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…