★★★★★
When Waylon and Willie referenced Jerry Jeff's train songs on Luckenbach, Texas, they gave Walker a lift he hadn't experienced since his early ditty Mr Bojangles became the kind of standard that would be covered by everyone from Nina Simone, Bob Dylan and Harry Nilsson to Philip Glass. Shame, really, because Jerry Jeff isn't really an outlaw type, nor a one-trick palomino.
- recordcollectormag.com
2014-07-17
★★★★★
Raven Texas troubadour Jerry Jeff Walker would evidently rather ramble--rolling down the road, playing music with friends and having a good time--than record an album. At least that's the story he tells in the liner notes of his 1972 self-titled album, released for the first time on CD by the Australian label Raven Records...
- www.jambands.com
2011-12-26
★★★★★
After running his best-of against his live double one-on-one, I can only conclude that this longtime folkie and frequent drunk, a native New Yorker upstate division, turned himself into the archetypal Sun Belt hippie the natural way: interacting nice and easy with the lost gonzos in his band and the refugees from reality in his cult or audience or whatever. Cult, I guess...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-17
★★★★★
Walker's Austin-based cult reputation has so much to do with looseness and charisma that it took a live double-LP featuring poetry readings and chicken imitations to convince me the man deserved it. Definitive.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
In 1973, gonzosinger-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker pulled into a tiny dance hall in Luckenbach,Tex., and recorded a benchmark album of progressive Lone Star country(Viva Terlingua). Twenty years later, he returned to that spot tomake this live record, Viva Luckenbach. The bold hippie rhetoric of "Up Against theWall Red Neck" has been replaced by the gray-haired hippiesentimentality of "Keep Texas Beautiful." Next album: Viva SocialSecurity. C+
- ew.com
2009-06-12
★★★★★
A lesser light of the outlaw-country movement, Walker's main claim to fame is writing "Mr. Bojangles." If you want to check out Walker's gruff voice and surly songs, go
for last year's Ultimate Collection, which includes the dozen songs gathered here, and more.
- www.rollingstone.com
2009-06-08
★★★★★
Dean of the Texas school of rowdy, good-time songwriters, Jerry Jeff Walker is surprisingly bland in this follow-up to his last album, the spirited Live at Gruene Hall. Walker admits in the Navajo Rug liner notes that he hates to do studio records ("That's like tryin' to make love with all your clothes on"). But the real problem is that he relies on too many borrowed songs, only a few of which are worth borrowing...
- ew.com
2009-06-04
★★★★★
Viva Terlingua, recorded live in Luckenbach, TX, on a hot August night in 1973, is among the most legendary of "live" singer/songwriter albums ever released. It's the Live at the Fillmore East of redneck Texas folk-rock. Essentially, it's Jerry Jeff fronting the Lost Gonzo Band at the beginning of their long run together playing, living it up, having a ball, giving everybody the impression that life was a party, and to be sure, it was for a while...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-28
★★★★★
Jerry Jeff Walker's debut introduced his dry vocals and narrative songwriting style, with support from many session musicians, the most notable of whom were Ron Carter and David Bromberg. The influence of Bob Dylan and other singer/songwriters of the time is felt fairly strongly on this extremely low-key release (especially on the seven-minute "Desolation Row"-like "The Ballad of the Hulk"), but Walker favored the country and folk side of folk-rock much more than the rock side...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-28
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