A Southerner in Montreal
COOK, BRUCE
On Music A Southerner In Montreal by Bruce Cook The word is out that during the Ford-Carter interregnum the Justice Department has put pending prosecutions of draft evaders on the shelf. What,...
...It is a meditation on violence: The image of the black dog running heedlessly through life—biting, hurting, killing—is also a picture of the man who claws his way...
...He will not find that larger group of devoted listeners until he coordinates his recordings with personal appearances...
...Robertson liked what he heard and urged Albert Grossman, Dylan's manager, to sign Jesse for his Bearsville label...
...Paul Butterfield, the great blues harmonica man, is featured in backdrop and solo: Jesse keeps good company...
...Black Dog" has one of those dark, resonant lyrics that suggests more than it says...
...In some ways, it remains his best, notwithstanding his certainly having grown beyond it...
...The President-elect, who is said by some to be fuzzy on the issues, was crystal-clear on one of them: If elected, he would pardon on an individual basis draft resisters who returned to the United States...
...Indeed, I doubt that most of his listeners are aware of it?I've never heard the fact mentioned on the air and his label, Bearsville, has given it no publicity...
...He has never sung better on a record...
...Listen to him once and you will know what I mean...
...But two of the best tracks on Let the Rough Side Drag fit no particular category...
...The album contains three of Jesse's most outstanding compositions?Yankee Lady," "Black Dog" and "The Brand New Tennessee Waltz...
...For example, in his second album, Third Down, 110 to Go, "Snow"—cowritten with Robbie Robertson—is a humorous expression of this fly-away theme...
...Step by Step" is pure blues, and Winchester proves equal to the form...
...If, on the basis of his earlier efforts, I had been asked to fix an appropriate label on Jesse, I would have placed him in the folk-country genre, alongside such other singer-writers as Tracy Nelson, John Prine and Arlo Guthrie...
...In today's music business the two contribute mutually to a kind of synergism that can suddenly transform a modest reputation into something much greater...
...So the word is good from Canada...
...The record reveals several new aspects of the artist...
...Without a job, low on money, dismally uncertain about the future, Jesse decided music was the only work he could ever do in Canada...
...Jesse's great-great-grandfather, James Rid-out Winchester, was cofounder with Andrew Jackson of Memphis...
...It is a beautiful, straightforward tale of a Southern boy who finds peace living one summer "with the gentle folk in the hills of old Vermont," and of his love for a local woman...
...When that Southern boy moved all the way up to Montreal he found the city frigid, and not merely because the long, bleak, snowy Canadian winters are harsh...
...Perhaps others feel the writer alone can do it justice...
...The majority of those who left the county a decade or so ago have made new lives for themselves...
...Black country singer Stoney Edwards made the charts with his rendition of Jesse's beautiful and evocative "Mississippi, You're on My Mind...
...Without wishing to encourage another long delay, I would say that it was well worth the wait...
...That was his promise, and he has given every indication of intending to keep it...
...Even so, little will probably change...
...The natives were rather cold toward young Americans coming to their country to avoid conscription...
...His success, such as it is, has nothing to do with his draft-resister status...
...Anyone familiar with Jesse's work remembers that record, titled simply Jesse Winchester...
...The family has lived within 100 miles of the city ever since—even though the singer's grandfather was the Episcopal bishop of Arkansas, and his father, born and bred in Memphis, took the brood to the Mississippi farm where Jesse grew up...
...We hear that Jesse Winchester in Let the Rough Side Drag, but we also get a sample of black music?blues and gospel—not in evidence before...
...It does, although generally in voices other than his own, as more and more country and western artists pick up his songs...
...Never one to court fashion, Jesse has gone churchly when everybody else seems stuck on the disco sound...
...Growing up in rural Mississippi, Winchester was at no point very far away from the sound of the black church, and he has caught it in these two songs, infusing them with the testifying, the giving witness to the truth, that is the very essence of gospel...
...Since then he has built an underground reputation of sorts in the United States: His albums have good exposure on the FM rock stations, but he has never had a hit single and is probably unknown to any top-40 disc jockey in the country...
