Jerry Jeff Walker was born 81 years ago today.
A country music singer and songwriter, Walker was best known for writing the song, "Mr. Bojangles." His prolific music career and his widespread musical influence made him an iconic fixture of the Texas country music scene.
His maternal grandparents played for square dances in the area, with his grandmother — Jessie Conroe — playing piano and her husband playing fiddle.
After high school, Walker (then named Ronald Clyde Crosby) joined the National Guard, but his thirst for adventure led him to go AWOL and roam the country busking for a living in New Orleans and throughout Texas, Florida and New York, often accompanied by H.R. Stoneback (a friendship referenced in 1970's "Stoney").
He played mostly ukulele until Harriet Ottenheimer, one of the founders of The Quorum, got him settled on a guitar in 1963. He adopted his stage name "Jerry Jeff Walker" in 1966, and spent his early folk music days in Greenwich Village through the mid-1960s.
Walker co-founded a band with Bob Bruno in the late-1960s called Circus Maximus that put out two albums. One album featured the popular FM radio hit, "Wind," but Bruno's interest in jazz apparently diverged from Walker's interest in folk music.
Walker thus resumed his solo career and recorded the seminal album, "Mr. Bojangles," with the help of David Bromberg and other influential Atlantic recording artists. He settled in Austin in the 1970s associating mainly with the country outlaw scene that included artists such as Willie Nelson, Guy Clark, Waylon Jennings and Townes Van Zandt.
"Mr. Bojangles" (written by Walker) is perhaps his most well-known and most-often covered song. It was about an obscure alcoholic but talented tap-dancing drifter, (not the famous stage and movie dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, as usually assumed), nor was it about New Orleans blues musician Babe Stovall, a friend of Walker's.
In his autobiography “Gypsy Songman,” Walker makes it clear the man he met was white. Further, in an interview with BBC Radio 4 in August, 2008, he pointed out that at the time the jail cells in New Orleans were segregated along color lines, so his influence could not have been black.
Bojangles is thought to have been a folk character who entertained informally in the south of the U.S. and California, with authentic reports of him existing from the 1920s through about 1965.
Artists from Neil Diamond to Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Philip Glass, David Bromberg, Tom T. Hall, Jim Stafford, Sammy Davis Jr., Lulu (New Routes), Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Harry Belafonte and Robbie Williams have covered the song.
Walker has also recorded songs written by others such as "LA Freeway" (Guy Clark), "Up Against the Wall Red Neck Mother" (Ray Wylie Hubbard), "(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night" (Tom Waits) and London Homesick Blues (Gary P. Nunn).
A string of records for MCA and Elektra followed Jerry Jeff's move to Austin, Texas, before he gave up on the mainstream music business and formed his own independent record label. Tried & True Music was founded in 1986, with his wife, Susan, running it.
Susan also founded Goodknight Music as his management company and Tried & True Artists for his bookings. A series of increasingly autobiographical records followed under the Tried & True imprint. Tried & True also sells his autobiography called "Gypsy Songman." In 2004, Jerry Jeff released his first DVD of songs from his past as performed in an intimate setting in Austin.
He has interpreted the songs of others like Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Keith Sykes, Paul Siebel, Bob Dylan, Todd Snider and even a rodeo clown named Billy Jim Baker.
Some have called Jerry Jeff the Jimmy Buffett of Texas. It was Jerry Jeff who first drove Jimmy Buffett to Key West (from Coconut Grove, Florida in a Packard). Walker and Buffett also co-wrote the song "Railroad Lady" while riding the last run of the Panama Limited.
Walker has developed a style of music he calls "Cowjazz." The poignant “Eastern Avenue River Railway Blues” is one of the best examples of this music. The song sounds like a cross between Bob Dylan and Harry Chapin, with lyrics that refer to the industrial area between Cincinnati's Eastern Avenue and the Ohio River, just south of the tony Mount Adams area.
Walker had an annual birthday celebration bash in Austin at the Paramount Theatre and at Gruene Hall in Gruene, Texas. This party became an enormous event in Texas and brought some of the biggest names in country music out for a night of picking and swapping stories under the Austin skyline.
Walker was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2017. He died of the disease on October 23, 2020, at a hospital in Austin. He was 78 years old.
Here, Walker performs Ray Wylie Hubbard's “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother”
Jerry Jeff Walker with Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson