When Jesse Winchester's draft notice showed up in his mailbox in 1967, he did something lots of guys talked about, some thought about and a few actually did. He went to Canada and stayed. "When I first
moved to Canada, I was really narrow-minded and thought
you had to be from the South to have soul," he said in an interview. "I learned that
wasn't true; it doesn't have anything to do with where you're from," he said. He's not the only person to leave the South with that assumption. And he isn't the only southern boy to learn that the geography of the soul covers some unfamiliar ground, despite what he was taught growing up. But it is a topography that takes some getting used to. You can hear that in some of his early songs.
I first heard Winchester's songs when I lived in Atlanta in the early 1970s. A young folksinger named Fox Watson sang them, explaining that the Vietnam war had driven Winchester to Canada and he couldn't come and sing them himself. I think the first one he sang was "Yankee Lady" and I know he sang "That's a Touch I Like." I fell in love with them. I don't know what happened to Fox Watson, but someday I would like to thank him for introducing me to Jesse Winchester's music. I wore out one copy of Winchester's first album and bought another. And even in the age of iTunes, I am downloaded and still listening. Winchester's songs are gently wonderful, hopeful, thankful, and often sepia-toned (it is no wonder that members of The Band had a hand in that first album). They are incredibly well written. The simple fact is that Jesse Winchester songs are worth listening to over and over for years and years, especially when he sings them.
Winchester says the territory of his songwriting extends to "God and women." And he covers that old ground pretty well. Listen to "Brand New Tennessee Waltz" (which Winchester says in the first song he ever wrote), "Yankee Lady" (a homesick southern boy gets cold feet in Vermont), "Mississippi on My Mind" (which can make me miss Mississippi and I never have spent any time there or wanted to), "Defying
Gravity" (something a bit more global), "Talk Memphis" (Texas singer Toni Price has a wonderful version of this one), or "The Showman's Life" (which is about the unintended consequences of success: "Nobody told me about this part"). Get hold of The Best of Jesse Winchester. They are all on there.
Which brings me to Winchester's most recent album, Love Filling Station. There are songs about the thrill of love, the foolishness of love, the labor of love, the mystery of love, the loss of love, the choice of loneliness (for a while), a gospel song that gives eternal love some human passion and makes it something worth dying for when the time comes. He sings "Stand By Me" and closes the album with "Loose Talk," an old country duet about married people who might have to leave town to get some peace from their neighbors. Some he wrote and others he covered. And they are wonderful, gentle, delicately southern accented. As long as Jesse Winchester keeps singing about God and women, I will keep listening. He sings in a language I can heart down in my well-traveled southern soul. My wife gave the new album to me and I don't intend to stop listening to it. She likes it too. It is in a loving language we understand.
Jesse Winchester's website.