3 Folk Songwriters From the 1970s Who Could Make a Whole Story Fit Into One Verse

These 1970s folk songwriters were deeply talented storytellers. They could tell a movie-worthy tale in verses and rhymes. Sometimes, a single verse was all they needed to create a narrative arc.

John Prine

Several genres claim John Prine, but his narrative-style songwriting places him in the folk camp. Throughout the 1970s, Prine delivered plenty of enduring narrative tracks, including “Angel From Montgomery”, “Sam Stone”, and “Hello In There”.

Indeed, Prine had a singular knack for storytelling. He could break your heart, make you laugh, and speak to life’s most specific circumstances, all in one fell swoop. Take “Hello In There”, for example. This heartbreaking track about aging loneliness says a great deal in its short runtime. “Me and Loretta, we don’t talk much more / She sits and stares through the back door screen / And all the news just repeats itself / Like some forgotten dream that we’ve both seen,” a selection of the lyrics reads. Sledom has there ever been a songwriter as succinctly world-altering as Prine.

Jim Croce

One of Jim Croce’s biggest 1970s hits, “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”, proves his singular storytelling skill. Certainly one of the most enduring folk tracks of the 1970s, it became a cultural staple; a universal story of standing up to opposing forces.

“Now Leroy he a gambler / And he like his fancy clothes / And he like to wave his diamond rings / In front of everybody’s nose / He got a custom Continental / He got a Eldorado too / He got a thirty two gun in his pocket for fun / He got a razor in his shoe,” the lyrics read. Croce created a visceral character piece with this track, proving himself one of the most adept storytelling folk songwriters of his generation.

Gordon Lightfoot

When we think of folk storytelling songs, “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald” is one of the first that comes to mind, in any generation. With this offering, Gordon Lightfoot set himself apart from his peers, creating a rich, twisting story that shouldn’t fit within the songwriting medium, but does.

“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down / Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee / The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead / When the skies of November turn gloomy / With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more / Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty / That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed,” the famous lyrics read. This song lifts the listener and drops them onto the stormy waters aboard a doomed ship. It’s deeply transportive.

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