Walker, Jerry Jeff (1942–2020)

Jerry Jeff Walker, celebrated singer, songwriter, and Texas entertainer, was born Ronald Clyde Crosby in Oneonta, New York, on March 16, 1942. He was the son of Melvin R. Crosby and Alma (Conrow) Crosby. In a career that spanned roughly fifty-five years, Walker released more than thirty-five albums, composed songs that included his international classic, “Mr. Bojangles,” and maintained a rigorous touring schedule.

In his autobiography, Gypsy Songman (1999), Walker described his “Ozzie and Harriet” childhood in Oneonta, a town of about 12,000 in the rolling hills of Otsego County about 180 miles northwest of New York City. His father worked in the food and beverage industry and refereed local basketball and soccer games. His mother worked in retail and later in banking while maintaining the household for her son and his younger sister, Cheryl. Walker, an average student at Oneonta High School, focused on sports and excelled as a star forward on the basketball team. He was also an avid reader, a habit that he maintained and nurtured throughout his life.

Young Ronald Clyde Crosby “grew up surrounded by music.” His mother and grandmother were devoted pianists, and his maternal grandparents led a square-dance band. His grandmother, Jessie Conrow, gave the thirteen-year-old his first guitar for Christmas in 1954. He was enthusiastic about learning the instrument and found inspiration in his parents’ record collection by listening to such artists as Frank Sinatra, the Mills Brothers, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Benny Goodman. He was particularly fond of “cool jazz” trumpeter Chet Baker, and he enjoyed the contemporary hits he heard on AM radio by Bill Haley and His Comets, Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, The Platters, Johnny Horton, Marty Robbins, and others. Inspired by these popular new sounds, he played with local teen bands such as the Pizzarinos, the Chymes, the Tones, and the Townies.

Walker graduated from Oneonta High School in 1960. At his father’s urging, he enlisted in the National Guard and in spring 1961 shipped out to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for basic training. The following year, he was back in Oneonta feeling trapped by small-town life and encumbered by his National Guard responsibilities. After several recreational jaunts up and down the East Coast and periodic trips as a proto-folksinger to Greenwich Village, he left Oneonta a final time in January 1963. He gathered up his guitar and travel bag, hitchhiked down Route 7 South, and threw away his driver’s license and related identification. After a swing through Florida and the Southeast, he arrived in New Orleans in February.

He went by “Jerry Ferris,” the name on the draft card he had used on his underage drinking adventures while at Fort Dix. He initially found work as a bartender and continued his musical education on the streets and busked in the French Quarter in New Orleans. He sought out veteran performers like Delta blues musician Babe Stovall, who would become a powerful mentor in Walker’s musical development. He routinely adapted his day-to-day encounters into lyric and melody thus solidifying his penchant for molding life’s experiences into songs. With New Orleans as a home base, he ventured out on a series of performance and songwriting missions. His ongoing travels took him to coffee houses, ad hoc stages, and roadside dives across the country as he consistently expanded his catalog of originals to include early classics such as “Gypsy Songman,” “Stoney,” “That Old Beat-Up Guitar,” “Little Bird,” and “Dust on my Boots.” Most notably, while back in New Orleans in 1965, he was arrested for public intoxication and jailed with the soft-spoken street performer Walker depicted in “Mr. Bojangles.”  

Throughout the 1960s he maintained his perpetual movement. By 1966 he adopted the name Jerry Jeff Walker, and while on a trip through Texas, he befriended fellow East Coast native Bob Bruno, who he described as “the epitome of a New York City jazz player” and a “genius.” They enlisted several other Texas musicians to form the group the Lost Sea Dreamers and traveled back to Walker’s familiar haunts in New York City. They were signed by Vanguard Records, and, after a marketing-mandated name change to Circus Maximus, they went to work in the studio. The five-piece ensemble was a folk-rock hybrid, strong on sophisticated chord changes, vocal harmonies, and contemporary psychedelic overtones. They released two moderately successful albums, Circus Maximus (1967) and Neverland Revisited (1968), before breaking up in 1968.  

During his two-year tenure with the band, Walker maintained a regular presence in the folk clubs of Greenwich Village and was joined by guitar virtuoso David Bromberg, who added a signature waltz-based guitar part to “Mr. Bojangles.” One night Walker and Bromberg dropped by Bob Fass’s WBAI-FM early morning radio show where they played a haunting version of “Mr. Bojangles” that Fass taped. The popular deejay loved the song and played it in regular rotation on his broadcasts. This led to the curious situation of listeners hearing and liking the song then requesting a recording that did not exist from their local retailers. This caught the attention of Atco Records which promptly signed Walker and whisked the songwriter and the guitar player to Memphis where they recorded the single that was released on June 20, 1968. 

