Album: It's About Time
Label: Tried & True Music
Release date: April 2018
Though not a native Texan, Jerry Jeff Walker is one of the artists who helped shape the Texas country music sound and put the city of Austin on the country music map in the 1970s. Walker's best-known song was 1968's "Mr. Bojangles" (a Top 10 pop hit in the hands of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band), but he was immortalized five years later with the highly influential live album Viva Terlingua! Recorded in Luckenbach before Waylon and Willie and the boys made the town famous, Terlingua became a cornerstone of Red Dirt country music.
Details about the album come from an interview with the Austin Statesman:
"It’s About Time includes several original tunes he’s been playing in concert for a while. Perhaps the best is called “I Always Thought I Was Going to Live in California,” which retells how he landed in Austin in the 1960s while heading west after leaving his upstate New York hometown. He met Susan here, and the rest soon enough became history. But “It’s About Time” also gathers tunes by others that he’s known and loved for decades. “South Coast,” with its moving “the lion still rules the barranca” chorus, was written in the 1950s by Lillian Bos Ross, Rich Dehr and Sam Eskin before being immortalized first by the Kingston Trio and then Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. And he taps into Paul Siebel, best known for writing the folk classic “Louise,” with a slightly updated take on “The Ballad of Honest Sam.” That’s the one song on “It’s About Time” where Walker does get semi-political. “It really fits the Trump era,” he says, reeling off a couple of lines from the song about a character who “made his money shadily.”The album is currently available through Walker's website HERE.
