‘Everybody loved Banjo’
Country star reminisces about his much-adored dog
Rodney Crowell recently sat down with me to talk about his new record, “Close Ties,” which comes out Friday.
One song on the album references “a dog named Banjo.” Banjo was Crowell’s running buddy in the ’70s. “He was just a part of Rodney’s crew like anybody else,” friend and producer Tony Brown says. “Nobody treated him like a dog. He came to the sessions, he came to the rehearsals.”
I asked Crowell about Banjo, expecting the throwaway question to get a short answer. Instead, he told a Banjo story featuring Jerry Jeff Walker that perfectly captures the weird community of outsider country musicians from Texas living in Nashville in the early ’70s.
Q: Do you name a dog Banjo assuming he’ll one day end up in a song?
Crowell: Jerry Jeff named that dog. Very aptly. So, I had a dog. It was the early-’70s, and I had just finished all the Tolkien books: “The Hobbit” and the three volumes of “Lord of the Rings.” So I had my dog, Bilbo. I named him Bilbo. And Jerry tried to steal him. Jerry used to carry his cowboy boots in a shoulder bag, you know, like an old cowboy shoulder bag. He was at my house, and everybody had been up all night playing and cavorting. And so he snuck out the next morning with his boots in that bag — and with my dog. (Laughs.)
I mean, it’s not OK, but I guess it was kind of funny. He loved my dog. And he started calling him Banjo. It was such a better name. He heard Bilbo, and it was Banjo to him. So Dave Loggins, you know the singer? He was over at my house that night, and the next morning, he said, “Hey, man, Jerry Jeff ’s got your dog. He went to the airport.” ... So I raced over there to confront him. And there was Jerry at the gate waiting to get on a plane with his boots and my dog. And I said, “Jerry, give me my dog. You stole my dog.” And he gave him back.
I mean, it’s not cool. It’s dog rustling. At the same time, it was so poetic because he named him Banjo. And Banjo, everybody loved Banjo . ... Man, Banjo had so much panache and so much personality and such a poetic sensibility. I want to write more about him, and it’ll be easy. So yes, I did have a dog named Banjo. But I didn’t name him that.