This blogger dares anyone to listen to "London Homesick Blue" without tapping a toe. Just returned from a road trip from Austin to Kerrville, this blogger saw enough bluebonnets along the highway to make living in the Hill Country worthwhile. Listening to Gary P. Nunn sing the best Texas song ever makes any trip in Texas easy to take. If this is (fair & balanced) nostalgia, so be it.
[x YouTube/BRod313 Channel]
"London Homesick Blues"
By Gary P. Nunn (with Jerry Jeff Walker & The Lost Gonzo Band)
[x Wikipedia]
Gary P. Nunn is a Texas singer/songwriter. He was born in Brownfield, Texas, and was a member of Lubbock, Texas rock band The Sparkles during the 1960s. In 1995, Nunn was inducted into the West Texas Walk of Fame, and in 2004, into the Texas Hall of Fame.
In 1968 he was a pharmacy major at the University of Texas at Austin. By the 1970s, Nunn was backing Jerry Jeff Walker with the Lost Gonzo Band, which parted ways with Walker in 1977, with Nunn later moving on to a solo career. "Austin City Limits" on PBS has made the songwriter's "London Homesick Blues" its theme for more than two decades. The refrain "Home with the Armadillo" may have referred to the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin's heyday as a countercultural center in the 1970s.
[x Wikipedia]
Jerry Jeff Walker was born Ronald Clyde Crosby in Oneonta, NY. After high school, Crosby joined the National Guard, but his thirst for adventure led him to go AWOL and roam the country busking for a living in New Orleans and throughout Texas, Florida, and New York. He settled in Austin, Texas, in the 1970s associating mainly with the country-rock outlaw scene that included artists such as Willie Nelson, Guy Clark, Waylon Jennings, and Townes Van Zandt. Interestingly, as Van Zandt and Walker became close friends, it was Walker who gave the future songwriting legend the impetus to begin writing songs in earnest.
"Mr. Bojangles" (written by Walker) is perhaps his most well-known and most-often covered song. It was about an obscure alcoholic but talented tap-dancing drifter, (not the famous stage and movie dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, as usually assumed, nor was it about New Orleans blues musician Babe Stovall), a friend of Walker's. ♥
Copyright © 1973 Gary P. Nunn
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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
