Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

Country Music

FOR TEN YEARS, JESSE WINCHESTER COULD RELEASE RECORDS IN AMERICA BUT COULD NOT SAFELY STAND ON AN AMERICAN STAGE. ON APRIL 21, 1977, FOUR MONTHS AFTER JIMMY CARTER’S AMNESTY, HE FINALLY WALKED ONSTAGE IN BURLINGTON, VERMONT. Winchester had left the United States for Canada in 1967 rather than serve in Vietnam. The decision shaped everything that followed. From Montreal, he made acclaimed records, toured Canada and Europe, and wrote songs steeped in Memphis, Mississippi and Tennessee. But the country occupying so much of his music remained the one place he could not perform it. That changed on January 21, 1977. President Jimmy Carter issued a pardon for many Vietnam-era draft resisters. Winchester had become a Canadian citizen in 1973, creating complications, but he was ultimately included and could legally return. His first U.S. concert in roughly a decade came April 21 at Burlington Municipal Auditorium in Vermont, only about 40 miles from the Canadian border. The location carried its own tension. A few months earlier, crossing that border could have meant arrest. Now Winchester stood onstage with his Canadian band before an American audience that had known his records but had never been able to see him tour behind them. Early in the show, he acknowledged Carter while performing “Why Do You Like Roosevelt?,” a song he had rewritten to explain his refusal to fight. When Winchester reached the line about refusing the call to war, the audience erupted. It was not simply applause for an old song. For the first time, the political decision that had kept Winchester away from American stages was being sung about openly by the man who had lived its consequences. A month later, he played Philadelphia’s Bijou Cafe. That performance was recorded and later released, capturing an artist who had suddenly gained access to an audience he had spent most of the 1970s reaching only through records and other singers. The timing, however, was cruel. By 1977, the singer-songwriter boom that might have carried Winchester into wider American fame had already begun to fade. His return did not produce the commercial breakthrough that years of critical praise had once suggested was possible. He kept his home in Canada and continued recording and touring. Only decades later, in 2002, did he move back permanently to the United States. The Burlington concert did not give Jesse Winchester back the career he might have had. It gave him something smaller and perhaps more important. From that night forward, the geography inside his songs was no longer a place he was forbidden to enter.

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.”

JESSE WINCHESTER COULD RELEASE RECORDS IN AMERICA, BUT FOR TEN YEARS HE COULD NOT SAFELY STAND ON AN AMERICAN STAGE. THEN, FOUR MONTHS AFTER JIMMY CARTER’S AMNESTY, HE CROSSED BACK INTO THE COUNTRY HIS SONGS HAD NEVER LEFT.

Jesse Winchester had been writing about the American South from exile.

He left the United States for Canada in 1967 rather than serve in Vietnam, and that decision shaped everything that followed. From Montreal, he made acclaimed records, toured Canada and Europe, and wrote songs filled with Memphis, Mississippi, Tennessee, church bells, humid roads, old longing, and Southern memory.

But the country living inside so many of those songs remained the one place he could not safely perform them.

For most artists, distance is inconvenience.

For Winchester, it became the frame around his whole career.

The Songs Could Cross The Border Before He Could

Winchester’s records could reach American listeners.

His own body could not move as freely as the music.

That was the strange ache of his 1970s career. People in the United States could buy the albums, hear the songs, and watch other singers carry his work forward, but they could not see him tour those rooms himself without the shadow of arrest hanging over the crossing.

The songs were full of places he knew.

Yet those places had become unreachable in the ordinary way.

He was close enough to hear America.

Too far away to stand inside it.

Carter’s Pardon Changed The Door

That changed on January 21, 1977.

President Jimmy Carter issued a pardon for many Vietnam-era draft resisters. Winchester had become a Canadian citizen in 1973, which complicated his situation, but he was ultimately included and could legally return.

That did not erase the decade.

It did not give back the years when American stages were closed to him.

But it changed what could happen next.

For the first time in years, Jesse Winchester could look south and see more than risk. The border that had shaped his life and career no longer carried the same threat.

The songs could finally follow the singer home.

Burlington Was Close Enough To Feel The Border

His first U.S. concert in roughly a decade came on April 21, 1977, at Burlington Municipal Auditorium in Vermont.

The location mattered.

