Mr. Bojangles

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Mr. Bojangles is a song by the American country singer and songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker from 1968. It is about an old, shabby dancer who performs his tap dance in a prison . The song was best known for the 1970 recording of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band , which reached the top ten of the American charts the following year. Numerous performers have since recorded cover versions .

Text and music

In first person and everyday language, the narrator tells of a silver-haired man in worn clothes and well-worn shoes, whom he met in a prison cell in New Orleans and who calls himself "Bojangles". The man looks back on an eventful life and seems to be in a good mood despite the predicament. To entertain those present, he dances a soft-shoe tap dance in the cell , during which he jumps high in the air and hits his heels. He says he spent fifteen years traveling the southern states, performing at minstrel shows and fairs. His only companion was a dog, which he mourns for twenty years after its death. Now he only dances for tips in honky tonk bars, but spends most of the time behind bars because he drinks. He shakes his head when a fellow inmate asks him to dance again.

Mr. Bojangles is a typical example of a song with a simple song structure that consists of a repetition of the same melody over and over again, only interrupted by a multiple hook line . That the hook line “Mr. Bojangles ”, which is also the title of the song, conjures up a dazzling figure, gives the otherwise monotonous course of the piece its special flavor, according to Dick Weissman. In his autobiography Gypsy songman , Jerry Jeff Walker describes the song as "a waltz in 6/8 time about an old man and hope" and a " love song ". It is played in a shuffle rhythm with a descending bass line . Walker wrote the piece under the influence of a reading from Dylan Thomas ' Unter dem Milchwald . Similar to how Thomas' language follows a rhythm, he let the lines emerge from the rhythm of the tap dance.

history

Jerry Jeff Walker (2001)

Jerry Jeff Walker had already written the song Mr. Bojangles when he joined the progressive rock band Circus Maximus in 1966, which he soon left due to musical differences. As a solo artist he sang the song, accompanied by David Bromberg , on a live broadcast on the New York radio station WBAI . It became a local hit, earning the singer a record deal with Atlantic Records . In 1968 his album Mr. Bojangles was released by Atco , an Atlantic sub-label. However, the song only became popular with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 1970/71.

When Jeff Hanna, the singer of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band , heard the song on the radio, he immediately made the plan for a cover version. The band members got the recordings, which they replayed by ear. In doing so, they falsified some passages of the original text that they had not understood correctly. The band recorded the song at World Pacific Studios in Los Angeles and used the accordion and mandolin to create an emotional mood . The single was introduced by a spoken prologue Uncle Charlie and his Dog Teddy , which the producer William E. McEuen contributed. Already at the first public appearances, the band recognized how strongly the audience responded to the song. It stayed on the Billboard Hot 100 for 19 weeks and reached the top position 9th. In 2010, the version of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame .

Sammy Davis Jr. (1986)

One of the most famous interpreters of Mr. Bojangles was Sammy Davis Jr. , who developed a kind of "love-hate relationship" to the song. On the one hand it seemed tailor-made for him, on the other hand he had the subliminal fear of ending up as an impoverished and worn-out star like the sung-about character. Davis was reluctant to sing the song, and when he appeared on Tom Jones' television show in 1970, he just silently played the old dancer while Jones sang. However, the song later became a trademark of his performances and regularly formed the finale of his shows. According to his daughter Tracey Davis, Sammy Davis Jr. interpreted Mr. Bojangles with more feeling than any other of his songs. His live performance was characterized above all by the fact that he not only sang the song, but also slipped into the role of Mr. Bojangles through his dance steps and gestures .

From the 1970s to the present day, numerous cover versions of the song have been made every decade , a total of over 100 recordings. Performers include Chet Atkins , Harry Belafonte , Bermuda Triangle Band , David Campbell , Tony Christie , Bobby Cole , Edwyn Collins , Jim Croce , John Denver , Neil Diamond , Bob Dylan , Arlo Guthrie , Tom T. Hall , John Holt , Whitney Houston , Billy Joel , Elton John , Frankie Laine , Lulu , Rod McKuen , Harry Nilsson , Nina Simone , Frank Sinatra , Jamie Walker and Robbie Williams . In the field of jazz and rhythm & blues , Mr. Bojangles has been covered by Charlie Byrd , King Curtis , Cornell Dupree , Etta Jones , Greetje Kauffeld , Houston Person , Esther Phillips , Sonny Stitt and Warren Vaché . German interpreters included Katja Ebstein (in a broadcast by Michael Kunze ), Wolfgang Niedecken and Helge Schneider . The classical composer Philip Glass named a piece of his opera Einstein on the Beach after the song.

