On Saturday night, I was one of the thousands of people in the audience at Billy Bob’s honky-tonk in Fort Worth, Texas, watching a 72-year-old Jerry Jeff Walker perform. While he spent most of the evening seated, he was still energetic, entertaining, relishing his role. The crowd sang along with most of his “hits,” while I felt like I had walked into a strange church congregation – not that the celebration wasn’t valid, I just wasn’t familiar enough with the hymns.
Some history: Walker was raised in upstate New York and his real name is Ronald Clyde Crosby. He seems to have spent most of the ‘60s as a wandering, free spirit, but was more often than not based in New Orleans. In 1965, he was arrested for public drunkenness (a not altogether uncommon state for the young Mr. Walker) and met a street character in his jail cell that did a tap dance routine and talked about how much he missed his dead dog. That encounter would result in his signature song, “Mr. Bojangles.”
He performed in coffeehouses and recorded in Nashville, before moving to Austin in 1971. While Willie Nelson is often viewed as the artist that started the outlaw/progressive country movement in Austin, Jerry Jeff Walker was just as important and he worked further away from the mainstream. He was an early supporter of Guy Clark, recording “L.A. Freeway” in 1972 and his 1973 album ¡Viva Terlingua!, recorded live at the dancehall in Luckenbach, Texas, included a song from Clark and two Walker standards from Texas songwriters Ray Wylie Hubbard (“Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother”) and Gary P. Nunn (“London Homesick Blues”). That album kicked off Walker’s artistic peak, as he spent the next few years as a defining figure on the Texas music scene, delivering a loose, alcohol soaked version of country rock music.
He stayed on the fringes of country radio, which wasn’t going to play odes to hell raising buddies like “Pissin’ in the Wind.” He finally had a Top Ten country hit in 1977 with “Leavin’ Texas,” but he wasn’t built vocally and probably didn’t desire mainstream country success – it would be four years and several albums later before he even released another single. Most of the crowd reaction on Saturday night was for the ‘70s material; he played such a powerful version of “L.A. Freeway” an hour into the show that nothing else could follow it. However, there are some keepers from the 80s and beyond, like the family and Luckenbach memories on the “Pickup Truck Song,” “Texas on My Mind,” (written by his son Django, who lives in England but was in town to sing it on Saturday night), and perhaps best of all “The Cape,” a song about faith and courage and believing in yourself.
There are people that get ahead in this world due to planning and calculation and those that rely on wit and charm. Jerry Jeff Walker is clearly in the latter category, someone that believes in the poetry of music and has spent decades working in the music business on his own terms, following his instincts. I was taken back on Saturday night by how strongly his body of work resonated with his Texas audience. He doesn’t have the world’s deepest catalogue or the artistic breadth of fellow scene maker Willie Nelson, but his gifts are rewarding and undeniable. May be the gleam in his eye never grow dim.