“Mr. Bojangles” peaked at Number 77 on the Billboard Hot 100 in America and at Number 51 on Canada’s RPM Top Singles. Walker traveled the United States and Canada in support of the single, and Mr. Bojangles, the ten-song album, was released three months after the single. In the ensuing two years, he released three more albums—Driftin’ Way of Life on Vanguard (1969), Five Years Gone on Atco (1969), and Bein’ Free on Atco (1970). His newfound fame enjoyed a spectacular surge when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band released their cover of “Mr. Bojangles” in 1970, and the song became a massive Top 10 hit. Ultimately, the song was recorded by a diverse group of more than 100 artists, including Bob Dylan, Harry Nilsson, Nina Simone, Harry Belafonte, Dolly Parton, King Curtis, Bobbie Gentry, Neil Diamond, Chet Atkins, George Burns, and Sammy Davis, Jr. A steady stream of publishing royalties generated by the Top 10 hit and enhanced by revenues from other artists’ recordings of “Mr. Bojangles” afforded Walker newfound financial freedom and a period of frenetic activity. He made new friends, such as aspiring songwriter Jimmy Buffet, and shared song-centric adventures with old friends Michael Murphey, Steven Fromholz, Guy Clark, and Townes Van Zandt.

After spending time in Key West, Florida, where Walker was frustrated with what he regarded as a restrictive recording studio environment, he signed a lucrative recording contract with MCA Records that guaranteed him the creative freedom to record his albums as he imagined them. Deciding that Austin might be the place to flex his newly liberated creative muscle, Walker moved there in 1971. He was familiar with the city and sensed its potential as viable national music hub. One of his first Austin stops was a 1950s-era motor court where friend and fellow songwriter Michael Murphey and his band had set up shop to work on arrangements of Murphey’s current material. The band occupied the small cottages surrounding the main house where Murphey and bandleader Gary P. Nunn lived, but the nexus of the compound was the rehearsal room situated in the garage out back where jam sessions were the norm. Walker fell right in with this group of players and made arrangements with Murphey to borrow them for a series of recording sessions. To this end, he secured a sparsely-equipped recording studio downtown, set up the band in a loose circle, and let the tapes roll. He soon had the foundation for an album, and in the ensuing months, he gathered select musicians in New York to lay down additional tracks, notably his own “David & Me” (with David Bromberg on guitar) and Guy Clark’s “L.A. Freeway.” These sessions completed a twelve-song collection that MCA released in 1972 as the album Jerry Jeff Walker. The label was pleased with the initial sales, and Walker was on his way to solidifying his “ragged but right” recording philosophy.

In August 1973 Walker and the band settled into Luckenbach, seventy miles west of Austin, for a week of recording. The Texas Hill Country hamlet, led by mayor and colorful character Hondo Crouch, promised to be an ideal venue for Walker’s next project. The dance hall became a soundstage, haybales served as baffles between the musicians who set up in the now familiar circular fashion, and an endless assortment of audio cables snaked outside to a state-of-the-art mobile studio. The recording procedure mirrored the 1972 Austin sessions where Walker would toss out a tune and the circle of musicians joined in with their musical impressions. The project ran for a full week. On weekdays, the band and crew assembled after lunch, with music and merriment continuing late into the evening. Saturday night was reserved for a public concert, and Sunday was set aside for listening and any additional tracking that might be required.

Once again, “ragged but right” prevailed. When things wrapped up Sunday night, Walker had nine solid cuts in the can. In addition to his own compositions, he recorded Guy Clark’s “Desperados Waiting for a Train” and Michael Martin Murphey’s “Backslider’s Wine.” The Saturday night concert was a grand success that yielded Ray Wylie Hubbard’s “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother” as well as Gary P. Nunn’s “London Homesick Blues,” a song that would serve as the theme song for Austin City Limits from 1977 through 2004. On Sunday, as a fortuitous afterthought, Walker introduced and the band recorded a song titled “Wheel” about the death of his grandfather in a farming accident when Ronald Clyde Crosby was only fifteen. 

MCA released ¡Viva Terlingua! in November 1973, and in the following months it sold more than 100,000 units and eventually went gold with sales of more than 500,000 copies. This major accomplishment, coupled with the respectable showing of his initial MCA album, highlighted several aspects of Walker’s evolving career. “Ragged but right,” the notion of a like-minded band of pickers focusing on the song, the message, and the feel of a track rather than the technical aspects of the recording, definitely worked and would underpin Walker’s projects for years to come. He also exhibited his talent in selecting songs from other songwriters, and his intuition as a song scout served him well throughout his career. Songs such as “L.A. Freeway,” “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother,” “Backslider’s Wine,” and “London Homesick Blues,” all became popular recordings by their authors and by other artists. By including these “covers” on the early MCA albums, Walker boosted the careers of aspiring songwriters who were largely unknown in successful songwriting circles.

