After two years of service in Germany as an army draftee, John Prine went home in 1967 to a job as a postman in Maywood, a working-class suburb of Chicago. He started making up songs to amuse himself as he walked his routes but he didn't share them, even as he made the nightly rounds of Chicago's burgeoning folk music circuit.

Occasionally he'd hint to friends he could do better than the performers onstage, and finally they dared him to prove it.

"At the end of 1970, I got up at an open-mike night at a club called the Fifth Peg,'' Prine recalls. "It was the first time I'd stepped on a stage.''

Prine sang three songs that night - Sam Stone, Hello in There and Paradise. The first was a wrenching portrait of an addicted Vietnam vet. Hello in There poignantly captured the isolation of old people, while Paradise evoked the Prine family's old Kentucky home town of that name, bulldozed into oblivion by a coal company. They eventually became the three songs that, even today, are probably Prine's best known.

"He was unlike anybody I'd ever seen - such a young kid, and yet he's writing songs like Hello in There,'' recalls fellow singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson, who caught one of Prine's early performances and immediately helped get him a record contract.

"I can't imagine myself at that age writing anything remotely that good.''

"In retrospect,'' Prine says, "I didn't know just how original that stuff was or how lasting it would be. I thought it would last as long as it would last and then I would write other stuff.''

Prine did write "other stuff'' - 15 albums' worth over 35 years - in a voice so original that the US poet laureate honored Prine in March in the Library of Congress' historic Coolidge Auditorium. It wasn't a concert but a two-man conversation in story and song.

"I have been an admirer of John Prine since the early 70s, when his first album came out,'' says Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, who just a few weeks later was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Introducing Prine that night, Kooser compared him to Raymond Carver, whose stories about "ordinary people elevated them to almost heroic status. John Prine has taken ordinary people and made monuments of them, treating them with great respect and love. He is a truly original writer, unequaled, and a genuine poet of the American people.''

In the auditorium hovered the ghost of another genuine poet of the American people, one who also imbued his work with humor, homespun wisdom and empathy for the common man. Sixty-five years earlier to the month, 27-year-old Woody Guthrie sat on the same stage, making his first recordings and telling folklorist Alan Lomax tales of his Oklahoma boyhood, freight-train-riding hobo days and other events that shaped his writing. Highlights were heard soon after on Lomax's national radio show but the full recordings were not released until 1964.

By contrast, the Prine-Kooser encounter, all 83 minutes of it, was up on the library's Web site within days and remains its most popular Webcast, with almost 3,000 visits - double the number of any of the library's 400 other Webcasts.

The encounter with Kooser proved downright familial. The poet, who worked for an insurance company in Nebraska for 35 years, is one of the few poet laureates from the midsection of the country. Some of the praise that critics have sent Kooser's way - "a haiku-like imagist'' who "draws in-spiration from the overlooked details of daily life to reveal the remarkable in what before was a merely ordinary world'' - could apply to Prine.

The songwriter offhandedly supp-orted the haiku connection, telling Kooser: "If you're looking for the big picture, sometimes you've got to get a really small frame.''

Like Kooser, Prine is a cancer survivor. Late in 1997, a carcinoma was found on the right side of Prine's neck. The surgery to remove it was not a concern - the growth wasn't near his vocal cords - but the six weeks of radiation therapy that followed was. Prine, whose gruff, sandpaper baritone was always an instrument of truth, not beauty, gets a kick out of recalling the concerned radiologist who wanted to shield the vocal cords during treatment - until Prine asked: "Have you ever heard me sing?'' Thirty years of smoking a pack a day obviously hadn't helped. Giving up that habit affected Prine's voice as much as surgery and radiation. His voice coarsened a bit and dropped an octave, closer to his conversational level.

The surgery involved removing a small portion of Prine's neck and refashioning his bite. He's put on weight. With his brushy mustache, the 58-year-old Prine looks like a friendly Joseph Stalin - except for standup shocks of hair that may be the most electric thing about him.

``My voice lost its strength for about a year after everything was over,'' Prine says. ``I could pick up a guitar and talk but I had no power to sing.

``Little by little it came back. When my voice dropped, I had to drop the key considerably, to where I've got to carry another guitar that's tuned down two steps. I'm limited in my chords.''

Typically for Prine, he's found the upside of that change.

``To me, it's like hearing someone else doing a really good rendition of one of my songs to where it reawakens me to the song - except it's me doing it, so it's double fun for me. I'm very comfortable for the first time with my singing voice.''

