Jesse Winchester – The Best Of Jesse Winchester (1972)

Jesse Winchester wrote and recorded more than enough great songs for Bearsville to fill a single-disc compilation, which means that some of them were bound to be left off. The trick was to balance the material from the brilliant first two albums with a careful selection from the subsequent five albums, each of which had its virtues. This 14-track album chooses four from Jesse Winchester, including the essential "Yankee Lady," "Biloxi," and "The Brand New Tennessee Waltz," and three from its follow-up, Third Down, 110 to Go. There are three from Learn to Love It, one each from Nothing But a Breeze and A Touch on the Rainy Side, and two from Talk Memphis. Lesser material such as "Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt" and "Rhumba Man" could have been excised in favor of more from Third Down, but the selection is good enough to give a reasonable representation of Winchester's seven Bearsville albums, which contain some of the most impressive songwriting of the '70s.~William Ruhlmann