The success of ¡Viva Terlingua! solidified Walker’s roots in Austin, as he was playing music with his friends—known as the Lost Gonzo Band by that time—and had a secure recording budget for the foreseeable future. During this period he met Susan Streit, a University of Texas graduate from the small North Texas town of Vernon. Streit worked in the Texas legislature for Representative Charlie Wilson. Despite their seemingly disparate lifestyles, the couple was “inseparable.” They married in Luckenbach on December 12, 1974. They later had two children—Jessie Jane and Django Cody.    

During the intensely productive years of 1972 through 1978 Walker cut eight albums and played as many as 200 dates a year. His releases included Walker’s Collectables (1974), Ridin’ High (1975), It’s a Good Night for Singing (1976), and A Man Must Carry On (1977). Walker and the band appeared on the first season of Austin City Limits in 1976, the first of four episodes he filmed for the archetypal television series. When the Lost Gonzo Band spun off in 1977 to pursue their solo career, Walker assembled the Bandito Band in 1978 and carried on with two new albums, Contrary to Ordinary (1978) and Jerry Jeff (Red, White & Blue) (1978).

He maintained that this intense period was “greased by drugs and alcohol,” but it came at a high price. American Express sued him for $90,000 for charges accrued through extravagant road spending, the IRS demanded a settlement on back taxes, and the pending financial and legal forecasts were bleak at best. With his wife’s help, Walker averted these potential disasters and wrapped up a contractual commitment to Electra Records and delivered the album Too Old to Change in 1979. He then “gave up drugs, whiskey, cigarettes and red meat” and settled into a new, subdued lifestyle.

The 1980s brought a pair of albums on MCA, Reunion (1981) and Cowjazz (1982), but neither were particularly successful, and a drought of new venues and flatline of performance fees along with a changing music industry suggested a new path for Walker. In 1986 Jerry Jeff and Susan Walker launched Tried & True Music, designed to facilitate the interests of a single client, Jerry Jeff Walker. The business venture fell largely to Susan who consolidated and organized all the trappings of Jerry Jeff’s twenty-year music business career and studied contract law, copyright and publishing procedures, booking policies, and road logistics.

In the effort to streamline operations, they elected to let the band go and put Walker on the road as a single act, a practice they maintained for three years. At the cusp of this solo period, Walker recorded Gypsy Songman (1986), the first album release on the Tried & True label and his first album since Cowjazz in 1982. The album featured twenty-four songs. It was released as a cassette tape and was designed to be sold at Walker’s solo shows. Small and easy to transport, the cassette served as a remedy to a supply chain problem that haunted the fledgling Tried & True organization. They had no records to sell. All of Walker’s previous albums were out of print, and the recording industry was in the throes of a paradigm shift from vinyl to compact disc (CD). The Gypsy Songman cassette not only helped remedy this supply shortage, but, in an interesting twist, also helped establish Tried & True as a viable record label. In 1987 Rykodisc, a relatively new record company from Salem, Massachusetts, picked up Gypsy Songman and agreed to release it as a CD worldwide. This led to a CD fabrication and distribution deal for all upcoming Tried & True products.

In December of 1988 Walker assembled a group of notable musicians to record a live album at historic Gruene Hall, fifty miles south of Austin. The lineup included Paul Pearcy on drums, Roland Denney on bass, Champ Hood on lead guitar, Brian Piper on piano, and Lloyd Maines on steel guitar. Walker’s goal was to recapture the spontaneity and spark of his 1973 recording, ¡Viva Terlingua!. Released in 1989, Live at Gruene Hall, succeeded on several levels: it artfully channeled the verve and vitality of the Luckenbach recording; it produced three strong singles that appeared on Billboard’s Country Singles chart; and it boosted Walker’s profile in live-performance markets around the country. He was in demand and needed a strong touring band, so he sought out Gonzo veterans Bob Livingston and John Inmon, along with Bandito drummer Freddie Krc, to create a new group. This band, The Gonzo Compadres, accompanied Walker well into the twenty-first century. Live at Gruene Hall ultimately became the most successful album in the Tried & True album catalog.

In the summer of 1990 Walker and the band cut tracks on the large Austin City Limits soundstage for a new album. Navajo Rug was released in 1991. Well-received in critical circles, it made the Billboard Top Country Album charts and was the first of a series of high-quality recordings that defined the remainder of Walker’s career, including Hill Country Rain (1992), ¡Viva Luckenbach! (1994), Christmas Gonzo Style (1994), and Night After Night (1995), a sparse yet sparkling live recording featuring Gonzo Compadres Inmon, Livingston, and Krc. Scamp (1996) focused on Walker’s original material with several tunes co-written with the Gonzo Compadres.

