John Winn
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John Winn

Grand Junction, Colorado, United States

Grand Junction, Colorado, United States
Band Folk Singer/Songwriter

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Press


"New York City"

Among the newer promising talents deserving mention are a 20 year-old latter-day Guthrie disciple named Bob Dylan, with a curiously arresting mumbling, country-steeped manner; John Winn, a polished, poised tenor whose art-song approach to balladry was impressive. - New York Times


"Carnegie Hall appearance 1963"

John Winn represented the minstrel-Troubadour tradition with high artistry. - New York Times


"Nobody Gets Off the /Bus: The Viet Nam Generation Big Book"

Popular music of the 1960s harked back to the music and poetry of the people: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and a myriad of others whose names are less well-known today--Ed McCurdy, Roger Sprung, John Winn, and the Kingston Trio popularized folk and traditional music for the same reason that the Romantic poets did. - Josephine A. McQuail, Tennessee Technological University


"September 13, 2006 Concert at Western Colorado Botanic Gardens"

From Dylan to Durango
Singer/songwriter John Winn loving life in Junction


By Greg Reed
Grand Junction Free Press
September 13, 2006


It was the early 1960s in New York City.

John Winn was walking down West Fourth Street when he came upon his pal, Bob Dylan.

He was just another pilgrim on his journey then,? said Winn, now 72 and living in Grand Junction.

Hey, Bobby, you look down,Winn said.

Suzes gone,? Dylan said of his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. I don't know if shes ever coming back. I just wrote a song about it this morning. C'mon upstairs and I'll sing it for you.

The song was Tomorrow's a Long Time.

Winn said the song sounded great as he listened to Dylan playing it on the tiny bed of his tiny New York City apartment.

The story, though?

Winn had been around Dylan in the early 60s New York City folk music scene long enough to know one thing.

You take everything Bobby said with a grain of salt,? Winn said. He told us he was an orphan, that he was Indian, that he grew up in Gallop, N.M., and ran away to join the circus when he was 14.

Of course, a couple years later, we find out Bobby D. was really Bobby Z., that he was Robert Zimmerman before that.

Winn played with Dylan, worked with Judy Collins and Jose Feliciano and played Carnegie Hall with many of the early folk artists of the time. Winn has lived in Grand Junction for 10 years now and plays tonight at the Western Colorado Botanical Gardens.

Winn is 72 now and his musical career spans six decades.

Winns passion is music.

Next to skiing, that is.

Colorado kept a callin' me


Growing up in Mark Twains hometown of Hannibal, Mo., Winn played basketball, hunted birds along the Mississippi River, and even spent summers as a cave guide at the Mark Twain cave. Its also when he developed his strong tenor voice.

But ask Winn about his youth and he'll immediately take you back to 1946, when he found some long boards in his neighbors barn.
What are these?? he asked.

Those are skis. We call them snowshoes,? the neighbor replied. And Winn didn't hesitate.

Can I use them?

Winn knew they needed wax, so he went into the closet and got his mothers Johnsons furniture wax and went to town.

I went over to the cow pasture, stuck my World War II combat boots in the toe strap and pointed them downhill, Winn recalled.

What a ride.

Not so much on the ending, though.

I steered myself into a brush pile and flushed a covey of quail and six rabbits, Winn laughed.

Still, he was hooked.

After a year at Culver Stockton College in Missouri, he became restless.
Colorado kept a callin me, Winn said.

So he loaded up a bag and hitched west. Winn landed in Summit County, well before Copper and Keystone mountains. He worked for Ski Tip Ranch near Arapahoe Basin, where he cut wood, built fires and was the head dishwasher.

And the only dishwasher,? he laughs.

Excited about skiing, he volunteered for the military and hoped to get into the mountain and cold training, which at the time was at Camp Hale.

However, as troubadours will tell you, life is often a funny road to follow and sometime after boot camp, Winn had found a gal and the cold and mountain training was moved to Greeley, Maine. So he was stationed at Fort Carson, where he just happened to be in the same unit as legendary American skier Buddy Werner.

One day, they took me up on Pikes Peak and turned me loose on Colorado snow,? Winn said. I said, this is it. This is what I want to do.

Shortly thereafter, his other passion crossed that funny road of life. Songwriters at that time worked on pianos. But those, Winn says with a smile, are tough to carry around.