...In addition, a couple of numbers ?Lay Down Your Burden" and "As Soon as I Get On My Feet"?are very much in the style of white Protestant hymns...
...For no current popular musician is more American than Jesse Winchester...
...As might be expected, the yearning for a home in the South is an oft-repeated theme in the music of Jesse Winchester...
...Just a fraternity dance musician when he crossed over the border to elude the Selective Service System, he began writing and singing as a solo performer, and cut his first album in 1969...
...This is not really surprising...
...And in "Mississippi, You're on My Mind," my personal favorite of all his songs, memories of and yearning for the old times and places come in the form of very specific images of Southern rural life...
...Black Dog" has such strength, so many undercurrents of meaning, that it ranks among the few pop songs of recent years to seem even remotely like poetry...
...And Waylon Jennings, the top man in country today, got good air play with his version of Jesse's "Brand New Tennessee Waltz...
...It has a quality of innocence and sweetness we once thought of as pure homegrown...
...Winchester wants his music to speak for itself...
...nevertheless, the chance to perform in America gives him an opportunity to realize his considerable potential...
...Jesse deserves and is ready to be better known, and if he succeeds in arranging a concert tour in the States, he will be...
...Winchester sings "Blow On, Chilly Wind," especially well and even blows a bit of flute...
...Everybody Knows But Me," a down-home tune likely to be picked up by other singers, is about the course of rumors in a Southern town...
...In short, Winchester the songwriter is thriving...
...The first is, quite simply, a classic...
...They will come back to visit, to sniff the air, a few of them with plans to resettle but most simply to clear up that awkard bit of unfinished business they left behind...
...This number, on Jesse's third LP, Learn to Love It, is fully realized in his performance as his voice soars over the chords of his acoustic guitar...
...His bid for a big audience as a performer is another matter...
...What, after all, would be the point of legal action...
...The new melody is altogether brighter, better and more interesting, and the words communicate a poignant feeling of nostalgia and homesickness for a Tennessee left behind long ago...
...But soon he had himself back in shape, started singing again and—something new?writing...
...A pronounced gospel flavor marks "Working in the Vineyard" and "It Takes More Than a Hammer and Nails to Make a House a Home" (the only song on the album not written by Winchester...
...The Winchester family goes back a long way in the American South...
...As for "The Brand New Tennessee Waltz," the single common denominator it shares with the old one is Southern references...
...Grossman did and Robertson himself produced the initial album, recorded, like those that followed, in Canada...
...The wonder is that the song has not been widely recorded...
...It will be a chance for his following here—intensely loyal, if smaller than he deserves—to catch the sweet-voiced, laid-back Southern singer in the flesh for the first time...
...The voice is unmistakably Dixie—soft around the edges and easy on the ears...
...The melody is intriguing, with a slight Latin or calypso flavor...
...Jesse Winchester is alive and working to considerable effect...
...He started out with a French-Canadian lounge band that needed somebody who could sing in English...
...After a year or so of gigging with the group around Montreal, he played solo on the coffeehouse circuit for a while, then discovered psychedelic drugs and went a bit off the deep end...
...In terms of overall recording and performance Let the Rough Side Drag is better than any of his earlier albums, and the material is of equally uniform high quality...
...Eventually, Jesse came to the attention of The Band's Robbie Robertson, a Canadian who was home on a visit from Bob Dylan's musical commune in Woodstock, New York...
...One new development we are likely to see, however, is Jesse Winchester's first American tour...
...w ? T inchester's new album, Let the Rough Side Drag (Bearsville BR 6964), his first in three years, was a year and a half in preparation...
...Jerry Jeff Walker heard it and liked the number so much he recorded it as well...
...He threw away as many songs as he kept the first year, yet the ones he kept and played were good enough to win him a sizable following in Montreal and Toronto...
...Winchester will probably never be a superstar, he's not the type...
...Winchester has been in Montreal since January 1967...
...The impact of that voice, and those songs, and the face (looking out, bearded and with haunted eyes, like some 19th-century wanted poster), was not then to be ignored or now to be forgotten...
Vol. 60 • January 1977 • No. 1
