Listening to WUMB online this morning, I heard that today is the anniversary of Jesse Winchester’s birth. Jesse died in 2014 of of bladder cancer at the age of 69. He was a songwriter’s songwriter and an artist to be remembered, as I did here just a few months ago in one of my Sunday Morning tributes.
Jesse struggled with his first bout of (esophageal) cancer in 2011. Fellow artists including James Taylor, Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, Allen Toussaint, Jimmy Buffett, Rosanne Cash, Lyle Lovett, and Rodney Crowell came together to support Jesse with the fantastic tribute album Quiet About It (2012) (available on streaming services and on YouTube). The great New Orleans musician / songwriter / producer Allen Toussaint contributed a cover of Jesse’s “I Wave Bye Bye” (from Jesse’s brilliant Gentleman of Leisure).
I was thrilled to take my youngest daughter to see Toussaint perform at the Dakota the following year. Toussaint himself died in 2015 at the age of 77. Looking for a recording I haven’t posted before on Power Line, I want to go with Allen Toussaint’s moving cover of Winchester’s loving look back in this spare arrangement.