So on post one night, he stopped at the PX and checked out a Stella guitar with a Gene Autrey picture stenciled on it.

He looked at some chords and his first song was the cowboy traditional, I Ride An Old Paint.

I thought, this is pretty cool, I can play guitar and sing,? Winn said. The guitar is a lot more portable than a piano.

Fresh out of the Army, Winn returned to Summit County and the Ski Tip Ranch, where he learned to teach skiing at Arapahoe Basin and played guitar and sang in the evenings by the huge stone fireplace in the lodge. That turned into playing at bars and coffee houses like the Red Ram in Georgetown, Mikes Pub in Boulder and the Exodus and the Cafe Les Tarot in Denver.

His musical friend and compatriot, Judy Collins, introduced Winn to her manager, who convinced him to move to New York City.

This time he headed east

Winn caught the folk music scene just in time and played in coffee houses like the Gaslight, Folk City and Cafe Lena. He toured the country as a featured vocalist with the Karlsrud Singers, was on a national tour with the Belafonte Singers and performed at many of the early 1960s hootenannies, inclu - Grand Junction Free Press


"The Mayor of MacDougall Street"

(Page 160, regarding an apartment on Waverly Place)

The agent of the place was a music fan and he got an apartment for Berry Kornfeld, then Barry got an apartment for me on the third floor, and then when I moved to a larger place on the second floor Patrick Sky was installed in my old apartment. Alix Dobkin was living on the fourth floor, and Bill Faier and John Winn moved in as well at some point. John was a classical tenor, a marvelously good musician who did a lot of John Dowland, and he, Ed McCurdy, Bob Dylan and I used to do madrigals together, which had to be heard to be believed.
- Memoir of Dave Van Ronk


"John Winn at Botanic Gardens"

A reminder: One of my favorite local musicians, John Winn, is doing a show tonight at the Western Colorado Botanical Gardens. Johns a music veteran who has performed on stage with all kinds of well-known people, including Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and Jose Feliciano. Now we’ve got him right here in our own neighborhood.

It’s not going to be stuff for the headbanging set and it’s also not for small kids who need Barney-type sugar-fueled mania in their tunes, but for people who can enjoy the talents of a man who can set stories to music. Two of my favorite of John’s songs are the melancholy Wild Stallion and the funny Coffee Song.
- Grand Junction Daily Sentinel web log by Todd Powell


"Musician recalls start during early Dylan era"

John Winn’s lips move along with the voice on the recording.

His cowboy boot taps the floor with each count of the song, and the notes wash over each other and return to familiar patterns before he air-strums the final chords of the ballad.

Normally, Winn doesn’t like listening to recordings of his own performances. He can’t enjoy the music because he’s focused on the buzzes and clinks and clunks only he can hear.

The warbling voice was recorded more than 50 years ago, and Winn listens in amazement to a younger version of himself: A John Winn who hadn’t yet seen the canyons of Colorado. A John Winn who hadn’t written any of his own song lyrics about meeting girls in Laundromats. A John Winn who really had something good.

These are more memory than anything, he said. I was young, and I had a high note.

Hindsight is a slightly regretful 20-20 for 71-year-old John Winn now.

I couldn’t get anyone to record it. Isn’t that annoying?” he said, switching off the music. When you’re in it and you’re young, you don’t know.

But Winn didn’t really like being ‘in it’ as far as the whole music scene was concerned back then. Aside from the whole rock n’ roll lifestyle, he liked hanging out with Joan Baez and Judy Collins, and he even played at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall.

Despite these accomplishments, there’s a tinge of regret in John Winn’s voice as he tells the story of meeting with the record guy — the one who asked if he had any other original songs after hearing him play the music he wrote to accompany the poem ‘Billy Budd.’

Winn knows now that it was original stuff like Bob Dylan’s music that the record guy was looking for.
Even after almost 40 years of living in Colorado, Winn’s sharp memory recalls meeting Dylan in Greenwich Village as the folk music scene was really gearing up.

At the time, Winn thought, ‘He sings like he’s got a mouthful of mush, but he writes nice songs and is pretty entertaining.’

Today, Winn is mentioned in two biographies about Bob Dylan and his autobiography, although Dylan misspelled his last name.

The mere fact that he remembered me is pretty cool, Winn said.

In the early 1960s, folk music was gaining a niche in popular music, and Winn had an agent who tried to bill him as ‘Big John Winn — who was born singing and has been singing ever since.’ The name made people anticipate a giant, plaid-clad lumberjack was coming to perform.

