A good song has the power to change one career after another. in 1967, Jerry Jeff Walker, a 25-year-old former psy-chedelic rocker, was reinventing himself as a country singer/songwriter. His transformation began in earnest that year, when he wrote the luminous “Mr. Bojangles”—based on a real-life encounter.
During a visit to New Orleans, Walker had been thrown in a local drunk tank over a weekend. One of his cellmates turned out to be a former minstrel show dancer who ended up sharing his life story with the young troubadour. Walker rec-ognized the dancer’s tales as great song material, and he eventually composed a gentle tribute to the talented old-timer who still “jumped so high” but dearly missed his dog who’d “up and died.”
The new song got its first wide ai ring in November 1967, when Walker and guitarist David Bromberg performed it live for New York City DJ Bob Fass on WBAI-FM’s all-night ‘‘Radio Unnamable” show. Fass liked the song and continued to play his live tape, building the song’s followïng. Upon signing with the Atco sub-sidiary of Atlantic Records,
Walker recorded the song in two slightly different versions— first as a single and then for the Mr. Bojangles album, released in 1968. Though the album received strong reviews, the single version stalled at No. 77 on the Billboard pop charts in the summer of 1968.
Enter the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band a year later. Formed in 1966 in Long Beach, Calif., the group had made three albums for Liberty Records with disappointing results and had then broken up briefly in 1968—before reforming in June 1969. To the original nucleus of Jeff Hanna, Les Thompson, Jimmie Fadden and John McEuen, the group added new drummer/singer/ multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Ibbotson, who would play a key role in the band’s breakout hit. Liberty gave the Dirt Band one more shot with the album Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy.
“Mr. Bojangles” appeared on the album through pure serendipity.
As Jeff Hanna explamed to Michael Buffalo Smith of Gritz magazine, “I was driving home from a late-night rehearsal and heard this tune [on the radio] about this old guy and this dog. It was Jerry Jeff Walker, who I didn’t know at the time, and they didn’t teil who it was singing it. I went into rehearsal the next day and told [the band] the story of what I had heard on the radio last night.”
New member Jimmy Ibbotson said he not only knew the song, but even had the single in the trunk of his car. The band promptly learned the song and recorded it in a straightforward acoustic rendition that owed a great deal to Walker’s 45. But they had no illusions about having just out a hit. In fact, when they played the finished tracks for the execs at Liberty Records, the band deliberately held “Mr. Bojangles” for last. “We were thinking that a four-minute song in 3/4 time that didn’t say the title until the midd!e…that was about a dancer and a dead dog…wasn’t really great radio potential,” John McEuen later explained to writer Robyn Flans.
DJs and radio listeners begged to differ. By early 1971 it was a No. 9 pop hit, giving the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band a new lease on life and a career that’s still ongoing.
The song’s magie didn’t stop there. Pop singer Tom Jones suggested that “Mr. Bojangles” would be a perfect number for his friend, song-and-dance man Sammy Davis Jr., because Sammy could not only sing the story of Bojangles—he could dance the heil out of it too. Although Davis initially resisted Jones’s sugges-tion because he thought the song was depressing, he eventually recorded it for MGM Records in 1972 and made it the dramatic closer in his live act as well as a show-stopper on network TV vari-ety programs. To this day, many people know the song only through Sammy Davis Jr.’s emotional, swinging version.
Since then, many singers have recorded the song, including Harry Belafonte, Andy Williams, Nina Simone, John Denver, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, and Brit-pop singer Robbie Williams, who modeled his 2001 version closely on the Sammy Davis Jr. record-ing—right down to the opening whistling. BMI has now logged “Mr. Bojangles” at more than 4 million performances and counting. For Jerry Jeff Walker, that weekend in a New Orleans jail was surely time well wasted.
