Jesse Winchester, a tuneful poet from a small corner of southern America who had to flee America--at a time when it was going through one of its more invasively imperial stages--to find his voice passed away yesterday. Anyone who knows the work of The Band or Reba McEntire or Jimmy Buffett needs no introduction to the story of this greatly talented and mostly ignored songwriter; for everyone else, check out his work in these two clips, and ponder what great voices emerge from little places: