He’d cut off communication with his parents. He’d gone AWOL from the New York National Guard and was living under an alias (friends knew him as Jerry Ferris). I was writing a lot, and melodies (were) pretty fresh to me. “Every day I tried to dash off something. “I was sleeping on people’s floors,” Walker said about those bleary hitchhiking, busker days. The French Quarter was the singular, most important formative playground for Walker, who lived and sang there on and off from 1963 to 1965.
#MTMR BOJANGLES MOVIE#
(Hall was an excellent choice for the movie project, having written colorfully about Walker’s wild early ’70s antics for Rolling Stone).
Jerry Jeff is still drinking at the time of these interviews and sometimes out of control, Hall’s widow recalls. Mixed in is fantastical riffing aimed at creating a fictionalized narrative for Hall’s screenplay. Interview transcripts from the Hall sessions support and contradict the generally accepted origin story. That’s when the budding singer-songwriter said he met Bojangles, in jail. Walker’s signature waltz-time song – first made famous by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – was inspired by a drunken incident and chance meeting in New Orleans in October 1964. (The Douglas Kent Hall Papers, 1950-2011, are housed at the Department of Special Collections at Princeton University Library).
#MTMR BOJANGLES ARCHIVE#
Casey, a former CNN executive and award-winning journalist, donated the archive in 2018. Those forgotten transcripts are part of the Earl Casey Collection at The Wittliff Collection at Texas State University. But the extensive interviews conducted offer tantalizing clues about the protagonist of the poetic folk song.Īt one point, Walker suggested to Hall, who died in 2008, that he wanted Black actors and white actors to portray Bojangles, and that somehow the magic and wisdom of Bojangles “transfers to me.” Walker died in 2020.
The film never materialized beyond the draft stage. It was to be built around the character of Bojangles, “an old man that tells stories.” In the 1970s, Jerry Jeff Walker met with writer and photographer Douglas Kent Hall to begin work on a movie script about the singer-songwriter’s life. used to sing it so convincingly that many believed it was autobiographical. One misconception about the famous song is that it’s about Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the famous early 20 th century dancer and actor who tap-danced with Shirley Temple and was a genuine star and innovator. Was it really about an old man Walker met in a New Orleans jail? Was it a composite of street characters who sang the blues and danced for their supper? The true identity has remained mysterious. One of them is likely Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. They are the nicknames of African American street performers who worked the New Orleans’ French Quarter in the early and mid-1960s.
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