Crystal Springs’ gospel singer/songwriter Ramsay Prine -- not to the be confused with his father Calvin Prine, a well-known singer around Hattiesburg -- is making his own music and becoming recognized for his special talent from Crystal Springs, where he settled in 2013.
Nicknamed “Mr. Guitar,” he was the baby in a musical family of 18 children in which almost everyone of them sings or plays music. He wrote his first song when he was six about the girl next door and won the first talent show he entered when he was seven playing a three-string guitar and singing to an Elvis CD.
Elvis remains his main source of inspiration, with Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash close seconds.
Although he can sing almost anything, country gospel, which he also writes, is his favorite. He “sings anything from George Strait to George Thorogood,” opens shows for other musical talents and performs at weddings, funerals, graduations, birthdays and valentine banquets.
He doesn’t read music, but thanks God for the gifts of being able to hear a song and play it by feel and rhythm and to write songs from the heart -- being in touch with an emotion, such as love or grief, and recording the words that come.
He struggled growing up, and fought addiction before “music saved my life,” and he started “singing for the right reasons,” turning to gospel. He and his wife have two musical children -- Kenzie, who plays piano, and Colton, who is already singing and playing guitar like his dad. In 2013, settled with his family in Crystal Springs -- “a place of redemption” where “people have been so nice.”
A MAC Records owner from Columbus, Mississippi, heard him singing in a church in 2014 and approached him about recording, a new career route on which he embarked a few years ago that is expanding his renown.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The 2023 Copiah County Bicentennial year has ended, but Wesson News continues to feature sketches of past and present visual artists, musicians, authors and photographers who are natives of the county excerpted from Tricia Nelson’s reporting in A Shared History: Copiah County, Mississippi 1823-2023 edited and compiled by Paul C. Cartwright and available through Cartwright for $25 plus $5 for shipping at 3 Waverly Circle, Hattiesburg, MS 39402. Nelson is a Crystal Springs writer who contributes to the Copiah County Monitor.
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