Jerry Jeff Walker

Jerry Jeff Walker (born Ronald Clyde Crosby; March 16, 1942 – October 23, 2020) was an American country and folk singer-songwriter. He was an icon in the progressive country and outlaw country music movement. He is best known for writing the 1968 song "Mr. Bojangles".

Walker was born Ronald Clyde Crosby in Oneonta, New York, on March 16, 1942. His father, Mel, worked as a sports referee and bartender; his mother, Alma (Conrow), was a housewife. His maternal grandparents played for square dances in the Oneonta area – his grandmother, Jessie Conrow, playing piano, while his grandfather played fiddle. During the late 1950s, Crosby was a member of a local Oneonta teen band called the Tones.

After high school, Crosby joined the National Guard, but his thirst for adventure led him to go AWOL, and he was eventually discharged. He went on to 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 first played under the stage name of Jerry Ferris, then Jeff Walker, before amalgamating them into Jerry Jeff Walker and legally changing his name to that in the late 1960s.

Walker spent his early folk music days in Greenwich Village in the mid-1960s. He co-founded a band with Bob Bruno in the late 1960s called Circus Maximus that put out two albums, one with 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 1968 album Mr. Bojangles with the help of David Bromberg and other influential Atlantic recording artists. He settled in Austin, Texas, in the 1970s, associating mainly with the outlaw country scene that included artists such as Michael Martin Murphey, Willie Nelson, Guy Clark, Waylon Jennings, and Townes Van Zandt. "Jerry Jeff's train songs" (such as "Desperados Waiting for a Train") were cited in the lyrics of Jennings and Nelson's 1977 hit song "Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)". On September 28, 1974, Walker appeared with Doug Sahm at the Main Hall of Carnegie Hall.

A string of records for MCA and Elektra followed Walker's move to Austin, 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 as president and manager. 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, which also sells his autobiography, Gypsy Songman. In 2004, Walker released his first DVD of songs from his past performed in an intimate setting in Austin.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.