Burlington sat only about forty miles from the Canadian border. A few months earlier, crossing that line could have meant arrest. Now Winchester stood onstage with his Canadian band before an American audience that had known his records but had never been able to watch him perform them on a proper U.S. tour.

That gave the night a charge beyond music.

It was not only a concert.

It was a return under lights.

A man who had spent ten years separated from the country inside his songs was finally singing them on American ground again.

The Audience Heard The Cost In One Line

Early in the show, Winchester acknowledged Carter while performing “Why Do You Like Roosevelt?”

He had rewritten the song to explain his refusal to fight.

When he reached the line about refusing the call to war, the audience erupted.

That applause was not casual.

It was not only appreciation for an old song.

For the first time, the political decision that had kept Winchester away from American stages was being sung about openly in America by the man who had lived its consequences.

The distance, the exile, the criticism, the lost years, and the private cost of principle all met inside one room.

For a moment, the border was no longer silent.

The Return Came Late

A month later, Winchester played Philadelphia’s Bijou Cafe.

That performance was recorded and later released, capturing an artist who had suddenly gained access to an audience he had spent most of the 1970s reaching only through records and other singers.

But the timing was cruel.

By 1977, the singer-songwriter boom that might have carried Winchester into wider American fame had already begun to fade. The years when his quiet, literate, Southern-rooted songs might have landed most powerfully in the American market had passed while he was still living north of the border.

His return did not become the commercial breakthrough many had once imagined.

The door opened.

But it opened late.

He Kept Living With The Distance

Winchester continued recording and touring.

He kept his home in Canada for decades and did not move back permanently to the United States until 2002. That fact says something about the shape of his life after exile. Returning to American stages did not mean the past could be folded up and put away.

Canada had become more than refuge.

It had become home too.

Still, the 1977 return changed the meaning of the map inside his music. The places he sang about were no longer only memories, images, or unreachable names. He could stand before the people who heard them and let the songs breathe in the country that had formed them.

That mattered, even if fame did not arrive with it.

What Burlington Really Leaves Behind

The deepest part of this story is not only that Jesse Winchester returned to an American stage after Carter’s amnesty.

It is that the return gave his songs back their geography.

A young man leaving the United States in 1967.

Montreal exile.

A Canadian passport.

Records full of Memphis, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

Then Carter’s pardon, a border crossing, and an April night in Burlington only forty miles from the line that had once carried the threat of arrest.

The concert did not give Jesse Winchester back the career he might have had.

It could not return the lost decade.

But from that night forward, the country inside his songs was no longer a place he was forbidden to enter.

He had sung America from a distance.

In Burlington, America finally had to hear him from the room.

Video

Related Post

Country Music

BOBBY BARE RECORDED A DEMO BEFORE LEAVING FOR THE ARMY. THE LABEL RELEASED HIS VOICE UNDER ANOTHER MAN’S NAME—AND IT WENT TO NO. 2. Bobby Bare was still trying to find a place in music when the draft interrupted him. He had already recorded unsuccessful sides for Capitol and Challenge when, back in Ohio awaiting induction, he met his friend Bill Parsons, who wanted a record deal. Bare suggested cutting some demos and joined him for a session at King Records in Cincinnati. Most of the studio time went to Parsons. With about fifteen minutes left, Bare quickly recorded a talking-blues song he had been writing about a young singer getting drafted just as fame arrived. He called it “The All-American Boy.” Bare considered it little more than something worth saving before he forgot it. Fraternity Records heard the tape and wanted to release it. There was a problem: Bare was still under contract to another label and was about to enter the Army. According to Bare, he agreed to the deal but specifically asked that his own name not be used. Fraternity released the unfinished demo credited to Bill Parsons as both performer and writer. Then Bare went through basic training at Fort Knox. The next time he heard “The All-American Boy,” it was already becoming one of the hottest records in America. The single climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart in 1959. Parsons appeared publicly as the singer and even lip-synced Bare’s voice during promotional appearances. Bare received no royalties from the hit. Strangely, he later believed the mistake helped him. “The All-American Boy” was a novelty record tied closely to the Elvis-era military draft. Bare felt that if his own name had been attached to it, the industry might have permanently categorized him as a novelty singer. Instead, after two years in the Army and another unsuccessful stretch with Fraternity, friends including Harlan Howard and Hank Cochran helped bring him to the attention of Chet Atkins. RCA signed him in 1962. “Shame on Me” followed, then “Detroit City,” which became Bare’s first Top 10 country hit and won a Grammy. “500 Miles Away from Home,” “Miller’s Cave,” “Four Strong Winds,” and “The Streets of Baltimore” established the career that the mislabeled single never could. Years later, Bare did not sound bitter about watching another man’s name sit on his first major hit. By then, the error on that Fraternity label had become an odd footnote rather than his identity—and the voice hidden behind it had gone on to build a career strong enough that nobody needed the wrong name anymore.

