Jerry Jeff Walker talked to the AJC in 2012 ahead of a summer concert at Atlanta Botanical Gardens.
TEXAS TROUBADOUR Jerry Jeff Walker may be best known as the guy who penned the classic American ballad, “Mr. Bojangles” — covered by everyone from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Bob Dylan to Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.
But Walker's life has been every bit as colorful as the characters in his songs. And when he performs with his band July 18 at the Atlanta Botanical Garden for a cadre of his longtime fans (known as the Tried and True Warriors), most will be there because they relate to the man as well as the music.
Before he moved to Austin in the early '70s, and became a founder and a fixture of the gonzo, country-rock scene there, Walker mostly lived on the road. Traveling from New Orleans, where he met Bojangles in a jail cell, to New York's Greenwich Village, where he followed in the footsteps of Dylan and Ramblin' Jack Elliot, to Key West, where he befriended Jimmy Buffett, Walker was in the thick of several musical epochs. He talked about that recently in a phone call from his home in Texas.
You're a pillar of the Austin music community, but much less is made of your early days around the Greenwich Village folk scene. Why do you think that is?
I don't know. I listen to the folk channel on XM satellite radio, and they never play me. I guess if you're gonna be a cult figure, you've gotta be a cult figure. The DJs know that Judy Collins and Tom Rush were there, but they don't know that I was there. David Bromberg was my stepping stone to success as a singer/songwriter in New York. Through him, I met a lot of people and starting playing my songs, like "Little Bird" and "Bojangles," at places like the Bitter End. I opened for Tom Rush, and I got to know people like Dave Van Ronk, who was the unofficial "Mayor of the Village." It was a nice time.
And then you moved to Austin in the early '70s?
I came through Austin in like 1965 and '66. And then around '67 is when I took off for New York City. But years don't account to me. Three months of sleeping on somebody's couch seems like a lifetime. In '68, I had "Bojangles." By the summer of '69, I was headed back to Texas. I went down to Key West for awhile. That was the Buffett time. We had a lot of fun. But it wasn't productive fun. Tom McGuane, the writer, said it might be time for me to get on with whatever it was I was going to do — because I sure was wasting a lot of talent on that bar stool. When I came back to Texas, I was really set to do something.
So that was the "Outlaw Country" thing?
During that time, Willie Nelson came back from Nashville, I came back from Key West, and we were stirring it up pretty fast. If you came to Austin in the early '70s, you could live pretty inexpensively and do your thing. But Merle [Haggard] and I were the only two who were ever in jail. Oh, David Allan [Coe] was in jail, too. David Allan ought to be in jail.
When he's asked if thinks about retiring, Willie always says, "I play golf and I play music — what would I retire from?" How about you — ever think about quitting the road?
I don't like to travel as much as used to. But I like to play. We always say, "The music is free, we're paid for the travel." That's our quote.
So honestly, are there times when you say, "I just don't want to play 'Mr. Bojangles' again tonight"?
No. I never do. We have two versions we do. One’s a waltz time for dances. The other is a jazzy thing for when people are sitting and listening. But no one is on a strict, play these notes thing. We just have fun with it.
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