B8 N THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESMONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2020Edith O’Hara, who started the
13th Street Repertory Company in
Greenwich Village in 1972 and
made it a quirky mainstay of New
York’s Off Off Broadway scene,
keeping it going through the dec-
ades while countless other compa-
nies fell by the wayside, died on
Oct. 16 at her home, an apartment
above the theater. She was 103.
Her daughter Jill O’Hara an-
nounced her death.
Ms. O’Hara didn’t move to Man-
hattan until midway through her
long life, but once she did she
plunged into the theater scene
with gusto. Her children called
her the Hurricane.
She had come to the city from
Warren County in northwestern
Pennsylvania, bringing a show
she had developed at a small the-
ater she founded there: a musical
called “Touch,” about young peo-
ple trying the communal life. In
the age of “Hair,” it found an audi-
ence, enjoying a two-year run.
Ms. O’Hara was smitten by the
bohemian theater scene. When a
building at 50 West 13th Street
was advertised as being for rent
and containing a small theater,
Ms. O’Hara took a lease, and the
13th Street Rep was born.
The theater was never the type
of feeder institution that sends
plays to Broadway, but it had its
place in the city’s theater ecosys-
tem.
“It was an initial stop for many
people who arrived in New York,”
said Albert Poland, a theater his-
torian whose publications include
“The Off Off Broadway Book,”
written with Bruce Mailman. “I
would say it was a nurturing
place.”
The theater offered a place for
playwrights to try out new works
and for would-be actors to test
their skills. And it was not without
its long-running successes. An Is-
rael Horovitz play, “Line,” which
opened there in 1974, was still run-
ning until recently, its cast ever-
changing; it lays claim to the long-
est run in Off Off Broadway his-
tory. The comic monologuist
Brother Theodore, who died in
2001, did a regular show there for
almost two decades.
Ms. O’Hara joined a partner-
ship that acquired the building in
the early 1980s, but about 15 yearsago she became embroiled in a
protracted legal dispute as the
building’s majority shareholder, a
bookseller in Baltimore, first
sought to buy her out, then threat-
ened to evict her when she de-
clined to sell. A settlement in 2010
allowed her and the theater to
stay until her death.
Joe John Battista, who became
the theater’s artistic director five
years ago and has tried to bring a
more businesslike approach to its
programming and finances, said
in a phone interview that the fu-
ture of the 13th Street Rep was un-
clear, especially in light of the pan-
demic. But he vowed to keep it go-
ing in some form.
That Ms. O’Hara had managed
to do so for so long, he said, was “a
miracle,” given the pressures of
producing theater in New York.
“Edith had such a big heart,” hesaid. “She gave so many people,
whether they really deserved it or
not, a chance to come in and try to
create.”
Her story began a long way
from the bright lights of Manhat-
tan. Edith Mildred Hopkins was
born on Feb. 15, 1917, on a farm
outside Coeur d’Alene in north-
west Idaho. Her father, Oscar, was
a logger, and her mother, Mary,
who died when she was a girl, was
a homemaker.
“Growing up, I never heard the
word ‘theater’ because I was born
in the wilds of northern Idaho, and
we were up in the mountains,” Ms.
O’Hara said in “A Home in the
Theater,” a 2010 documentary di-
rected by Melodie Bryant about
Ms. O’Hara and her fight to save
the theater. “My father had a log-
ging camp — no telephone, no
electric power lines up there, no
indoor plumbing.”
There was a one-room school,
but it went only through sixth
grade, so when she aged out of
that the family moved to Coeur
d’Alene so she could continue her
education. Jill O’Hara said her
mother had a summer job at a food
stand catering to visitors to the
scenic lake there, and the stand
had a bear cub for the amusement
of the tourists; her job included
caring for the bear.
A life-changing moment came
when her seventh-grade teacher
put her in a school play.
“I played George Washington,”
Ms. O’Hara said in the documen-
tary. “Little boys weren’t too eager
to be on the stage in those days.”
The experience kindled an in-
terest in theater. She took theater
classes at the University of Idaho
and, while a student there, did an
apprenticeship in New York. She
wanted to stay, but, she said in aninterview with the video project
Active Aging Stories, she had
been accepted at the University of
California, Los Angeles, for junior
year and figured she had better
pursue that.
“On top of that,” she added, “I
had my classmates in the car who
needed a ride home.”
Her plans to return to New York
were put on hold when she mar-
ried John O’Hara and had three
children; the family settled in
Warren, Pa., in the 1950s. She and
Mr. O’Hara divorced in 1962, but
she stayed in Warren and started
a children’s theater.
“I only did it because I was
working as a children’s librarian
and I noted they really could use
help with their speech and dic-
tion,” she said.
That led her to found a summer
theater in a barn. Productions by
the company, the Plowright Play-
ers, included “Touch,” which gen-
erated enough buzz that theater
producers came.
“One of them said: ‘I have a the-
ater on East Fourth Street. I have
grant money. If you bring your ac-
tors down, we’ll put it on togeth-
er,’ ” she recalled in the documen-
tary.
