Gilmore, Jimmie Dale

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JIMMIE DALE GILMORE

Born: Amarillo, Texas, 6 May 1945

Genre: Country, Folk

Best-selling album since 1990: Spinning Around the Sun (1993)

Although his recording career has stretched over thirty years, Jimmie Dale Gilmore achieved recognition only at its bookends, with a sixteen-year gap in between. The soothing twang in his voice epitomizes the high and lonesome sound that is the essence of traditional country music. Both country and pop artists have recorded his songs. With his long, stringy hair and Zen-inspired lyrics, the iconoclastic Gilmore operates on country music's fringes, wedding philosophical musings to a honky-tonk sound.

Part Irish and part Native American, Gilmore was raised in Lubbock, Texas, a fertile musical town in West Texas that also gave birth to Buddy Holly. After playing in bands as a teen (Holly's father financed his demos in 1965), he joined in with Lubbock locals and aspiring songwriters Joe Ely and Butch Hancock. Calling themselves the Flatlanders, the group recorded its debut album for a small Nashville label, Plantation Records, in 1972. It was released only on 8-track and was subsequently ignored. The group moved to Austin and ended up launching solo careers.

Although Ely and Hancock immediately poured their energies into music, Gilmore retreated. He studied philosophy at Texas Tech, then dropped out in 1974 and moved to Denver to join an ashram, a secluded religious community led by the Indian guru Maharaj Ji. In those six years of study, his music leaked out. Ely recorded his songs, particularly "Dallas" and "Treat Me Like a Saturday Night," which later became staples of Gilmore's live performances.

Gilmore returned to Austin in 1980. In the years that followed, he refined his songwriting, creating rich emotions from simple images. After performing around town for years, he finally released his solo debut album, Fair and Square, in 1988. A second album followed the next year; around that time he attracted the attention of Natalie Merchant, the lead singer with the folk/pop group 10,000 Maniacs. She helped get him signed to Elektra, a major label that released After Awhile in 1991.

Gilmore's breakthrough came with Spinning Around the Sun in 1993. Combining traditional country songs, a few Hancock covers, and his originals, the album was a crosscurrent of American musical styles: country, swing, rock, folk, and bluegrass. Rather than sell the music hard as most contemporary country stars do, Gilmore sang the songs with the sweet but mournful twang of an earlier era. The album's success gave Gilmore a level of exposure he had never experienced. He was soon playing to capacity crowds, appearing on television and on the covers of magazines, and even briefly collaborating with the Seattle grunge rock group Mudhoney.

A more commercial album, Braver Newer World, arrived three years later. Its atmospheric production and rockabilly songs made it a departure from his earlier work. Gilmore was later dropped from Elektra and ended up releasing One Endless Night, a collection of covers of Texas songwriters on the Windcharger Music imprint.

Meanwhile, throughout the 1990s, Gilmore, Ely, and Hancock experienced an unexpected bit of serendipity. The album they made in the early 1970s began circulating a decade later, and by 1990, the Massachusetts roots music label Rounder Records re-released it with the fitting title More a Legend Than a Band. It became the holy grail for a younger generation of rock fans who were beginning to discover country music giants like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. The building buzz around the Flatlanders led them to record the song "South Wind of Summer" for the soundtrack for the Robert Redford film The Horse Whisperer in 1997. They began touring together again, and in 2002—thirty years after their debut—the Flatlanders recorded a second album, Now Again, to critical acclaim.

His sublime vocal style and subtle, philosophical lyrics helped to make Jimmie Dale Gilmore a leading voice in the 1990s resurgence of traditional country music.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Fair and Square (HighTone, 1988); Jimmie Dale Gilmore (HighTone, 1989); After Awhile (American Explorer/Elektra, 1991); Spinning Around the Sun (Elektra, 1993); Braver Newer World (Elektra, 1996); One Endless Night (Windcharger Music/Rounder, 2000). With the Flatlanders: More a Legend Than a Band (Rounder, 2000); Now Again (New West, 2002). With Butch Hancock: Two Roads (Caroline, 1993).