Fame & Fortune: Jesse Winchester American music's most identifiable draft-dodger
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I break his rules all the time but he's got some good ones, like don't play two nights in a row; I break that one all the time really. The whole thing is to keep you from getting burned out. Just take it easy, you know? Don't try to play everywhere.

Bankrate: What kind of kid were you?

Winchester: Gee. I played music from the very beginning, so I wasn't very athletic. I was good in school. I didn't have a lot of friends.

Bankrate: You were born in Louisiana but you were actually raised in Memphis, right?

Winchester: Yes, my dad was stationed in Louisiana at Barksdale Field, just the other side of the river from Shreveport, but that's not where we were from. My family is from Memphis, Tenn. Right after Dad got out of the army, he got money from the government, as did the other soldiers, a loan or something, and he used his to buy a farm. He was sort of an early hippie, back to nature after the war and wanted to sort of check out of civilization, I guess, because he knew nothing about farming. Anyway, in spite of that, he bought a farm in Mississippi and we farmed there until he had a heart attack, when I was about 12, and couldn't do hard work anymore. So we moved back to Memphis, Tenn., and Dad went to law school and joined the family law firm and knuckled under eventually.

Bankrate: Was he from a long line of lawyers?

Winchester: Lawyers and preachers. My great-grandfather, for whom I'm named, was the Episcopal bishop of Arkansas. There are other preachers in there too, the bishop of Chicago. Although I was raised a Catholic. My mother was a Catholic and the Catholics insist that the children be raised in the Catholic church.

Bankrate: How in the world did you find your way to Williams College? That seems like a stretch.

Winchester: It really is (laughs). Nobody in Memphis, Tenn., knew anything about Williams, including me at the time. It was my uncle; he knew about Williams and Amherst and Trinity, and he recommended it. Williams was really out of my league academically, coming from the South. They let me in, I'm sure, because I was from the South; sort of affirmative action. I really had to struggle to keep up with those Northern boys.

Bankrate: What was your field of study?