The show played at the Village
Arena Theater. Mr. Poland signed
on as the production’s general
manager, and when the opportu-
nity to rent the 13th Street space, a
rather ancient building, came up,
he accompanied Ms. O’Hara to
look at the property.
“I was very concerned about
the wiring,” he said in a phone in-
terview. “There were wires hang-
ing out everywhere. But she was
not to be stopped.”
Mr. Poland worked on early
shows there, including, in 1973, a
collection of songs and skits, someof which he wrote, called “Hot and
Cold Heros.” The title had an unin-
tended effect.
“At lunchtime there were peo-
ple lined up to get sandwiches,”
Mr. Poland recalled. “We had to
put up a sign that said, ‘Not a Deli-
catessen.’ ”
Mel Gussow, reviewing that
production in The New York
Times, concluded with a para-
graph that seemed to sum up the
career that lay ahead for Ms.
O’Hara.
“This is a young, perhaps too
energetic, cast of eight that sings
well in unison, but is much less se-
cure in solos,” he wrote. “But once
again Mrs. O’Hara is to be encour-
aged for discovering new talent
and nurturing it toward profes-
sionalism.”In addition to her daughter Jill,
an actress, Ms. O’Hara is survived
by another daughter, Jenny
O’Hara, also an actress; a son,
Jack, a musician; three grandchil-
dren; and a great-grandchild.
Ms. O’Hara not only lived in the
building herself, but would also
use its various spaces to give ac-
tors, writers and others a place to
stay if they needed one. Some
years ago she offered a crawl
space to Tom Hanlan, who had
been homeless. He became the
theater’s resident set and cos-
tume designer.
“She took me in,” he told The
Times in 2017. “I was about to
sleep on a bench and I heard
someone coming. I was going to
run because I knew that sound.
But it was Edith.”Edith O’Hara, 103, Founder of Off Off Broadway Pillar
By NEIL GENZLINGEREdith O’Hara in 2006 at her theater, which offered a place for
playwrights to try out new works and actors to test their skills.RUBY WASHINGTON/THE NEW YORK TIMESThe 13th Street
Repertory Company
endured as others fell
by the wayside.
Jerry Jeff Walker, the singer-
songwriter who wrote the much-
recorded standard “Mr. Bojan-
gles” and later became a mainstay
of the Texas outlaw movement
that catapulted Willie Nelson and
Waylon Jennings to fame, died on
Friday at a hospital in Austin,
Texas. He was 78.
His former publicist John T. Da-
vis said the cause was cancer. Mr.
Walker learned he had throat can-
cer in 2017.
A native New Yorker, Mr.
Walker began his career in the
1960s, hitchhiking and busking
around the country before estab-
lishing himself in Greenwich Vil-
lage and writing the song that
would secure his reputation.
A waltzing ballad about an old
street dancer Mr. Walker had met
in a New Orleans drunk tank, “Mr.
Bojangles” was first recorded by
Mr. Walker for the Atco label in
- The song achieved its great-
est success in a folk-rock version
that reached the pop Top 10 in 1971
with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band,
and went on to be covered by a
wide range of artists, among them
Nina Simone, Neil Diamond and
even Bob Dylan. Sammy Davis Jr.
included it in his stage show and
performed it on television.
“At the time, I was reading a lot
of Dylan Thomas, and I was really
into the concept of internal
rhyme,” Mr. Walker wrote of the
song’s origin in his 1999 memoir,
“Gypsy Songman.”
“The events of the past few
months were still swirling inside,
along with the memory of folks I’d
met in jail cells in Columbus and
New Orleans,” he went on.
“And it just came out: Knew a
man Bojangles, and he danced for
you.... ”
The song was by far Mr. Walk-
er’s best-known composition, the
only original of his — he typically
performed songs written by oth-
ers — to become a major hit. But
perhaps his most enduring contri-
bution to popular culture was as
an architect of the so-called cos-
mic cowboy music scene that co-
alesced around Armadillo World
Headquarters, an iconoclastic
nightclub in Austin.
The reception Mr. Walker re-
ceived in Austin, he often said, sig-
naled the first time he felt truly
validated as an artist. “Texas was
the only place where they didn’t
look at me like I was crazy,” he told
Rolling Stone in 1974, referring to
the freewheeling ethos he culti-
vated with fellow regulars at Ar-
madillo World Headquarters like
Kinky Friedman and the Texas
Jewboys and Commander Cody
and His Lost Planet Airmen.
“It was the first place where,
when I got on the stage to play,
they said, ‘Of course, why not?’
Other places, they said, ‘Aw,
you’re just another Bob Dylan,
trying to make it with your gui-
tar.’ ”
In a career that spanned six
decades, Mr. Walker never had a
Top 40 pop hit. But in his 1970s
heyday, he and the Lost Gonzo
Band, his loose-limbed group of
backing musicians, made a num-
ber of definitive Texas outlaw re-
cordings.
