised Orange”
I’m WIth Her, “Wild and Clear and Blue”
Margo Price, “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore”
Margo Price, “Screw You and the Horse You Rode In On”
Margo Price, “Angel From Montgomery”
Emmylou Harris and Hayes Carll, “In Spite of Ourselves”
— intermission —
Lucius, “Hello in There”
Lucius and I’m With Her, “Dusty Trails”
Patty Griffin, “I Remember Everything”
Patty Griffin, “Love Throw a Line”
John Dickerson, “Mexican Home” (spoken)
Hayes Carll with Margo Price, “Illegal Smile”
Hayes Carll, “Beaumont”
Emmylou Harris, “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness”
Emmylou Harris, “Red Dirt Girl”
Tommy Prine, “Far From Me”
Tommy Prine, “Ships in the Harbor”
Full cast, “Paradise”