Jerry Jeff Walker, Outlaw Country Architect and ‘Mr. Bojangles’ Songwriter, Dead ...

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Jerry Jeff Walker,
Outlaw Country Architect
and ‘Mr. Bojangles’ Songwriter,
Dead at 78






Walker’s 1973 live album ‘¡Viva Terlingua!’ is a cornerstone of the
Austin, Texas, cosmic cowboy sound


He never had a Top 40 pop hit. But his best-known composition
became a standard, and he became a mainstay of the outlaw country
movement.




Jerry Jeff Walker in performance in 2001 in Annapolis, Md.
An architect of the so-called cosmic cowboy music scene in Austin, Texas,
he once recalled that “Texas was the only place where they didn’t look
at me like I was crazy.”
Credit...Kristen Elstner for The New York Times



By Bill Friskics-Warren
Published Oct. 24, 2020
Updated Oct. 26, 2020


Jerry Jeff Walker, the singer-songwriter who wrote the much-recorded
standard “Mr. Bojangles” and later became a mainstay of the Texas
outlaw movement that catapulted Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings
to fame, died on Friday at a hospital in Austin, Texas.
He was 78.

His former publicist John T. Davis said the cause was cancer. Mr. Walker
learned he had throat cancer in 2017.

A native New Yorker, Mr. Walker began his career in the 1960s,
hitchhiking and busking around the country before establishing
himself in Greenwich Village and writing the song that would
secure his reputation.

A waltzing ballad about an old street dancer Mr. Walker had met in
a New Orleans drunk tank, “Mr. Bojangles” was first recorded by
Mr. Walker for the Atco label in 1968. The song achieved its greatest
success in a folk-rock version that reached the pop Top 10 in 1971
with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and went on to be covered by a
wide range of artists, among them Nina Simone, Neil Diamond and
even Bob Dylan. Sammy Davis Jr. included it in his stage show and
performed it on television.



Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and
Jerry Jeff Walker, Mr Bojangles
(50th Anniversary)

“At the time, I was reading a lot of Dylan Thomas, and I was really
into the concept of internal rhyme,” Mr. Walker wrote of the song’s
origin in his 1999 memoir, “Gypsy Songman.”






“The events of the past few months were still swirling inside, along
with the memory of folks I’d met in jail cells in Columbus and
New Orleans,” he went on.

“And it just came out:
Knew a man Bojangles, and he danced for you. …”

The song was by far Mr. Walker’s best-known composition, the
only original of his — he typically performed songs written by
others — to become a major hit. But perhaps his most enduring
contribution to popular culture was as an architect of the so-called
cosmic cowboy music scene that coalesced around
Armadillo World Headquarters, an iconoclastic nightclub in Austin.


The reception Mr. Walker received in Austin, he often said, signaled
the first time he felt truly validated as an artist. “Texas was the only
place where they didn’t look at me like I was crazy,” he told
Rolling Stone in 1974, referring to the freewheeling ethos he
cultivated with fellow regulars at Armadillo World Headquarters
like Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys and
Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.

“It was the first place where, when I got on the stage to play,
they said, ‘Of course, why not?’ Other places, they said, ‘Aw, you’re
just another Bob Dylan, trying to make it with your guitar.’”



Mr. Walker in Chicago in 1977. In his 1970s heyday,
he a made a number of definitive Texas outlaw recordings.
Credit...Paul Natkin/Getty Images

In a career that spanned six decades, Mr. Walker never had a Top 40
pop hit. But in his 1970s heyday, he and the Lost Gonzo Band, his
loose-limbed group of backing musicians, made a number of definitive
Texas outlaw recordings.

Foremost was “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” a boozing, brawling
anthem written by Ray Wylie Hubbard that appeared on Mr. Walker’s
1973 album, “Viva Terlingua.”

