The Amorphous Strums
| Vic Chesnutt | |
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Vic Chesnutt performing in 2008
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | James Victor Chesnutt |
| Born |
November 12, 1964 Jacksonville, Florida, U.S. |
| Origin | Athens, Georgia, U.S. |
| Died | December 25, 2009 (aged 45) Athens, Georgia, U.S. |
| Genres | |
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| Instruments | |
| Years active | 1985–2009 |
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| Website | vicchesnutt |
James Victor "Vic" Chesnutt (November 12, 1964 – December 25, 2009) was an American singer-songwriter from Athens, Georgia. His first album, Little, was released in 1990, but his breakthrough to commercial success didn't come until 1996 with the release of Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation, a charity record of alternative artists covering his songs.
Chesnutt released 17 albums during his career, including two produced by Michael Stipe, and a 1996 release on Capitol Records, About to Choke. His musical style has been described by Bryan Carroll of allmusic.com as a "skewed, refracted version of Americana that is haunting, funny, poignant, and occasionally mystical, usually all at once".
Injuries from a 1983 car accident left him partially paralyzed; he used a wheelchair and had limited use of his hands.
An adoptee, Chesnutt was raised in Zebulon, Georgia, where he first started writing songs at the age of five. When he was 13, Chesnutt declared that he was an atheist, a position that he maintained for the rest of his life.
At 18, a car accident left him partially paralyzed; in a December 1, 2009 interview with Terry Gross on her NPR show Fresh Air, he said he was "a quadriplegic from [his] neck down", and although he had feeling and some movement in his body, he could not walk "functionally" and that, although he realized shortly afterward that he could still play guitar, he could only play simple chords. After his recovery he left Zebulon and moved to Nashville, Tennessee; the poetry he read there (by Stevie Smith, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Stephen Crane, and Emily Dickinson) served to inspire and influence him.
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