Foremost was “Up Against the
Wall, Redneck Mother,” a boozing,
brawling anthem written by Ray
Wylie Hubbard that appeared on
Mr. Walker’s 1973 album, “Viva
Terlingua.”
“Viva Terlingua,” recorded live
in Luckenbach, Texas, includedother tracks that became signa-
ture recordings for Mr. Walker:
among them are a dissolute take
on Michael Martin Murphey’s
“Backsliders Wine,” and “London
Homesick Blues,” a tribute to Ar-
madillo World Headquarters,written and sung by Gary P. Nunn
of Mr. Walker’s band, with Mr.
Walker on backing vocals. With a
memorable refrain that began, “I
wanna go home with the armadil-
lo,” “London Homesick Blues” lat-
er became the theme song of the
long-running PBS concert series
“Austin City Limits.”
Mainstream radio program-
mers nevertheless didn’t play Mr.
Walker’s music, perhaps because
of his gruff, braying singing voice
and his reputation for being in-
toxicated onstage or failing to
show up for performances alto-
gether. Further jeopardizing his
commercial prospects, he es-
chewed the glossier sensibilities
of Nashville and other recording
centers in favor of releasing rau-
cous albums, recorded both in
concert and in the studio, withoutthe benefit of editing or overdubs.
“I wanted our records to sound
like we were having a grand time
at a party thrown for a bunch of
our best friends — which, I guess,
is exactly what it was,” Mr. Walker
was quoted as saying in the 1998
edition of The Encyclopedia of
Country Music.
Jerry Jeff Walker was born
Ronald Clyde Crosby on March 16,
1942, in Oneonta, N.Y., in north-
ernmost Appalachia. His father,
Mel Crosby, refereed sporting
events and tended bar; his
mother, Alma (Conrow) Crosby,
was a homemaker.
Young Ronnie grew up in a mu-
sical home. His parents were local
dance champions, and his ma-
ternal grandparents led a square-
dance band.
A rebellious youth who excelledin athletics, Mr. Walker received
his first guitar as a Christmas
present when he was 12. He later
took up banjo and ukulele and
played in local pop combos when
he was in high school. He joined
the National Guard in the early
1960s, only to go AWOL before
embarking on the hitchhiking tour
of the country that ultimately led
to him changing his name to Jerry
Jeff Walker and moving to New
York to pursue his muse as a folk
singer.
While in Greenwich Village, he
became a member of the psyche-
delic rock band Circus Maximus,
although he remained with the
group only until the release of its
debut album. By that time he had
written “Mr. Bojangles,” which, af-
ter an auspicious live perform-
ance on the listener-supportedNew York radio station WBAI,
helped him secure a contract with
Atco Records.
Mr. Walker made three albums
for Atco and another for Vanguard
Records before relocating in 1971
to Austin. After signing with
Decca in 1972, he released an al-
bum, titled simply “Jerry Jeff
Walker,” which featured an ac-
claimed version of “L.A. Free-
way,” a staple of the Southwestern
songwriting canon written by Guy
Clark, the Texan singer-song-
writer. The next year, Mr. Walker
further helped raise Mr. Clark’s
profile as a songwriter with his
heart-rending cover of “Despera-
dos Waiting for a Train,” another
neo-western touchstone written
by Mr. Clark.
Mr. Walker toured and recorded
extensively throughout the 1970s
and ’80s, even as his drinking be-
came unmanageable and he faced
mounting debt, including back
taxes owed to the I.R.S. With the
help of Susan Streit, his wife of 46
years, he gave up liquor and drugs
in the late ’70s, put his life back to-
gether and eventually settled into
the role of elder statesman of the
gonzo Texas music scene he had
helped create.
In addition to Ms. Streit, Mr.
Walker’s survivors include a
daughter, Jessie Jane McLarty; a
son, Django, who is also a musi-
cian; a sister, Cheryl Harder; and
two grandchildren.
Mr. Walker had been receiving
chemotherapy and radiation. In
2017, it was announced that he had
donated his music archives, in-
cluding tapes, photographs and
handwritten lyrics, to the Wittliff
Collections at Texas State Univer-
sity.
“The mid-’70s in Austin were
the busiest, the craziest, the most
vivid and intense and productive
period of my life,” Mr. Walker
wrote in his memoir.
“Greased by drugs and alcohol,
I was also raising the pursuit of
wildness and weirdness to a fine
art,” he wrote. “I didn’t just burn
the candle at both ends, I was also
finding new ends to light.”Jerry Jeff Walker, Who Wrote and Sang ‘Mr. Bojangles,’ Is Dead at 78
By BILL FRISKICS-WARRENChristina Morales contributed re-
porting.
GAB ARCHIVE/REDFERNSPAUL NATKIN/GETTY IMAGES“The mid-’70s in Austin were the busiest, the craziest, the most
vivid and intense and productive period of my life,” Jerry Jeff
Walker wrote in his memoir. Mr. Walker in Chicago in 1977, left.An artist who became
a mainstay of the
outlaw country
movement.
.