RIP Vic Chesnutt

The Athens, Georgia singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt died Christmas Day. He performed at the Calgary Folk Music Festival in 1997, bringing his unique take on songwriting and sense of humour to the rapt audiences. He returned to Calgary in November to perform at Calgary’s Marquee Room.

Paralysed from the waist down following a car accident in 1983, Chesnutt expressed that this tragedy helped to focus his creativity. The sense of humility and wry levity in his songs could only have been born out of tough personal experience that elevated his music far beyond the maudlin.

REM’s Michael Stipe produced his first two albums, 1990's Little and West Of Rome. Chesnutt released over a dozen albums, and was considered at the peak of his abilities. His last couple of Constellation Records’s recordings At The Cut and North Star Deserter highlight raw, powerful, fragile chamber-rock elegies.

Chesnutt was a real songwriter who lived his songs and transformed our sense of what true character, grace and determination are all about. As his good friend Kirstin Hersh wrote: “Vic was brilliant, hilarious and necessary; his songs messages from the ether, uncensored. He developed a guitar style that allowed him to play bass, rhythm and lead in the same song — this with the movement of only two fingers. His fluid timing was inimitable, his poetry untainted by influences.”

Hersh has set up a website to raise money for Vic’s family, to cover his considerable medical bills: http://kristinhersh.cashmusic.org/vic.

While insured, Chesnutt reportedly owed $70,000 in unpaid medical bills and had recently been served with a lawsuit by a Georgia hospital. On the Constellation Records homepage, Jem Cohen, a filmmaker and producer of Chesnutt's North Star Deserter vented his spleen at the United States' "broken health care system depriving so many of the help they need to stay around and stay sane, and a society that never balks at providing more money for more wars but fights tooth and nail against decent care for its citizens. Vic's death, just so you all know, did not come at the end of some cliché downward spiral. He was battling deep depression but also at the peak of his powers, and with the help of friends and family he was in the middle of a desperate search for help. The system failed to provide it."