Mural honoring John Prine to grace outside wall of Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music

Renowned singer-songwriter and Chicago-area native John Prine will be honored with a mural at the Old Town School of Folk Music in the Lincoln Square community.

Big Wall Sign & Mural announced Wednesday that visual artist and musician Jon Langford designed the mural, for which work began this week. The mural will be painted on the north-facing brick wall of the Old Town School's headquarters at 4544 N. Lincoln Ave. in Chicago's Lincoln Square neighborhood.

The mural is expected still to be in process during the Square Roots Festival, which will be held from Friday, July 10, through Sunday, July 12.

"Festival attendees will have the unique opportunity to watch the mural come to life while enjoying one of the city's premier celebrations of music, art, and community," Big Wall Sign & Mural said in a news release.

John Prine was a native of west suburban Maywood, and his connection to the Old Town School of Folk Music dates back to the early 1960s — when the school, founded in 1957, was relatively new, and Prine himself was just a teen.

"When Prine was a young teenager in Maywood, around 14 years old, his older brother, Dave, inspired by the American folk music revival sweeping the nation at the time, taught his younger brother a few chords then took him by Old Town School when it was located in an old storefront at 333 W. North Ave. in Chicago," wrote Old Town School director of marketing Dave Zibell.

It was at the Old Town School where Prine honed his craft and played for some of his first audiences, Zibell wrote.

Prine served a stint in the U.S. Army, and then worked as a mail carrier while hanging out at the Old Town School in his free time, published reports note.

The Old Town School moved in 1968 to The Aldine Hall, a vintage Romanesque Revival building at 909 W. Armitage Ave. in Lincoln Park that the school still uses as a secondary location. Near Aldine Hall on Armitage Avenue was the folk club The Fifth Peg, where Prine told the Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot he played his song "Same Stone" at an open mic to applause. Soon, Prine told Kot in 2010, he was playing at The Fifth Peg a couple of times a week.

On one occasion, it so happened that Roger Ebert dropped in on one of Prine's shows at The Fifth Peg.

"At the time, Prine was a 23-year-old mailman who had been singing his original songs every Thursday night for about two months," Prine's website says. "Ebert wrote a glowing review for the Chicago Sun-Times, essentially launching Prine's music career."

Atlantic Records released Prine's self-titled debut album in 1971. He put out several more albums for Atlantic Records before moving to David Geffen's Asylum Records in 1978, and then cofounding his own label, Oh Boy Records, in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1982, published reports noted.

Prine won four Grammy Awards out of 13 nominations, two of them posthumously, and he also won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys. As Rolling Stone put it, Prine explored styles "from hard country to rockabilly to bluegrass," and would say he tried to occupy a space between Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan.

In 2009, Rolling Stone reported, Dylan himself said: "Prine's stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind-trips to the nth degree."

Prine also kept up his relationship with the Old Town School all the while.

"Prine always returned home to Chicago and the Old Town School over the years for concerts, benefits, and special events," Zibell wrote.

Prine died April 7, 2020, at the age of 73. He was an early casualty of COVID-19 toward the start of the pandemic.

 "Prine's artistic roots were planted at Old Town School, and installing this unique, artistic mural is a way to honor the man and songwriting legend," Zibell wrote.