Country Music

JOE ELY WENT TO LONDON PLAYING WEST TEXAS HONKY-TONK. THE CLASH CAME TO SEE HIM, PULLED HIM INTO THE LONDON CALLING SESSIONS — THEN FOLLOWED HIM BACK TO LUBBOCK TO SEE WHERE THAT MUSIC CAME FROM. By 1979, Joe Ely had already lived several musical lives. He grew up in Lubbock, Texas, played with Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore in the Flatlanders, watched their first recordings nearly disappear, then built a solo band around accordion, steel guitar, rockabilly and hard West Texas country. His 1978 album Honky Tonk Masquerade began attracting attention beyond Texas and helped take him to England. While Ely was playing the Venue in London, members of the Clash came to see him. Their worlds looked completely different. Ely came from Texas dance halls. The Clash came out of London punk. But Joe Strummer knew far more American roots music than Ely expected, even songs by Texas writers such as Guy Clark. The groups became friends. The Clash invited Ely and his band into the studio while they were working on London Calling. They spent several days together, talking about country, blues, rockabilly and the music underneath the labels. Later that year, when the Clash toured America, Ely joined them for several dates. Then he brought them to Lubbock. For the British band, West Texas was unfamiliar territory: flat land, cowboy culture and the hometown of Buddy Holly. They spent several days there before returning to the road. The relationship continued. The Clash later brought Ely back to England during the London Calling period, and recordings from that tour became his album Live Shots. Ely also contributed backing vocals during the sessions that produced “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” He never became a punk singer, and the Clash never became a country band. Years later, Ely would continue moving freely between honky-tonks, rock clubs and songwriter circles without treating those rooms as separate careers. The Flatlanders’ first record had once struggled even to reach stores. One of its members eventually discovered that his West Texas music did not need Nashville’s permission to travel.

Country Music

THE MAN TOM T. HALL IMMORTALIZED AS “CLAYTON DELANEY” WAS NOT A FICTIONAL COUNTRY HERO. HIS REAL NAME WAS LONNIE EASTERLY — A LOCAL GUITAR PICKER WHO TAUGHT A BAREFOOT KENTUCKY BOY HOW TO PLAY, THEN DIED BEFORE THAT BOY EVER REACHED NASHVILLE. Tom Hall grew up in Olive Hill, Kentucky, far from the professional country world he would eventually enter. One of the musicians he followed was Lonnie Easterly, an older local guitar player who had worked with a five-piece band in Ohio and returned home without becoming famous. To young Tom, none of that mattered. Easterly was the best picker around. Hall followed him, watched him play and learned from him. The Country Music Hall of Fame later credited Easterly as an important early mentor who helped shape Hall’s musical beginnings. But Easterly also represented the life country music could fail to deliver. He drank heavily, never made the move to Tennessee and reportedly warned Tom that there was no money in music and that the guitar would only make him old early. Hall listened to the lessons. He ignored the warning. Easterly died while Tom was still young, probably after a long illness. Hall later remembered going into the woods alone and crying for the man he had treated as a hero. Years passed before he turned that memory into a song. When Hall finally wrote it, he changed the name. “Clayton” came from Clayton Hill, where Easterly had lived. “Delaney” came from a neighboring family. Hall said he deliberately kept the invented name rooted in the same geography because he did not want to lose the reality of the place. “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died” was released in 1971. It reached No. 1 on the country chart for two weeks and crossed onto the pop chart. Hall later considered it one of his highest artistic achievements. The song worked because Hall did not turn Easterly into a flawless saint. Clayton drank. He failed to reach Nashville. He warned the boy following him that music could ruin a life. Yet none of those contradictions erased what he gave Tom: a first model of what a musician could be. By the time the record reached No. 1, Hall had become everything Easterly never managed to become — Nashville songwriter, recording artist, Grand Ole Opry member and eventually “The Storyteller.” But the song did something more interesting than rewrite the ending. It gave a local Kentucky picker who never escaped his own town a place inside country music history anyway. Lonnie Easterly never made it to Tennessee. His name did not need to.