background

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (1933) in a photograph by Carl van Vechten

According to Jerry Jeff Walker, the song is based on an experience of its own. In about 1964, after a murder in the French Quarter, the New Orleans police arrested numerous homeless people and street performers , including Walker himself. In his cell was an old man nicknamed “Bojangles,” a former vaudeville who introduced himself in conversation -Artists, singers and dancers. He talked about his life as a dancer in minstrel shows, about his dead dog and that he now mostly spent his life in bars, drank a lot and was repeatedly taken into police custody for sobering up. When a fellow inmate asked him to dance for her, he performed a tap dance. Walker was released the following Monday, wrote the song in a few days, but then put it aside for several years. A third verse, which dealt with the dancer's failed marriages, was dropped because it did not fit into the song.

The name Bojangles refers to the famous American dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson , who revolutionized tap dancing at the beginning of the 20th century and was successful in variety shows and on Broadway . As one of the first black stage and Hollywood stars (especially on the side of Shirley Temple ) he was a pioneer for the emancipation of African Americans . Walker knew Robinson by name, but he denies any influence of the real "Bojangles" on his song. On the contrary, the man he met by this nickname was a white man, since the prisons were strictly segregated at the time. Nevertheless, the Harlem cultural historian Delilah Jackson laments that Walker borrowed the name of the elegant and respected Robinson for a seedy drinker with his song and thus degraded the role model. It was not until Sammy Davis Jr., in turn an admirer of Robinson’s life, paid tribute to the true “Bojangles” Robinson through his interpretation of the song. According to Kwame Kwei-Armah, Davis embodied the character of the song to such an extent that Walker's Mr. Bojangles became a black dancer again.

literature

  • Jerry Jeff Walker: Mr. Bojangles . In: Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Randy Rudder (Eds.): Chicken Soup for the Soul: Country Music . Chicken Soup for the Soul, Cos Cob 2011, ISBN 978-1-935096-67-2 , Chapter 56, pp. 208-211 ( online as premium content).

Radio broadcast

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dick Weissman: Song Writing. The Words, the Music & the Money . Hal Leonard, Milwaukee 2001, ISBN 0-634-01160-X , pp. 10-11.
  2. ↑ "I was writing a 6/8 waltz about an old man and hope. It was a love song. ”Quoted from: Mr. Bojangles by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on songfacts.com.
  3. ↑ Mr. Bojangles . In: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Acoustic Guitar Songs: 30 Acoustic Guitar Hits . Alfred Music, Van Nuys 2007, ISBN 978-0-7390-4672-2 , p. 90.
  4. ^ Richard J. Scott: Chord Progressions for Songwriters . iUniverse, Lincoln 2003, ISBN 0-595-26384-4 , p. 182.
  5. ↑ a b c d After: Kwame Kwei-Armah: The Man Who Was Bojangles . On: BBC Radio 4 , first broadcast on August 23, 2008.
  6. ^ Entry by Jerry Jeff Walker . In: Richard Carlin: Country Music: A Biographical Dictionary . Routledge, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-415-93802-0 , p. 418.
  7. ^ Paul Kingsbury, Michael McCall, John W. Rumble (Eds.): The Encyclopedia of Country Music . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-539563-1 , p. 547.
  8. ↑ Roy Trakin: The Making Of The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's “Mr. Bojangles " . On the Grammy Awards website , December 27, 2013.
  9. ↑ The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in the Billboard database .
  10. ^ Hall of Fame on the Grammy Awards website .
  11. ↑ Tracey Davis, Nina Bunche Pierce: Sammy Davis Jr .: A Personal Journey with My Father . Running Press, Philadelphia 2014, ISBN 978-0-7624-5064-0 , pp. 27-31.
  12. ↑ Tom Lord : The Jazz Discography (online, accessed April 1, 2015)
  13. ↑ Jerry Jeff Walter: Mr. Bojangles . In: Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Randy Rudder (Eds.): Chicken Soup for the Soul: Country Music . Chicken Soup for the Soul, Cos Cob 2011, ISBN 978-1-935096-67-2 , Chapter 56, pp. 208-211 ( online as premium content).