During the early 1990s Walker became more politically involved and supported the campaign of Ann Richards for Texas governor. He subsequently performed at her inauguration in 1991. In 1992 he joined Richards on the campaign trail with Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton and sang “Up Against the Wall Republican President,” a political adaptation of one of his most popular recordings. Walker and the band played for the Bill Clinton-Al Gore inauguration festivities on January 20, 1993.

In 1991 Walker began hosting The Texas Connection, a television show for The Nashville Network (TNN). The program was filmed in Austin at KLRU’s Studio 6A and featured mainstream country acts as they toured through Texas. Walker engaged his guests by swapping songs and stories and joining them onstage. Many of the performers were iconic industry figures such as Willie Nelson or Kris Kristofferson, or genre pioneers such as the Texas Playboys, but most were high-octane country/pop stars, including Jimmy Buffett, Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, Vince Gill, Steve Earle, Mark Chestnut, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. The broadcast was particularly popular with the younger country music demographic. Accordingly, Walker’s concerts and public appearances soon grew to include an enthusiastic college-aged component who affectionately referred to the fifty-year-old folkie as “The Man.” Walker’s wife Susan capitalized on both his loyal fan base and newer audiences with a business and marketing strategy for Tried & True that targeted demographics and personalized information through periodic newsletters from the Walker family to the ever-expanding family of Jerry Jeff boosters collectively known as “The Tried & True Warriors.” With the advent of the Internet and email, the label joined the digital age in the mid-1990s. 

As Susan Walker built the Tried & True brand, she and Jerry Jeff established a home-away-from-home in Belize and in 1994 began hosting fan club functions on the Caribbean coast. These tropical excursions sparked a pioneering recording session on Ambergris Caye in 1997 that resulted in the Tried & True release of Cowboy Boots & Bathin’ Suits in 1998.

Tried & True marked its ten-year anniversary in 1996, when Walker launched his first end-of-the-summer soiree called Laborfest in Luckenbach. These annual events focused on a younger set of singer–songwriters such as Robert Earl Keen, Todd Snider, Charlie Robison, Bruce Robison, Kelly Willis, Pat Green, and Jack Ingram. This group of new artists touted Walker as a strong influence on their careers and on the course of Texas music that had ascended to national prominence in the early 1970s.

Walker published his autobiography, Gypsy Songman, in 1999. The book was accompanied by a new album, Gypsy Songman: A Life in Song. The recording entered the Top Ten of the Americana Radio Albums Chart in 2000. Tried & True followed up in 2001 with Gonzo Stew. In 2003 Walker assembled a group of Austin jazz players to channel some of his early influences like Frank Sinatra, the Mills Brothers, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and “cool jazz” trumpeter Chet Baker. The result was the release of fourteen American classics on Jerry Jeff Jazz. In 2004 he released The One and Only, a DVD of his solo performance featuring twenty-three songs tracing his travels and adventures since leaving his home as a young man. The following year, Tried & True released a twin disc package, The Best of the Rest. Walker wrapped up his recording efforts for the decade with the release of Moon Child in 2009.

On March 26, 2016, the Austin Theatre Alliance unveiled the Jerry Jeff Walker Star on the sidewalk in front of the Paramount Theatre in downtown Austin. The ceremony preceded Walker’s seventy-fourth Birthday Bash, an annual event that had come a long way since he celebrated his fortieth birthday on the shores of Austin’s Town Lake with an all-day concert in 1982. The year 2016 marked the thirtieth consecutive year that Walker had held his annual Bash at the Paramount. Through the years, the Birthday Bash had evolved into a cultural institution by bringing together singers, songwriters, sidemen, music business operatives, and entertainment icons for an Austin-style convention and guitar pull.

Walker was diagnosed with throat cancer in the summer of 2017. The prognosis was deemed “isolated and treatable,” and he began what promised to be a successful recovery plan. Toward the end of the seven-week regimen, he developed life-threatening complications and almost died. He battled back and finished a highly reflective, autobiographical album. Tried & True released It’s About Time in 2018—it was the last recording of his long career.

In a star-studded tribute, the Texas Heritage Songwriters Association inducted Walker into its hall of fame on February 22, 2020, at the Paramount Theatre. The ceremony included a film segment of Walker’s fellow songwriters—Michael Martin Murphey, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Bruce Robison, Todd Snider, Rodney Crowell, Django Walker, Ray Benson, Jeff Hanna, Bob Livingston, Kix Brooks, Gary P. Nunn, and Jack Ingram—paying tribute to and congratulating the Texas icon. Jerry Jeff Walker died of complications from throat cancer on October 23, 2020, in Austin. He was cremated and was approved for burial in the Texas State Cemetery.