“Viva Terlingua,” recorded live in Luckenbach, Texas, included other
tracks that became signature recordings for Mr. Walker: among them
are a dissolute take on Michael Martin Murphey’s “Backsliders Wine,”
and “London Homesick Blues,” a tribute to Armadillo World Headquarters,
written and sung by  Gary P. Nunn of Mr. Walker’s band, with Mr. Walker
on backing vocals. With a memorable refrain that began,
“I wanna go home with the armadillo,” “London Homesick Blues” later
became the theme song of the long-running PBS concert series
“Austin City Limits.”

Mainstream radio programmers nevertheless didn’t play Mr. Walker’s
music, perhaps because of his gruff, braying singing voice and his
reputation for being intoxicated onstage or failing to show up for
performances altogether. Further jeopardizing his commercial prospects,
he eschewed the glossier sensibilities of Nashville and other recording
centers in favor of releasing raucous albums, recorded both in concert
and in the studio, without the benefit of editing or overdubs.



“The mid-’70s in Austin were the busiest, the craziest,
the most vivid and intense and productive period of my life,”
Mr. Walker wrote in his memoir, “Gypsy Songman.”
Credit...GAB Archive/Redferns


“I wanted our records to sound like we were having a grand time
at a party thrown for a bunch of our best friends — which, I guess,
is exactly what it was,” Mr. Walker was quoted as saying in the 1998
edition of The Encyclopedia of Country Music.

Jerry Jeff Walker was born Ronald Clyde Crosby on March 16, 1942,
in Oneonta, N.Y., in northernmost Appalachia. His father, Mel Crosby,
refereed sporting events and tended bar; his mother,
Alma (Conrow) Crosby, was a homemaker.

Young Ronnie grew up in a musical home. His parents were local
dance champions, and his maternal grandparents led a
square-dance band.

A rebellious youth who excelled in athletics, Mr. Walker received
his first guitar as a Christmas present when he was 12. He later
took up banjo and ukulele and played in local pop combos when
he was in high school. He joined the National Guard in the early
1960s, only to go AWOL before embarking on the hitchhiking tour
of the country that ultimately led to him changing his name to
Jerry Jeff Walker and moving to New York to pursue his muse
as a folk singer.

While in Greenwich Village, he became a member of the psychedelic
rock band Circus Maximus, although he remained with the group
only until the release of its debut album. By that time he had
written “Mr. Bojangles,” which, after an auspicious live performance
on the listener-supported New York radio station WBAI, helped
him secure a contract with Atco Records.

Mr. Walker made three albums for Atco and another for
Vanguard Records before relocating in 1971 to Austin. After signing
with Decca in 1972, he released an album, titled simply
“Jerry Jeff Walker,” which featured an acclaimed version of
“L.A. Freeway,” a staple of the Southwestern songwriting canon
written by Guy Clark, the Texan singer-songwriter. The next year,
Mr. Walker further helped raise Mr. Clark’s profile as a songwriter
with his heart-rending cover of “Desperados Waiting for a Train,”
another neo-western touchstone written by Mr. Clark.

Mr. Walker toured and recorded extensively throughout the 1970s
and ’80s, even as his drinking became unmanageable and he faced
mounting debt, including back taxes owed to the I.R.S. With the help
of Susan Streit, his wife of 46 years, he gave up liquor and drugs
in the late ’70s, put his life back together and eventually settled
into the role of elder statesman of the gonzo Texas music scene
he had helped create.

In addition to Ms. Streit, Mr. Walker’s survivors include a daughter,
Jessie Jane McLarty; a son, Django, who is also a musician; a sister,
Cheryl Harder; and two grandchildren.

Mr. Walker had been receiving chemotherapy and radiation.
In 2017, it was announced that he had donated his music archives,
including tapes, photographs and handwritten lyrics, to the
Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

“The mid-’70s in Austin were the busiest, the craziest, the most vivid
and intense and productive period of my life,”
Mr. Walker wrote in his memoir.

“Greased by drugs and alcohol, I was also raising the pursuit of
wildness and weirdness to a fine art,” he wrote. “I didn’t just burn
the candle at both ends, I was also finding new ends to light.”

















Christina Morales contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 26, 2020,
Section B, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline:
Jerry Jeff Walker, Who Wrote and Sang ‘Mr. Bojangles,’
Is Dead at 78.


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