You Missed

Country Music

BOBBY BARE RECORDED A DEMO BEFORE LEAVING FOR THE ARMY. THE LABEL RELEASED HIS VOICE UNDER ANOTHER MAN’S NAME—AND IT WENT TO NO. 2. Bobby Bare was still trying to find a place in music when the draft interrupted him. He had already recorded unsuccessful sides for Capitol and Challenge when, back in Ohio awaiting induction, he met his friend Bill Parsons, who wanted a record deal. Bare suggested cutting some demos and joined him for a session at King Records in Cincinnati. Most of the studio time went to Parsons. With about fifteen minutes left, Bare quickly recorded a talking-blues song he had been writing about a young singer getting drafted just as fame arrived. He called it “The All-American Boy.” Bare considered it little more than something worth saving before he forgot it. Fraternity Records heard the tape and wanted to release it. There was a problem: Bare was still under contract to another label and was about to enter the Army. According to Bare, he agreed to the deal but specifically asked that his own name not be used. Fraternity released the unfinished demo credited to Bill Parsons as both performer and writer. Then Bare went through basic training at Fort Knox. The next time he heard “The All-American Boy,” it was already becoming one of the hottest records in America. The single climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart in 1959. Parsons appeared publicly as the singer and even lip-synced Bare’s voice during promotional appearances. Bare received no royalties from the hit. Strangely, he later believed the mistake helped him. “The All-American Boy” was a novelty record tied closely to the Elvis-era military draft. Bare felt that if his own name had been attached to it, the industry might have permanently categorized him as a novelty singer. Instead, after two years in the Army and another unsuccessful stretch with Fraternity, friends including Harlan Howard and Hank Cochran helped bring him to the attention of Chet Atkins. RCA signed him in 1962. “Shame on Me” followed, then “Detroit City,” which became Bare’s first Top 10 country hit and won a Grammy. “500 Miles Away from Home,” “Miller’s Cave,” “Four Strong Winds,” and “The Streets of Baltimore” established the career that the mislabeled single never could. Years later, Bare did not sound bitter about watching another man’s name sit on his first major hit. By then, the error on that Fraternity label had become an odd footnote rather than his identity—and the voice hidden behind it had gone on to build a career strong enough that nobody needed the wrong name anymore.

Country Music

JOE ELY WENT TO LONDON PLAYING WEST TEXAS HONKY-TONK. THE CLASH CAME TO SEE HIM, PULLED HIM INTO THE LONDON CALLING SESSIONS — THEN FOLLOWED HIM BACK TO LUBBOCK TO SEE WHERE THAT MUSIC CAME FROM. By 1979, Joe Ely had already lived several musical lives. He grew up in Lubbock, Texas, played with Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore in the Flatlanders, watched their first recordings nearly disappear, then built a solo band around accordion, steel guitar, rockabilly and hard West Texas country. His 1978 album Honky Tonk Masquerade began attracting attention beyond Texas and helped take him to England. While Ely was playing the Venue in London, members of the Clash came to see him. Their worlds looked completely different. Ely came from Texas dance halls. The Clash came out of London punk. But Joe Strummer knew far more American roots music than Ely expected, even songs by Texas writers such as Guy Clark. The groups became friends. The Clash invited Ely and his band into the studio while they were working on London Calling. They spent several days together, talking about country, blues, rockabilly and the music underneath the labels. Later that year, when the Clash toured America, Ely joined them for several dates. Then he brought them to Lubbock. For the British band, West Texas was unfamiliar territory: flat land, cowboy culture and the hometown of Buddy Holly. They spent several days there before returning to the road. The relationship continued. The Clash later brought Ely back to England during the London Calling period, and recordings from that tour became his album Live Shots. Ely also contributed backing vocals during the sessions that produced “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” He never became a punk singer, and the Clash never became a country band. Years later, Ely would continue moving freely between honky-tonks, rock clubs and songwriter circles without treating those rooms as separate careers. The Flatlanders’ first record had once struggled even to reach stores. One of its members eventually discovered that his West Texas music did not need Nashville’s permission to travel.

