Steve Earle
Jerry Jeff
New West Records
2022
Jerry Jeff is the third in a trilogy of albums from Steve Earle that pay tribute to artists who inspired him, the others being Townes (Van Zandt) and Guy (Clark). This release doffs the cap to Jerry Jeff Walker, who died in October 2020.
Born Ronald Clyde Crosby in 1942, Walker’s best known for the much covered Mr. Bojangles, a song he wrote after a 1965 encounter with a homeless street dancer while in a New Orleans jail for public intoxication. The man called himself “Mr Bojangles” to conceal his true identity from the police, the real Mr Bojangles being Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, a tap dancer, actor, and singer, and the best known and the most highly paid African-American entertainer in the United States during the first half of the 20th century.
Naturally, Mr. Bojangles is included here, a simple acoustic setting with a raspy vocal, but Walker was more than a one-trick pony. Earle accompanied by his regular band; the album opens with the good time chug of the semi-autobiographical Gettin’ By about his haphazard recording process from the “gonzo country” 1973 album Viva Terlingua before the fiddle leads off his life in song number Gypsy Songman, the title of his 1987 album. Viva Terlingua is also mined for the strummed and steel stained post-break-up ballad Little Bird (previously recorded for 1968’s Mr. Bojangles) and, the penultimate track, the world-weary bluesy Wheel and its meditation on the transitory nature of life.
It’s back to good time verve and leg slapping stomp for I Makes Money (Money Don’t Make Me) off Mr. Bojangles, his declaration that “there ain’t a dollar in the world that make me change my stuff” that spirit also informing Hill Country Rain from the eponymous 1972 release with its euphoria for life (“Sometimes I just wake up hummin’/Feelin’ like the world is right/Want to jump right up and run outside/And take in the morning light/And feel the music running through me/Makes me want to dance”).
Released as the B side to LA Freeway in 1973, Earle gives Charlie Dunn a dusty guitar picking talking blues treatment; the song is a tribute to the titular American bootmaker of handmade Western boots for more than 80 years, dubbed the “Michelangelo of cowboy boots“. Interestingly, rather than the usual course of events, it was the song that gained Dunn widespread attention for his craftsmanship rather than the other way round.
The remaining cuts are simple acoustic reflective ballads, the romantic (not autobiographical) story song My Old Man, also from Mr. Bojangles, with the narrator’s fond memory of his restless fiddler father (“He’d hear an ol’ freight train and he’d have to go/Said he’d been blessed with a gypsy bone”) and the night he met the woman who’d become his wife.
The album ends in bare-bones style with Earle, unaccompanied save for bursts of harmonica, delivering a faithful rendition of another itinerant’s anthem, Old Road from 1969’s Driftin’ Way Of Life. Walker enjoyed a brief turn in the spotlight between 1975 and 1978 when his albums figured high in the US country charts, and he was namechecked in the lyrics to Waylon and Willie’s hit Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love). Still, otherwise, he remains a somewhat cult figure. Hopefully, this will go some way to raising his profile and, as Earle puts it, reminding people that “he wrote a lot of fucking great songs”. Indeed he did and Earle has done him proud.
Jerry Jeff is out now on New West Records: http://newwst.com/jerryjeff