Mr. Bojangles: ‘a song about an old guy and his dog’
A song like “Mr. Bojangles” doesn’t need a lot of corporate planning and production to become a hit. It just needs the right person to listen to it.
So it was back in 1970, when Jeff Hanna — one of the founders of the alt-country group Nitty Gritty Dirt Band — first heard it.
He was in Los Angeles, driving home from a band rehearsal late one night and turned the radio to an FM station. A slow country waltz was playing, a song about an alcoholic street dancer and a dog, who “up and died — after 20 years he still grieves.”
Hanna had never heard it before, had no idea who was singing it, who wrote it or what it was called. The radio station didn’t back-announce its title.
“It was a great tune and it just blew me away,” Hanna recalls in an interview from his Nashville home.
“I came into rehearsal the next day and say ‘I heard this great tune about this old guy and his dog,’” Hanna continues. “And bandmate Jimmy Ibbotson jumps out of his chair and says ‘I know the song.’
“Jimmy ran out to his car, lifted the trunk of his Dodge Dart and, under the spare tire, he had a 45 (rpm single) of Jerry Jeff Walker singing ‘Mr. Bojangles.’”
At the time, the Dirt Band was trying to come up with a fifth album, hopefully more successful than the previous four.
The group had formed out of the jugband scene in Long Beach, Calif., in 1966, when Hanna was barely out of high school. One of the other founding members was
a gifted teen named Jackson Browne, who only stuck around for a few months before setting on a solo career.
The Dirt Band loved traditional jugband music, but the record label wanted folk-rock so they played jangly Byrd-like guitars and scored a moderate hit with a song called “Buy for Me the Rain.” The next three albums tanked.
When Hanna heard “Mr. Bojangles,” the band had already assembled a strong assortment of songs, including four by previously undiscovered writer Kenny Loggins, two by former Monkee Michael Nesmith and another by future Grammy winner Randy Newman.
“Mr. Bojangles” was squeezed in among the others on the album “Mr. Charlie and His Dog Teddy,” including the first recording of Loggins’ “House at Pooh Corner.”
The group had been listening
to The Band’s second album quite a bit and borrowed the mandolin/accordion style of “Rockin’ Chair” for their version of “Mr. Bojangles.” Hanna took the lead on vocals.
“Mr. Bojangles” hadn’t done much for the career of Jerry Jeff Walker, a relatively obscure Texas-based troubadour who had written and released it two years earlier.
No one expected it to be a hit for the Dirt Band, either. It wasn’t even released as a single.
“It happened organically,” Hanna says. “I’ve come to realize
that’s the best way for things to happen. A little station down in Shreveport, Louisiana, was doing a ‘smash-or-trash’ thing and they played Bojangles off the album and the phone started lighting up. People were calling in saying, I want to hear it again.”
The record label rushed the Dirt Band’s version out as a single. It broke through the Billboard Top 10 and stayed on the charts for 36 weeks.
“We met Jerry Jeff after the fact and he liked our version,” Hanna, now 70, said. “Even though we screwed up some of
the lyrics because we learned the song off of a scratched-up record.”
Almost 50 years and several Grammy awards later, “Mr. Bojangles” is still the Dirt Band’s biggest hit — even bigger than “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” their landmark collaboration with Earl Scruggs, Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, Merle Travis and Roy Acuff.
Expect the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to perform it at the FirstOntario Concert Hall on Tuesday, May 8.
The current band’s lineup includes original members Hanna and drummer Jimmie Fadden, as well as longtime keyboard player Bob Carpenter.
Joining them will be multiinstrumentalist Ross Holmes (Mumford and Sons, Warren Haynes, Bruce Hornsby), Jeff’s son guitarist Jamie Hanna (The Mavericks) and bassist Jim Photoglo.