Country Music

THE MAN TOM T. HALL IMMORTALIZED AS “CLAYTON DELANEY” WAS NOT A FICTIONAL COUNTRY HERO. HIS REAL NAME WAS LONNIE EASTERLY — A LOCAL GUITAR PICKER WHO TAUGHT A BAREFOOT KENTUCKY BOY HOW TO PLAY, THEN DIED BEFORE THAT BOY EVER REACHED NASHVILLE. Tom Hall grew up in Olive Hill, Kentucky, far from the professional country world he would eventually enter. One of the musicians he followed was Lonnie Easterly, an older local guitar player who had worked with a five-piece band in Ohio and returned home without becoming famous. To young Tom, none of that mattered. Easterly was the best picker around. Hall followed him, watched him play and learned from him. The Country Music Hall of Fame later credited Easterly as an important early mentor who helped shape Hall’s musical beginnings. But Easterly also represented the life country music could fail to deliver. He drank heavily, never made the move to Tennessee and reportedly warned Tom that there was no money in music and that the guitar would only make him old early. Hall listened to the lessons. He ignored the warning. Easterly died while Tom was still young, probably after a long illness. Hall later remembered going into the woods alone and crying for the man he had treated as a hero. Years passed before he turned that memory into a song. When Hall finally wrote it, he changed the name. “Clayton” came from Clayton Hill, where Easterly had lived. “Delaney” came from a neighboring family. Hall said he deliberately kept the invented name rooted in the same geography because he did not want to lose the reality of the place. “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died” was released in 1971. It reached No. 1 on the country chart for two weeks and crossed onto the pop chart. Hall later considered it one of his highest artistic achievements. The song worked because Hall did not turn Easterly into a flawless saint. Clayton drank. He failed to reach Nashville. He warned the boy following him that music could ruin a life. Yet none of those contradictions erased what he gave Tom: a first model of what a musician could be. By the time the record reached No. 1, Hall had become everything Easterly never managed to become — Nashville songwriter, recording artist, Grand Ole Opry member and eventually “The Storyteller.” But the song did something more interesting than rewrite the ending. It gave a local Kentucky picker who never escaped his own town a place inside country music history anyway. Lonnie Easterly never made it to Tennessee. His name did not need to.

Country Music

FOR TEN YEARS, JESSE WINCHESTER COULD RELEASE RECORDS IN AMERICA BUT COULD NOT SAFELY STAND ON AN AMERICAN STAGE. ON APRIL 21, 1977, FOUR MONTHS AFTER JIMMY CARTER’S AMNESTY, HE FINALLY WALKED ONSTAGE IN BURLINGTON, VERMONT. Winchester had left the United States for Canada in 1967 rather than serve in Vietnam. The decision shaped everything that followed. From Montreal, he made acclaimed records, toured Canada and Europe, and wrote songs steeped in Memphis, Mississippi and Tennessee. But the country occupying so much of his music remained the one place he could not perform it. That changed on January 21, 1977. President Jimmy Carter issued a pardon for many Vietnam-era draft resisters. Winchester had become a Canadian citizen in 1973, creating complications, but he was ultimately included and could legally return. His first U.S. concert in roughly a decade came April 21 at Burlington Municipal Auditorium in Vermont, only about 40 miles from the Canadian border. The location carried its own tension. A few months earlier, crossing that border could have meant arrest. Now Winchester stood onstage with his Canadian band before an American audience that had known his records but had never been able to see him tour behind them. Early in the show, he acknowledged Carter while performing “Why Do You Like Roosevelt?,” a song he had rewritten to explain his refusal to fight. When Winchester reached the line about refusing the call to war, the audience erupted. It was not simply applause for an old song. For the first time, the political decision that had kept Winchester away from American stages was being sung about openly by the man who had lived its consequences. A month later, he played Philadelphia’s Bijou Cafe. That performance was recorded and later released, capturing an artist who had suddenly gained access to an audience he had spent most of the 1970s reaching only through records and other singers. The timing, however, was cruel. By 1977, the singer-songwriter boom that might have carried Winchester into wider American fame had already begun to fade. His return did not produce the commercial breakthrough that years of critical praise had once suggested was possible. He kept his home in Canada and continued recording and touring. Only decades later, in 2002, did he move back permanently to the United States. The Burlington concert did not give Jesse Winchester back the career he might have had. It gave him something smaller and perhaps more important. From that night forward, the geography inside his songs was no longer a place he was forbidden to enter.