Like the fans out front, the musicians on the bill were also making a pilgrimage of sorts. All of them had, in one fashion or another, been influenced by Walker over the course of his 50-plus year career, and many had been directly mentored by him. It was a mix of personalities that featured marquee acts like Jimmy Buffett, Michael Martin Murphey, and Emmylou Harris, and lesser-known figures like pro-baseball player-turned-songwriter Tim Flannery and Henry “Stoney” Stonebeck, an old hitchhiking buddy from the early 1960s and the subject of one of Walker’s best rambling songs.

Like the fans out front, the performers had more than their share of Jerry Jeff stories. Pat Green who, as a budding songwriter, used to visit Walker’s house in Austin to partake of wisdom and soak up the vibe, recalled being in Walker’s music room: “I felt like I was behind the curtain with the Wizard. As a very young man in my 20s, being in that house, I just felt like I was part of something.”

Steve Earle confessed that there was a time in his life when “I wanted to be Jerry Jeff Walker more than anything. Unlike a lot of songwriters, he was a great interpreter of other peoples’ songs. We know about Guy Clark (whose songs Walker was the first to record) because of him…He’s the connection between so many people and myself, and the reasons that I do this.”

“I opened for everybody at Gerde’s Folk City (in Greenwich Village) and David Bromberg and Jerry Jeff were the regular opening act for everybody at the Bitter End, so it worked out I could walk over and catch one of their sets almost every night,” said Emmylou Harris of her folk music days. “Somehow, Jerry Jeff was always this larger-than-life figure, generous and open-hearted. In a way, he needed to get out of the Village and come down to the wide-open spaces of Texas. He needed more room.”

“Jerry Jeff did quite a few of my songs along the way,” recalled Rodney Crowell. “And the last three years or so, we got close on the telephone. He would call me a lot. He was a big fan of my song, ‘It Ain’t Over Yet,’ and we’d talk about that. We’d talk for an hour and a half, and I’d talk for ten minutes.”

At the funeral service preceding the show, Jimmy Buffett wondered aloud at the direction his destiny had wound up taking all because he jumped into a car. “Jerry Jeff picked me up in his ’47 Packard and drove me from Coconut Grove (Florida) to Key West,” he said. “I’ve always said, if we had just driven down and had a beer and come back, my life would have turned out very differently.”

As for the concert itself, it was cleverly structured to follow the arc of Walker’s career and featured only songs Jerry Jeff had written or recorded.

The first part of the show, reflecting Walker’s roots as a folksinger from upstate New York named Ron Crosby, featured folk figureheads like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Keith Sykes, and Jeff Hanna of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, whose 1970 hit version of “Mr. Bojangles” introduced Walker too much of the radio-listening public.

The second portion echoed Walker’s move to Texas and his evolution into one of the standard-bearers in the 1970s, along with Willie Nelson and Michael Martin Murphey, of a new Texas-bred fusion of rock, country, blues, and folk. Forty-eight years later, no album sums up that transformational “redneck rock” alchemy better than Viva Terlingua.

The last portion of the show was, for lack of a better way to phrase it, a tribute to Walker as an elder statesman and an icon of Texas music, a mentor to his fellow musicians, a father and husband, and perhaps the ultimate “somebody” in Luckenbach’s mystical pantheon. It’s in that spirit that money raised from the show will go to construct a life-sized bronze of Walker and Hondo Crouch by sculptor Clete Shields.

Spearheaded by Rodney Crowell, Jimmy Buffett and Jerry Jeff’s son (and musician in his own right), Django Walker, and accompanied by everyone on the bill, the ensemble romped through a raucous 12-pack of some of Walker’s most iconic songs and covers, including “L.A. Freeway,” “Hill Country Rain,” “Sangria Wine,” “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” “London Homesick Blues,” “Railroad Lady,” and “Don’t It Make You Wanna Dance.”

There was a palpable sense of liberation, both in the audience and on the stage. Chalk it up, maybe, to giddy post-COVID liberation. Or the Brigadoon-like spell of a pretty summer night in Luckenbach. Or, just for a fleeting few hours, the feeling that everyone was in fact going to live forever.