Viva Terlingua

 For me, it wasn't a surprise that Jerry Jeff Walker died. I had assumed that the country star had collapsed under the weight of his own legend some years ago. Not so. Just this past weekend, the man who wrote "Mister Bojangles" shuffled off to Buffalo. Or someplace nicer. You've probably heard someone sing that song, somewhere, sometime. A partial list: Bob Dylan, John Denver, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Harry Nilsson, Sammy Davis Jr., Rod McKuen, Brenda Lee, Bebe Neuwirth, Harry Belafonte, and Neil Diamond. And more than one hundred other artists have covered this particular tune. Sammy Davis Jr. may have had the biggest hit, but I would expect that Mister Jeff Walker was probably not scrambling for gigs, providing he didn't sell his publishing rights. Each one of those artists had to write a check to take their shot at telling the story of the guy who would dance for drinks and tips. Legend has it that Jerry Jeff met the real Mister Bojangles while he was in a New Orleans jail for public intoxication. 

Which is fine, but it's not the Jerry Jeff Walker song that I remember most. That distinction belongs to "Up Against The Wall Redneck Mother." The first time I heard this tune, I was hanging out in my older brother's college apartment when he offered to make me a mix tape for playing on those bus trips that we members of our high school pep band took with the cheerleaders and pom-pom girls to away football games. It was a pretty certain thing that just being on the same mode of transportation with us was insult enough for these ladies, so my brother reasoned, why not earn it?

It should be pointed out at this moment that the song "Up Against The Wall Redneck Mother" was not written by Jerry Jeff Walker. As introduced so lovingly in his live version of the song, Jerry let everyone know that it was Ray Wylie Hubbard who penned this ode to motherhood. It was this version that my grungy band friends learned all the words to, and sang them loudly from the back of the bus as we drove on into the dark. "M is for the mudflaps you gave me for my pickup truck. O is for the oil I put on my hair. T is for T-Bird. H is for Haggard. E is for eggs, and R is for..." pause for effect, "Redneck!" And like so very many things that nerdy high school boys do, we were good for at least a couple choruses just for effect. 

It was also the first time I had ever heard of Muskogee, Oklahoma, which gets a name check as the song winds up. A few years after I graduated from high school, I found myself on a highway headed to that corner of the planet with a native of that city. Sometime before the engine in my Volkswagen bug threw a rod, and had to be towed from Tulsa, we were singing along with Jerry Jeff Walker in a scene reminiscent from those years of geekiness, and maybe a little like the lyrics to a song that Jerry Jeff Walker never got around to writing. 

This past weekend tributes flooded in for this country/folk legend, who became yet another victim of 2020's voracious suckitude. Jerry Jeff Walker stomped on the Terra, or at least he wrote songs that made us believe that he did. He will be missed. Aloha, Mister Walker.