Jerry Jeff Walker’s ‘Hill Country Rain’ is Still as Catchy as Ever

By THC Staff | February 11, 2016

 

There are songs that really try to describe the feeling of a place, and then there are songs that don’t even need to try. Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Hill Country Rain” is one of those classic odes to the heart of the Hill Country.

The title track on his 1992 album, “Hill Country Rain” epitomizes that free, easy feeling of a breezy back road after a summer rainstorm. And he means it to feel that way, too, equating all happiness with his lyric, “running naked in the high hill country rain.”

Walker, born a New Yorker, shed his city skin after going AWOL from the National Guard as he began hiding out in Louisiana and Texas towns. It seems Texas got the better of him, though, and he found his true home in the 1970s when Austin’s outlaw country scene was on the rise. Jerry Jeff Walker is now a legendary centerpiece of the Hill Country.

And thank goodness, because without that love affair with the Hill Country, would we have this energetic, catchy anthem? If nothing else, it just makes you want to kick off your shoes and plant your toes in some freshly cut green grass.