The earliest known surviving set of Jerry Jeff Walker’s handwritten lyrics for “Mr. Bojangles” exist because a plucky young guitar repairman in New Jersey asked Walker to write them down so he could learn the song.
Walker wasn’t yet a star in 1968. But he did have an amazing folk song on the radio in the
John at the workbench
New York area, and John Pascale at the Guild Guitar Co. loved “Mr. Bojangles” from the first time he heard it.
The song drew a portrait of a down-and-out traveling man named Bojangles who danced a lick across his jail cell yet still mourned his dog after 20 years. Its lyrics were inspired by a stranger Walker met during his time in a New Orleans jail after being arrested in the French Quarter on July 5, 1965.
Pop music critic Ellen Sander in the New York Times described it as “a masterpiece of a pop song, one of the finest contemporary folk poems ever set to melody” in a record review that year.
Pascale, a professional musician who played guitar, wanted to learn the words to sing it with his band but couldn’t find the single in record shops.
John’s band The Nomads
“That wasn’t a song you wanted to fumble through because of all the lyrics,” Pascale recounted. “It was not yet in the stores.”
It wasn’t unusual for musicians like Joan Baez and George Benson to drop in at Guild in Hoboken, NJ in the 1960s. Within the first couple of weeks of hearing “Mr. Bojangles” on the radio, Pascale learned that Walker was at the factory. He stopped the singer-songwriter in the hallway outside his work bench.
