The Voice of Experience

John Prine has been lionized by critics and folk-rock aficionados during his three-decade career, and 99.9% of the compliments have to do with the second half of the “singer-songwriter” description that usually accompanies his name.

Rarely does the “singer” part enter the picture. Prine himself makes no bones about the dirt-clod of a voice with which he croaks such uncommonly insightful songs as “Sam Stone,” his 1971 look at the toll the Vietnam War exacted on one morphine-addicted soldier, through his whimsically titled but penetrating 1996 song “Humidity Built the Snowman,” about the age-old struggle to understand why love evaporates.

Case in point: When a bothersome lump on his neck turned out to be cancerous and a well-meaning radiologist offered to build lead shields to protect his vocal cords during treatment, Prine just laughed and asked, “Have you ever heard me sing?”

So chalk it up to the mysterious ways of the musical gods that Prine’s latest album, “In Spite of Ourselves,” is selling as well or better than any of his previous 15, when it consists not of a batch of new Prine tunes for fans to rally around, but of 20- to 50-year-old country songs.

Part of the explanation is the friends Prine brought along for his ride down the back roads of country music. The songs are duets with his favorite female singers, including Emmylou Harris, Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless, Iris DeMent, Melba Montgomery, Lucinda Williams, Dolores Keane and Connie Smith.

“There are a lot of singers you hear and go, ‘Wow!’ because they have such great voices,” says Loveless, who sings the 1952 Webb Pierce hit “Back Street Affair” with Prine. “At the same time, [vocal] perfection is not always desirable--it’s the feeling you try to get across and the emotion, and that’s what John does so well.”

Adds DeMent, who harmonizes on four of the album’s songs and will open for him and sing with him when they play UCLA’s Royce Hall on Thursday: “John definitely knows how to deliver his songs, and in my book, that makes him a singer.”

The album has sold 115,000 copies since September, according to SoundScan, and has spent 30 weeks on Billboard’s country albums chart.

“The response has been phenomenal,” says Prine, who has been used to selling around 75,000 copies of each of the albums he’s released on the Oh Boy Records label he started 15 years ago. (The label’s logo bears a striking resemblance to the Big Boy restaurant mascot, an icon of Americana that keeps popping up in Prine’s album artwork and press materials.)

“It was something I’ve been meaning do to for quite a few years,” he says. “I just finally figured that if I’m ever going to do a record like this, I’d just have to get in there and do it.”

When he started recording in the fall of 1997, it looked as if the album would be done in a few weeks. That’s when he found out he had neck cancer, which put the album on hold for about 19 months.

“I’d never had a serious health problem before,” Prine, 53, says. “If I had to go to the doctor, it was like, ‘Lay off of this’ or ‘Take three of these.’ ”

Shopping for a cancer treatment turned out to be far more complicated.

“I was talking to six or seven different doctors, and they all had radically different remedies,” he says. “One wanted to do nothing but big doses of chemo, another guy wanted to do node surgery, another was big on radiation.”

The man he credits for delivering him from cancer is the same man who delivered Elvis Presley to the world--Sun Records founder Sam Phillips.

“I got a call out of the blue from [Sam’s son] Knox Phillips, because he’d had the same thing I had,” Prine says. “Sam got on the phone and said I should drop everything I’m doing, go down to this place in Texas where Knox had gone. . . . The last thing he said to me is that ‘If you don’t go down there immediately, I’m going to come to Nashville and kick your ass every inch of the way.’ So I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Phillips, I will go and talk to those people.’ ”

The treatment he underwent at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston worked, and Prine says he has tested cancer-free for almost two years now.

He did, however, get bitten by the acting bug while going through treatment. He’s co-starring with Billy Bob Thornton and Andy Griffith in Thornton’s new film “Daddy and Them,” which Miramax has slated for late summer release. He also wrote “In Spite of Ourselves” for the movie, which is the only Prine composition on his latest album.

Now the only pressure Prine is feeling is what to write about for a new album he wants to record in the fall.

“I’ve never been so content in my life. All my new songs are probably going to sound like ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,’ ” he says with a chuckle. “I have the best home life I’ve had, probably since I got out of high school. I’ve got a great wife and kids. . . .

“Everything’s good, but even more so since I recovered from cancer. You can’t help but go through something like that and not have everything seem brighter than it was before.”

*

JOHN PRINE and IRIS DeMENT, Royce Hall. Date: Thursday, 8 p.m. Prices: $25-$42.50. Phone: (310) 825-2101.