In the “old days,” before search engines, when you couldn’t remember the date of the first moon launch or why “the Bay of Pigs” was important (you must have been doodling instead of listening in class that day), you had to trudge off to the library. Now, answers to just about anything are at our fingertips. Recently, for example, my son-in-law wondered about the origins of the song “Mr. Bojangles,” and with a few clicks of his mouse came up with this information, which he promptly forwarded to me:
“Mr. Bojangles” was the nickname used by Bill Robinson, a black tap dancer who appeared in many movies in the 1930s, including with Shirley Temple in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. After Robinson’s success, many black street dancers became known as “Bojangles.”
[The song] was written and originally released by the singer/songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker, who wrote [it] in the mid-’60s and recorded it in 1968. Walker left his home in upstate New York and traveled the country playing music. He spent some time in New Orleans, where one day he was a bit tipsy and made a public display trying to convince a young lady that love at first sight was real. This landed him in jail, where his cell mate was an older black man who made a living as a street dancer and told Walker all about his life. In his book Gypsy Songman, Walker tells the story: “One of the guys in the cell jumped up and said, ‘Come on, Bojangles. Give us a little dance.’ ‘Bojangles’ wasn’t so much a name as a category of itinerant street entertainer known back as far as the previous century. The old man said, ‘Yes, Hell yes.’ He jumped up, and started clapping a rhythm, and he began to dance. I spent much of that long holiday weekend talking to the old man, hearing about the tough blows life had dealt him, telling him my own dreams.” Walker moved on to Texas, where he sat down to write: “And here it came, just sort of tumbling out, one straight shot down the length of that yellow pad. On a night when the rest of the country was listening to The Beatles, I was writing a 6/8 waltz about an old man and hope. It was a love song. In a lot of ways, Mr. Bojangles is a composite. He’s a little bit of several people I met for only moments of a passing life. He’s all those I met once and will never see again and will never forget.”
I did a little Googling of my own and apparently Walker’s cell mate was white; in those days, jail cells were segregated. So, you can’t necessarily trust everything you find on the net. But of course, the reason my son-in-law passed the story on to me was that the Mr. Bojangles “composite” was a conglomeration of all the consequential strangers Walker had met on the road of life. The same was true for writer Studs Turkel who drew inspiration from casual, and sometimes fleeting, acquaintances. (Read an excerpt about Turkel here.)
What’s going on? How do people inspire us? Psychologist Kenneth Gergen, author of The Saturated Self and, more recently, Relational Being, explains that our minds are “populated” by everyone we encounter in life, including characters in books and people we “meet” through various media. As any writer, artist, musician, or successful entrepreneur knows, some ideas seem to “come out of nowhere” or feel like “divine inspiration.” Now that I’m paying attention to all the members of my social convoy, or personal entourage of connections, I’m aware of how much my own thinking is shaped every day by the relationships in my life. In a sense, I’m practicing–and suggesting to readers–what psychologist/artist/writer Ellen Langer might call “social mindfulness.” A description of her classic book, Mindfulness explains: “To be mindful, she notes, stressing process over outcome, allows free rein to intuition and creativity, and opening us to new information and perspectives.”
I’m hoping that social mindfulness is infectious–and it looks like it just might be: I get emails every day from people telling me how their newfound awareness of consequential strangers is opening their hearts and minds to ideas, images, experiences, and perspectives–the very stuff of creativity.