I sang love songs, Winn said, shaking his head. It was ridiculous.

Back then, he sang songs he adapted from the Renaissance. The songs he sings now are his own.
His gray hair still has the potential for the tousled curls of the young troubadour, which he especially resembles when he wears the medieval-style tunics his wife, Kristin, sews for him.

His long fingers have no problem weaving through the intricate melodies of the songs. Even today, he gets out of bed at 4 a.m. and practices for an hour, usually on an old Spanish guitar that a buddy once used to paddle a canoe.

Music has been with him through the years as he came and left Colorado, returning to his beloved mountains before finally ending up in Grand Junction.

Looking back, Winn seems to care more about where he lived than being famous. He didn’t like cities, and he wanted to be around what he calls the “real people,” like the ones who live in Maine and Colorado.

Even though I could fake it in the city, I was still a farmer at heart,' he said.

Winn’s life has circled around his love of music, skiing and mountains. All of them played a role in bringing him to Colorado.

The Hannibal, Mo., native’s life changed in 1946 when he discovered a treasure in his neighbors’ barn — wooden skis with little belts on them to hold your toes down. The neighbors gladly loaned the skis to Winn, and he geared up in World War II combat boots and waxed them with furniture polish.

Winn chose a cow pasture for the first run.

It was a cow pasture with some cows that fortunately weren’t there at the time, because I didn’t know how to turn or stop, he said, laughing.

He found a brush pile to kamikaze into, and flushed out a covey of quail and about six rabbits. It was the beginning of his love of skiing, which ultimately helped bring him to the West.

Two epiphanies also lured Winn westward, after stints in Maine and other places.

The first one was in 1953, when he was going to school on a voice scholarship. He was sitting in a college zoology class ‘watching this paramecium flagellate its flagella,’ and realized it wasn’t where he wanted to be.

Winn walked out of class, packed up his stuff and headed to Colorado.

He worked in a lumber mill in Idaho, went back to Missouri, worked on his singing career, enlisted in the army so he could get back to Colorado — and ended up at Fort Carson for basic training.

The Army brought Winn to the guitar, via a buddy who got him interested in the instrument.
It was more fun and portable than a piano, he - Erin McIntyre, Special to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel


Discography

Canyon Wind, CD released September 13, 2006

Canyon Wind can be purchased online at:
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/johnwinn

Wild Stallion, CD released January 31, 2006

Available at:
http://www.cdbaby.com/johnwinn2

Colorado Mountain Song, released September 7, 2007
Available at:
http://www.cdbaby.com/johnwinn3

Apple Pickin' Time, released summer, 2008.

Available at:
http://www.cdbaby.com/johnwinn4

Photos

Bio

Known as the minstrel-troubadour, John Winn's musical career has spanned six decades, starting with formal voice training in college, stints as a tenor with a municipal opera company in St. Louis, and as a coffeehouse singer in the early days of folk music in New York City. Winn traveled with the Belafonte Singers, performed on stages with Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and Jose Feliciano, and performed at New Yorks Carnegie Hall with many of the early folk artists. He performed at folk venues such as the Gaslight, Gerdes Folk City, and Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York. He toured the country as a featured vocalist with the Karlsrud Chorale, and toured nationally with the Belafonte Singers. In the early 1960s, Winn performed at many of the early hootenany's including appearances in Carnegie Hall and Town Hall in New York City.

Musical friend and compatriot Judy Collins introduced Winn to her manager, Daniel Gordon, who was married to the folksinger Odetta. Gordon and Odetta encouraged him to go to New York where they booked him into Folk City. Winn moved to New York in 1960, just as the folk music scene was emerging on MacDougal Street in the Lower West Village. Bob Dylan soon arrived on the folk scene, playing in many of the same coffeehouses. Winn spent a lot of time talking with Dylan, including taking a memorable road trip with Bob to Ann Arbor, MI to perform in one of the early folk concerts.

His songs are filled with rich poetry that reflect on his life, his love of music, the rivers and canyons of the west, and the mountains and seacoasts of Maine. His songs and stories are written in the troubadour tradition of folk music.

John Winn currently has four CDs available. His most recent, Apple Pickin' Time, was released in the summer of 2008. His next CD, The Lonely Minstrel, is soon to be released in early 2009.