Jim James Covers John Prine’s ‘All The Best’

By Scott Bernstein Mar 30, 2020 7:45 am PDT

My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James recorded and shared a cover of John Prine‘s “All The Best.” James posted his performance on Instagram hours after the musical world was rocked by the news Prine has been hospitalized in critical condition after “a sudden onset of Covid-19 symptoms.”

Prine originally released “All The Best” on his Grammy-winning 1991 studio album The Missing Years. “Country songs and country songwriters are a strange lot. Seems like some of the best country songs over the years have come from some of the sadder situations in life – like divorce,” the Illinois native said during an introduction of the song on Irish TV in 1990 as per Wikipedia. “Having recently acquired my second divorce, about a month later the song truck pulled up and dumped a bunch of great songs on my lawn.”

My Morning Jacket contributed a cover of “All The Best” to the 2010 tribute album, Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs Of John Prine. James performed the song with Prine during an appearance that same year on The Late Show With David Letterman and the pair reprised the collaboration at the 2017 Newport Folk Festival. Watch the version Jim James shared on Sunday below:

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