Jerry Jeff Walker, writer of 'Mr. Bojangles' and a godfather to 'Texas outlaw' and Americana music, dies at 78 in Austin

Jerry Jeff Walker at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium in 2016
(Photo by Erkia Goldring, Getty Images)

Jerry Jeff Walker, who was best known for writing "Mr. Bojangles" but was also an influential figure in the music of his adoptive Texas and the development of the genre now known as Americana, died of throat cancer Friday at a hospital in Austin. He was 78.

He was born Ronald Clyde Crosby in Oneonta, N.Y., "in northernmost Appalachia," The New York Times notes. He got his stage name (soon afterward his legal name) in New Orleans, reports Melissa Roberto of Fox News. He wrote 'Mr. Bojangles' in the mid-1960s after a night in a New Orleans jail where he met a man who 'danced a lick across the cell'," writes Peter Blackstock of the Austin-American Statesman. The song languished, and Walker "was ready to give up on the music business" in 1971 until the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band had a Top 10 hit with it, reports Matt Schudel of The Washington Post. "It soon became recognized as a standard." More than 100 artists have recorded it, Blackstock reports.

Walker's own recording career "spanned 51 years and he released 36 albums, including compilations," Roberto notes. "He became known as a mentor to musicians such as Garth Brooks, Jimmy Buffett, Guy Clark, Todd Snider and Lucinda Williams." He "had some trouble with alcohol and drugs," and his obituary notes his "rowdy performances and offstage excess." He settled in Austin in 1971, and "The Austin outlaw music scene he helped launch came to include Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Townes Van Zandt," Schudel writes. He "formed a group called the Lost Gonzo Band, evoking the untamed spirit of 'gonzo' journalist Hunter S. Thompson." He told Rolling Stone in 1974 that “Texas was the only place where they didn’t look at me like I was crazy," The New York Times reports.

His 1973 album Viva Terlingua, recorded in the virtual ghost town of Luckenbach, Texas . . . practically defined the new Texas sound, combining elements of country, rock and folk music with a touch of sagebrush poetry," Schudel reports. Walked had only five songs on the album, and the best-known "were by other writers, including Guy Clark’s cinematic 'Desperados Waiting for a Train,' Ray Wylie Hubbard’s honky-tonk anthem 'Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother' and Gary P. Nunn’s 'London Homesick Blues,' about a Texan stranded in England who longs 'to go home with the armadillo, good country music from Amarillo and Abilene'."

None of Walker's songs "has had the staying power or emotional resonance of 'Mr. Bojangles,' Schudel writes, citing in part a 2004 profile in Texas Monthly: "He said he was reading the poetry of Dylan Thomas and was conscious of using internal rhyme. He strummed a descending chord figure in the lilting time signature of 6/8, and the words and music came together. . . . Many people assume that the dancer described by Mr. Walker was African American, like Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, but that was not the case. In his autobiography, Mr. Walker noted that because the jails were segregated in New Orleans in 1965, the Bojangles he met was an elderly white dancer down on his luck."