John Prine — Muhlenberg County, Kentucky

Muhlenberg County in western Kentucky is the setting of 'Paradise', one of John Prine's most beloved songs — a meditation on the destruction of the natural landscape by strip mining, written from the perspective of a boy whose father came from the county. Prine was born in Maywood, Illinois, to parents who had migrated from Paradise, Kentucky, a small town in Muhlenberg County that had been largely destroyed by the coal industry. The Peabody Coal Company had excavated much of the area, including the town of Paradise itself, transforming what had been a working-class community into a strip-mined landscape. 'Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel, and they tortured the timber and stripped all the land' — Prine's lyric is a direct description.

Prine recorded 'Paradise' on his debut album in 1971, and the song became one of the defining texts of the early 1970s folk revival — a devastating, economically precise account of environmental and community destruction that never lost its warmth for the people it described. It was later covered by numerous artists including the Everly Brothers. Prine's genius — his ability to write with the simplicity of folk tradition and the emotional complexity of literature — is demonstrated throughout his career, but 'Paradise' remains the clearest single statement of his relationship to American working-class experience.

Muhlenberg County and the surrounding western Kentucky coalfields remain a complex and economically struggling region. The town of Paradise is gone, replaced by the mine and the ash ponds of the Tennessee Valley Authority power plant that stands on the former townsite. Various Kentucky heritage organisations have marked the area's connection to Prine and to the broader story of Appalachian coal culture. Prine died on 7 April 2020 from complications of COVID-19, at the age of 73.