Internet shrine to Prine built by Q-C fan

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By David Burke | Saturday, March 10, 2007 1:26 AM CST | () comments

A dozen years ago, Reeda Buresh set out to create an Internet shrine to her favorite singer.

“You have to have something important to say,” the Davenport woman said of making her first Web site. “And I thought no one knew who John Prine was.”

But Buresh, who works for the Internet division of Heart of America Restaurants & Inns, quickly found she wasn’t alone.

“Within hours, I was getting e-mail from people in Ireland, from the remote parts of Canada, Germany and all over the United States,” she said of her site, www.jpshrine.org. “There’s all these people hiding behind the walls, thinking they’re John Prine fans and thinking no one else knows who he is.”

The site, called the “Prine Shrine,” receives as many as 80,000 hits a week from fans of the singer. It’s become so essential to Prine fans that his record company recently linked to it off its official Web home page.

Mitchell Drosin, Prine’s road manager, said the singer appreciates the site as much as his fans.

“John loves Reeda’s Web site. It’s a tremendous help to us,” Drosin said in a telephone interview. “Sometimes when John needs lyrics for a song, I go to JPShrine and get the lyrics. It’s informative and a lot more up-to-date than other Web sites.”

Prine returns to the Quad-Cities for a performance tonight at the RiverCenter/ Adler Theatre. Buresh has created a daily countdown of “agitated sleeps until Prine plays in Davenport, IA!” Prine last played the Adler in 1995 and co-headlined with Arlo Guthrie there in 1990.

Tonight will be the 32nd time Buresh, 47, has seen Prine perform, and the 32nd time she’s had the chance to meet him backstage. The first time she met him was at a concert date in Peoria, Ill., where she printed out every page of the Prine Shrine.

“He couldn’t believe he had all these fans,” she said. “He couldn’t believe people would pay money to come listen to him sing.”

In an interview shortly after that first meeting, “he called the Prine Shrine his site,” Buresh said. “He was tickled.”

Buresh said she knows that Prine visits the site and added that she can tell from onstage comments that he’s read some of the fan reaction.

She’s not certain, however, whether the singer posts comments on the site himself.

“If he does, we don’t know it’s him. He knows what they want and finds out if they liked his music,” she said. “I think he figures out his set list from what people say on the site.”

The site has grown to more than 2,000 files, she said, which sometimes isn’t enough to satisfy the Prine faithful.

“His fans all write me and tell me what I’m doing wrong and what I’ve forgotten,” she said with a laugh. “But they’re a bunch of nice people.”

That’s one of the common threads with fans of the Americana singer-songwriter, she said.

“They’re all just grass-rooted, fair-minded, laid-back, easy-going people,” she said. “They believe in good over evil and all that kind of stuff.

“I haven’t met one I haven’t liked.”

Her husband even dropped her off to spend a week with a fellow Prine fan known as “Crusher” in Wisconsin.

Crusher “threw a big party, did my laundry, treated me like royalty,” she said. “He was the nicest man named Crusher I’d ever met.”

Buresh calls Prine, 60, the “ultimate gentleman, very humble,” and very unassuming, even with so many fans.

“To talk to him, you wouldn’t even think he was up in that class with all those hotshots,” she said.

David Burke can be contacted at (563) 383-2400 or dburke@qctimes.com.

IF YOU GO

Who: John Prine, with Maura O’Connell

When: 8 p.m. today

Where: RiverCenter/ Adler Theatre, Davenport

How much: $59.50, $49.50, $39.50

Information: (563) 326-8555