The things that we think we know. I knew that the song had been written by Jerry Jeff Walker, not anyone from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, which is where most of us first heard it. I knew that the the original Bojangles was Bill something* who was known in the teens and especially the '20s as a vaudeville dance performer. He is remembered mostly now for his movies with Shirley Temple in the '30s, and was dead by 1950. So he is not the man that Walker met in a cell in New Orleans when he was "down and out."
That anonymous man took the name Mr. Bojangles to have something to tell the police when they picked him up. We don't know his real name. He was a homeless itinerant white man. Well knock me over with a feather. I suppose if you are looking for a pseudonym, you might as well pick a good one. Sammy Davis Jr, who knew the original Bojangles, sang the song and it always provoked a poignancy, because that whole dynamic of a black performer in a white industry, having to not only put up with insult and have a forced smile but to see others with talent make choices and succeed or not, and understand both. Dance, dammit. But you are either going to make a living or you ain't, and maybe there's others who depend on you. It's the sort of choice everyone faces in life, but more stark with black performers of the time.
So maybe you might want to hear Sammy do the song with that context. "I don't feel that I'm talking about Bill Robinson, I feel that I'm talking about all the black hoofers who never really made it."
*Robinson
3 comments:
Mr. Bojangles also appeared in a jazzy version of The Mikado.
One more way in which the past is more complicated than we think, isn't it?
It's a very unusual song for Jerry Jeff Walker, too; most of his work doesn't sound anything like it. His most famous song to sing was written by Ray Wylie Hubbard, while as you point out this song is most famously performed by someone else.
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