Born in: November 12, 1964, Jacksonville, Florida
Died: December 25, 2009, Athens, Georgia
Key Albums:Little (1990), West of Rome (1991), Is the Actor Happy? (1995), The Salesman and Bernadette (1998), North Star Deserter (2007), At the Cut (2009)
Vic Chesnutt was a singer-songwriter from Athens, Georgia, whose prolific career produced 14 albums of bruised poetry and ragged Americana, characterized by Chesnutt's tiny, effecting voice, and his penchant for using unexpected words —"glossolalia," "insoluble," "postulate," and "miscellany"— in song lyrics.


"People have accused me of singing words that have never been sung before and, well, that's true," Chesnutt confessed to me, in a 2009 interview.

Chesnutt's songs tapped a rich vein of dark Americana, sketchy Southern Gothic tales set in towns from Chattanooga to Baton Rouge. And though death was Chesnutt's favorite topic —in some ways his greatest fixation— his music was charged with an off-beat sense of humor (“Like the invisible man directing traffic/I'd be ineffective, no matter how enthusiastic”). "I have a dark worldview, but I’m also full of yuks," Chesnutt self-appraised, in a 2009 interview with Prefix.

Chesnutt collaborated with a range of artists, including Michael Stipe of REM, Jonathan Richman, Lambchop, Widespread Panic, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Elf Power. "Collaborations are, in many ways, like f**king," Chesnutt said; making him "a swinger, a flinger; if not a whore!"

Background

Born James Victor Chesnutt in Jacksonville, he was, in his own mythology, abandoned at birth and raised by the couple who found him by the roadside.

Chesnutt grew up a "very provincial dude" in Zebulon, Georgia. His grandfather taught him guitar at an early age, and by five, young Vic wrote his first song, called "God."

As a teenager, Chesnutt worked in a cotton mill ("there are no cotton mills left in the south now," he'd later lament, "they've all been outsourced overseas") before he started playing trumpet in a redneck bar cover band. He joined a new-wave outfit named Random Factor, as keyboardist, but was fired for not tucking his shirt in. "Fashion was very important in 1982," Chesnutt would laugh, in recollection. "Your hair had to go up, shirt had to go in pants and your tie had to be f**king skinny."

In 1983, when Chesnutt was 18, he drove drunk, had a car accident, and broke his neck. Chesnutt was paralyzed from the waist down, and for the first month of his recovery he could neither move nor talk. Laying in hospital for four months, listening to Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan and reading poems by Walt Whitman and W.H. Auden, the 'stillness' lead to a sense of mental clarity about music and poetry, and Chesnutt started writing songs in his mind, biding time until he could regain sufficient use of his gnarled hands to wrangle simple guitar chords.

"I always looked at things differently than other people," Chesnutt opined, to Neumu, in 2003. "The only thing that broken neck did toward that s**t was make me slower, like a turtle. Everybody else is spinning around fast around me and I'm slowly watching."

Early Acclaim

Moving to Athens, Georgia, in 1985, Chesnutt landed smack-bang in the middle of the scene that gave the world REM, Matthew Sweet and countless others. "There was this vibrant, incestuous and beautiful thing going on," he remembers. "It was like La Belle Epoque. It was incredible: poets, painters, rock'n'rollers. Lots of acid."

Chesnutt initially didn't intend to join the fray as performer, but friends heard his solo songs, and forced him to play a show. "From there," Chesnutt said, "it was a pretty short order 'til I made my first album with Michael Stipe."

The REM frontman wanted to "capture [Chesnutt's] songs before [he] killed [himself]," and Chesnutt's Stipe-produced debut, 1990's Little, garnered immediate attention because of its benefactor. So named because Chesnutt wanted to make small, humble, stripped-down music, the album found immediate acclaim with both critics and fellow musicians. It was followed shortly thereafter by another Stipe collaboration, 1991's West of Rome, an album oft regarded as Chesnutt's masterpiece.

In 1992, Chesnutt was chronicled in the PBS television documentary Speed Racer, which presented him very much as 'the songwriter in the wheelchair.' Chesnutt understood that his physical situation was both blessing and curse. "99% of the population is going to hear my music and they’re going to know that I’m in a wheelchair, paraplegic, [and] they can’t deal," Chesnutt said, to The Quietus. "They’re like, ‘This is the last shit on earth I wanna listen to. This is bumming me out.'"

Certainly not everyone felt pity for Chesnutt, either. In Los Angeles in 1993, after the release of his third LP, Drunk, Chesnutt played a show with poet Allen Ginsberg, who took umbrage with its title.

"He knew my story," Chesnutt would later recall, "and he said, ‘You broke your neck in a drunk driving car wreck.’ And I said, ‘Yes’. And he said, ‘And your new album’s called ‘Drunk’ right?’ And I said, ‘Yes’. ‘And you recorded it when you were completely drunk?’ And I said, ‘Yes’. And he said ‘You’re an idiot!’"

In 1995, Chesnutt issued another album hailed as a minor masterpiece, Is the Actor Happy?. Its title inspired by Chesnutt's small role in Billy Bob Thornton's Academy Award-winning picture, Sling Blade, the LP was Chesnutt's most accessible to date, and suggested that future crossover potential loomed.

The Major Label Year

In 1996, Chesnutt was the subject of a charity album assembled by the Sweet Relief organization, a non-profit founded by singer-songwriter Victoria Williams to assist musicians without health insurance. Sweet Relief II: The Gravity of the Situation found Chesnutt tunes being covered by a bizarre array of acts, from peers like Williams, REM, Kristin Hersh, Sparklehorse, and Joe Henry, to Madonna, Hootie and the Blowfish, Garbage, Smashing Pumpkins, and Indigo Girls.

The compile primed audiences for Chesnutt's major-label debut, '96's Capitol-bankrolled About to Choke. It proved Chesnutt's only release on a major ever, as he was dropped by Capitol shortly thereafter.

Next: Collaborations Aplenty, A Late-'00s Renaissance, and the Sad Death of Vic Chesnutt...