Your Evening Audio...Jerry Jeff Walker

HeTalkedOfLife

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Jerry Jeff Walker died last Saturday.

If you want to learn how, exactly, a guy from New York named Ronald Clyde Crosby came to be known as Jerry Jeff Walker back when he was just a kid looking for a gig in New Orleans, well...

Head on over and check out Todd Snider's tribute to Walker that he recorded live, in one long take on the weekend.

Not long after he settled on his new moniker, Jerry Jeff spent the night in a New Orleans drunk tank. A few hours later he stepped out into the morning light with a hangover and a song in his back pocket about an old dance man he now 'knew' that would make him rich. The tune also give him the freedom to become one of the founding members of the Cosmic Cowboy movement with a bunch of soon-to-be-country-outlaws in Austin in the early 1970's.

Not long thereafter Walker got all his friends together to record their songs however and wherever they wanted which, of course, was antithetical to the then still pre-Americana 'country' music business at the time.

And all through those wild years he also raged against the dying of any and all light:

...“The mid-’70s in Austin were the busiest, the craziest, the most vivid and intense and productive period of my life,” Mr. Walker wrote in his memoir.

“Greased by drugs and alcohol, I was also raising the pursuit of wildness and weirdness to a fine art,” he wrote. “I didn’t just burn the candle at both ends, I was also finding new ends to light.”...


Luckily, as the seventies began to wind down, Walker met the love of his life, Susan Streit,  and settled down.

Sort of.

Todd Snider tells an amazing story about the time he and Walker stumbled out of a bar at three in the morning in Santa Fe, New Mexico sometime in the late '90's.

As the pair walked backed to their hotel they heard the unmistakable opening bars of Mr. Bojangles being played on a banjo off in the distance.

So they changed direction, went around a corner and up the next street where they found an old busker, empty hat on the emptier sidewalk at his feet.

They listened to the old guy play Bojangles in its entirety and then, without a word of explanation, Walker pulled all the cash money he had from his all pockets and dropped it in the empty hat before heading back off into the night with a dumbfounded Snider in tow...

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Switched to an 'Evening Audio' because I keep hearing about how these things are good for falling asleep to...Not entirely sure how I feel about that, but what the heck...

You want Snider's story, for real, of meeting the old busker with his idol in the middle of the night?...It's here.

And, for the record, if there is only one thing I can ever convince you of at this little F-Troop-list blog it is that you will not regret clicking through on that link directly above...Seriously...I absolutely promise that it will surprise you, amaze you and, if you are even remotely alive, make you very, very happy....OK?

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