Sunday morning coming down

I saw singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester perform on the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota more than 25 years ago and he bowled me over. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred people in the audience. Accompanying himself on guitar, he turned in a beautiful performance concluding with “Yankee Lady.” Although Winchester had famously evaded the draft by decamping to Canada in 1967, returning only after the Carter amnesty, there was not a hint of politics in his performance.

Winchester died of cancer in 2014 at the age of 69; today is the anniversary of his birth. Jon Pareles had a good account of Winchester’s career in the New York Times obituary. Bob Mehr took an extended look in the Memphis Commercial Appeal obituary. I need a change of pace and would like to take pleasure in a few of Winchester’s songs this morning as we warm up for the celebration of Dylan’s birthday with our annual Bobfest next Sunday.

Winchester grew up in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. He spoke with an ingratiating Southern accent that seems to me, in Winchester’s case, how American English should be spoken. You can hear all the crosscurrents of American popular music in his songwriting and in his singing. Country, blues, rock, soul, and gospel — they’re all there. I hear those crosscurrents, for example, in a gospel-style tune like Martha Carson’s “You Can’t Stand Up” (below, with a little help from Bonnie Raitt and Emmylou Harris). If this doesn’t rev your engine, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Working the same vein that The Band had tapped into, Winchester had the gift of writing songs that sounded like they’d been around forever. I thought “Yankee Lady” was an instant classic. The song was a highlight of Winchester’s first album, produced by The Band’s Robbie Robertson in 1970.

Winchester’s songwriting was appreciated by fellow artists including Wynonna Judd. Wynonna recorded Winchester’s gospel-tinged declaration of faith — “Let’s Make A Baby King” — on her hit-filled disc Tell Me Why. Wynonna’s version of Winchester’s song reached number 61 on the country chart based on unsolicited airplay.

As Winchester struggled with his first bout of cancer in 2011, fellow artists including James Taylor, Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, Allen Toussaint, Jimmy Buffett, Rosanne Cash and Lyle Lovett recorded the tribute album Quiet About It. Not too shabby.

Winchester had a dry sense of humor that he drew on for many of his songs. Interviewing musician Herb Pedersen just before Winchester’s death and knowing Winchester was extremely ill, I asked Herb about the manifestation of Winchester’s sense of humor in his songwriting. “My goodness,” Herb said, “he could be funny pulling up his socks.” Winchester’s dry sense of humor is all over the title track (below) to Winchester’s brilliant 1999 collection Gentleman of Leisure.

Winchester also wrote songs that expressed deep feeling with economy and restraint. The last song on that album is “I Wave Bye Bye” (video below). As a father of three daughters, I have felt it hit home with the force of revelation. I thought he must have written the song for Alice, his youngest child, but Cindy Winchester (Jesse’s widow) gently advised I had gotten that wrong in my own remembrance of Jesse on Power Line. Cindy advised that “It Takes a Young Girl” was the one about Alice.

Let’s not wave bye bye before we take a look at Jesse in performance on Elvis Costello’s old Sundance cable show. “Sham-A-Ling-Dong-Ding” is a song that testifies to the power of song in our lives — a perfect example of expressive form. One can see the impact of the song on Neko Case, who sat beside Jesse staring straight ahead with a tear or two streaming down her face.