Jerry Jeff Walker

Most folks know that story – how Jerry Jeff moved to Austin, Texas in the early Seventies and reinvented himself as a Long Star country-rocker. He became, along with Willie Nelson, one of the arbiters of the internationally famous Austin musical community. Since then, he has celebrated the music of peers such as Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and served as a fountainhead and inspiration to younger musicians such as Robert Earl Keen, Pat Green, Jack Ingram and a moderately successful country tunesmith named Garth Brooks. A string of records for MCA and Elektra followed before Jerry Jeff gave up on the mainstream music business and formed his own independent record label, Tried & True Music, in 1986. Another series of increasingly autobiographical records followed under the Tried & True imprint. His last album, It’s About Time, brings Jerry Jeff’s album catalog to the grand total of 38. He’s played for four or five presidents, toured in Lear Jets and bought a second home in Belize (the fruits, in part, of having penned an American pop standard, “Mr. Bojangles). But even with all that, Jerry Jeff still saw the world with a troubadour’s eyes. His songs are the way he makes the world make sense, how he passed on stories of the people he met, the way he felt on a given morning. He came full circle, back to his singer-songwriter roots. Some might say he was heading that way all along.