Jerry Jeff Walker

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.[4] His maternal grandparents played for square dances in the Oneonta area[4] – his grandmother, Jessie Conroe, playing piano, while his grandfather played fiddle. During the late 1950s, Crosby was a member of a local Oneonta teen band called The Tones.[5]

After high school, Crosby joined the National Guard, but his thirst for adventure led him to go AWOL and he was eventually discharged.[4][6] 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").[7] 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.[6]

Walker spent his early folk music days in Greenwich Village in the mid-1960s.[8] He co-founded a band with Bob Bruno in the late-1960s called Circus Maximus that put out two albums,[8] one with the popular FM radio hit "Wind", but Bruno's interest in jazz apparently diverged from Walker's interest in folk music.[8] 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.[9][10] 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,[4] and Townes Van Zandt.[11] Walker was mentioned by name in the lyrics of Jennings and Nelson's 1977 hit song "Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)".[12]

A string of records for MCA and Elektra followed Jerry Jeff's move to Austin, Texas,[8] before he gave up on the mainstream music business and formed his own independent record label. Tried & True Music was founded in 1986,[13] with his wife Susan as president and manager.[14][15] Susan also founded Goodknight Music as his management company and Tried & True Artists for his bookings.[14] A series of increasingly autobiographical records followed under the Tried & True imprint, which also sells his autobiography, Gypsy Songman.[16] In 2004, Walker released his first DVD of songs from his past as performed in an intimate setting in Austin.[17]

Walker married Susan Streit in 1974 in Travis County, Texas.[2] They had two children: a son, Django Walker, who is also a musician, and a daughter Jessie Jane.[4] Walker had a retreat on Ambergris Caye in Belize, where he recorded his Cowboy Boots and Bathing Suits album in 1998.[18] He also made a guest appearance on Ramblin' Jack Elliott's 1998 album of duets Friends of Mine,[19] singing "He Was a Friend of Mine" and Woody Guthrie's "Hard Travelin'".[20][21]

Walker recorded songs written by others such as "LA Freeway" (Guy Clark), "Up Against the Wall Red Neck Mother" (Ray Wylie Hubbard),[4] "(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night" (Tom Waits),[22] and "London Homesick Blues" (Gary P. Nunn).[4] He also interpreted the songs of others such as Rodney Crowell, Townes Van Zandt, Paul Siebel, Bob Dylan, Todd Snider, Dave Roberts, and even a rodeo clown named Billy Jim Baker. Walker was given the moniker of "the Jimmy Buffett of Texas".[23][24][25] It was Walker who first drove Jimmy Buffett to Key West (from Coconut Grove, Florida in a Packard).[26] The two musicians also co-wrote the song "Railroad Lady" while riding the last run of the Panama Limited.[26][27]

Walker had an annual birthday celebration in Austin at the Paramount Theatre and at Gruene Hall in Gruene, Texas.[2] This party became an enormous event in Texas and brought some of the biggest names in country music out for a night of picking and swapping stories.[28] The New York Times Magazine reported in June 2019 that Walker was among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal Studios fire.[29]

Walker was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2017. He died of the disease on October 23, 2020, at a hospital in Austin, Texas.[4] He was 78 years old.[30][31]

• JerryJeff.com
• Jerry Jeff Walker discography at Discogs
• Jerry Jeff Walker at IMDb
• Unofficial Jerry Jeff Walker Fan Page
• "Local '50s band almost made it big", Mark Simonson, The Daily Star, Oct 1, 2001
• "Official Documentary Film on Jerry Jeff Walker's Life"