A month after his Library of Congress appearance, Prine released Fair & Square, his first collection of new songs in nearly a decade.

It offers typically wry Prine observations in Taking a Walk, Crazy as a Loon and I Hate It When That Happens to Me and the politically charged Some Humans Ain't Human.

But songs like Glory of True Love and She Is My Everything reflect positive changes in Prine's personal life. They include marriage (Prine's third) to Fiona Whelan, whom he met while touring in Ireland. They have two sons, Jack and Tom (10 and nine) as well as Fiona's 23-year-old, Jody, who's been with Prine since he was 11.

``I didn't have this family 10 years ago when I was writing [the last new song collection] The Missing Years,'' Prine says. ``It's changed my life.''

He grew up in Maywood, where his father moved the family to escape the coal mines of Kentucky, though they returned each summer to Paradise to stay with relatives. Prine's father, a tool and die maker who became president of a steelworkers union, was ``a huge country fan so we had plenty of country music around the house, though I was later exposed to rock 'n' roll and R&B and blues around Chicago,'' Prine notes.

The new album's inclusion of a Carter Family song, Bear Creek Blues, is a homage to the early influence of older brother Dave, who played fiddle in local old-timey bands and enlisted his sibling at the age of 14 to play rhythm guitar, giving him albums by the Carters, Elizabeth Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt.

It was from these that Prine learned the basic guitar underpinnings - simple chords and unfussy finger picking - that shape his writing even now.

``Entirely, because that's all I know,'' Prine admits with a chuckle. ``I always claim that if somebody else had taught me how to play guitar, and taught me one Chuck Berry song, I would have written a few more rock 'n' roll songs than I ever did.

``I'd probably have to learn from scratch to play guitar any differently, but my shortcomings or mistakes have all become a style and a strength over the years.''

Soon, Prine became a regular on the Chicago circuit, with other local song-writers championing him to visitors - including, one night, Kris-tofferson, the man who wrote Me and Bobby McGee and Help Me Make It Through the Night.

``It was incredible,'' Kristofferson recalls. ``John was singing some of the best songs I've ever heard, and they still are the best songs I've ever heard.

``The best of his songs are timeless. They're like folk music, completely original and unpredictable.''

Kristofferson took Prine to New York, where he auditioned for Atlantic Records and was signed within 24 hours.

Critics took notice of Prine from the start but acclaim never translated into stardom or sales. A certain amount of airplay in the less restricted days of FM radio, and his charming concert per-sona, helped Prine develop a loyal audience but after five albums for Atlantic and three more for Asylum, he found himself without a label.

So in the early 80s, Prine and his longtime manager, Al Bunetta, started Oh Boy (named after the Buddy Holly song), one of the earliest artist-owned labels. The first Oh Boy album, Aimless Love, came out in 1984; 1991's Grammy-winning The Missing Years featured appearances by Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, who has called Prine ``one of the great ones.''

In 1980, Prine moved to Nashville, where one of the first people he met was songwriter Roger Cook, who'd penned I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing for the New Seekers (later a ubiquitous advertising campaign song for Coca-Cola). Prine ended up marrying an artist Cook was producing, and their wives became fast friends, ``buzzing around Nashville, having a good time, while John and I would be hanging around at midnight, waiting for them to come home,'' Cook says.

``We'd sit around playing dominoes and then we started writing songs together.''

The first fruit of their solidarity came in 1983 when Don Williams had a No 1 country hit with Love Is on a Roll. Their other No 1, I Just Want to Dance With You for George Strait, arrived providentially in 1998, just as Prine was facing huge hospital bills for his cancer treatment.

Prine says: ``Roger is a professional songwriter. He's written a million songs and probably had 50,000 of them recorded.

``If we weren't friends, you probably couldn't get me to say, `I want to write a song with this guy.' It's because we play poker together, play snooker, go fishing and we're both songwriters. When I write with him, he keeps everything in line. He knows they're not the kind of songs I write [by myself] - and he gets a kick out of that, puts something in where it's actually going to have some sort of appeal.''

Cook, who co-wrote three songs on Fair & Square, says of Prine: ``He's so happy now. If John's lyrics lack anything these days, it's that he doesn't have that angst any more. He's not pleading his case against the bad and wicked world of things gone wrong; he reflects life as he sees it, and his lyrics are happier now.''