Jesse Winchester died of complications from bladder cancer at his home in Charlottesville yesterday.

I loved Jesse Winchester’s music…so mellow and spare… so considered.

I wrote about him once before on this blog….

What a life he must have lived…

Now, you can read about some of it here if you feel comfortable leaving my blog …I guess you can come back if you want to.

There’s so many weird distractions…so much flash and noise, so much pomp and posturing…that when someone quiet and intelligent comes along, it’s easy to lose them in the pool of people struggling to be noticed.

Jesse’s decision to go to Canada when the draft might have forced him to go to Vietnam gets a lot of attention.

He was a pretty high-profile “draft dodger”.

That’s a part of his story that gets a lot of attention…but it’s not the whole story.

What he did is really hard to do…distill things down to something strong, write less and mean everything that you say.

He’s like most of the folks I listened to when I was first discovering music and buying it on my own… I read about him, I found some used albums, then found some more used albums…and then I proceeded to wear out the grooves.

Maybe that’s the secret to a happy life? Find something you love…and then wear out the grooves appreciating it?

He was one of the good ones….one of the really good ones.