Others, such as Gilmore’s friend Hal Ketchum and fellow Flatlander Butch Hancock, are present through their songs. There’s also a trio of tunes from those who have recently passed on: Walter Hyatt’s “Georgia Rose”, Townes Van Zandt’s “No Lonesome Tune”, and the Jerry Garcia-Robert Hunter-penned “Ripple”. The last of these couldn’t be better suited to Gilmore’s earthy mysticism — especially when, awash in elegiac strains of fiddle and dobro, he wraps his willowy quaver around lines such as, “Rippling still water, when there is no pebble tossed nor wind to blow.”
Nevertheless, the one song on Gilmore’s new album that best captures his beatific vision is his cover of Jesse Winchester’s “Defying Gravity”. For starters, there’s the bodhisattva-like whimsy of the lyrics: “I live on a big round ball/I never do dream I may fall/But even one day if I do/Well I’ll jump off and smile back at you.” Even more striking, though, is the way the song’s title captures the essence of Gilmore’s singular voice — most notably, the way that, on such stiff draughts of post-hillbilly existentialism as “Dallas” and “Tonight I Think I’m Gonna Go Downtown”, his ethereal timbre literally seems to defy the gravity or transcend the weightiness of his lyrics.
It isn’t that Gilmore glosses over heartache. He is, after all, the guy who sang “She would never see/That this world’s just not real to me.” But much as Hank Williams did on “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (a song Gilmore covered exquisitely on his 1993 LP Spinning Around The Sun), he renders sorrow in a whole new key.
Lucinda Williams, who first heard Gilmore when he was a mainstay of the Austin singer-songwriter scene of the early ’80s, hears the Hank Sr. connection. “Jimmie’s coming from that same place,” says Williams. “It’s that ability to transform sadness into beauty. Of course what we’re really talking about here is soul. It’s one thing to have a beautiful voice, but a beautiful voice without soul is just a hollow shell. There’s just nothing there for people to connect with. But Jimmie, he’s got that ability to reach deep inside. He’s got soul.”
“One of the real strong functions of music is catharsis,” observes Gilmore. “It’s one of the things that early on I noticed about the blues — how those old guys just blurted out their hurt to the world. Of course back then I didn’t give it much thought. But there’s something about being able to express that pain that I think is a real aid in dealing with it, in integrating it into the rest of life. Someone once said they thought I had a knack similar to Hank Williams for being able to take sorrow and turn it into this beautiful sound, for being able to put into form the pain that a lot of people feel but aren’t able to express.
“That’s one of the things that makes music so powerful,” continues Gilmore, who’s seen his share of hard times, some of them self-inflicted, but isn’t one to volunteer much about or dwell on them. “It’s an avenue for really deep feelings — the real hurtful feelings of disappointment, sorrow, and loss — to get expression. It’s odd. It’s as if music is somehow able to take those things as a raw material and turn them into something wonderful. It’s a paradox, but for some reason, sad songs make people happy.”
Gilmore’s approach to music hasn’t always been so analytical. In fact, as a preschooler growing up on a dairy farm in the Texas panhandle town of Tulia (pop. 4,699), he didn’t give it a second thought. Like earth, wind, fire, and water, music was a basic element of life.
“I’ve said this before, but the bond that my family had through music reminds me of a scene from the movie The Commitments,” says Gilmore, who turns 55 in May. “There’s this one family where the guy’s got the picture of Elvis up higher than the Pope. That’s how it was in my family. We weren’t particularly religious, but music kind of occupied the space that religion would have in olden times.
“My dad played guitar,” Gilmore adds. “He never did that exclusively, as his livelihood, but we have an old clipping from the Tulia Herald advertising the band he played in. I think they called themselves the Swingeroos. The ad said: ‘Featuring Brian Gilmore and his electric guitar.’ My dad was one of the very first electric guitar players in West Texas.”
As it did in many homes during the early ’50s, radio also occupied a central place in the Gilmore household, especially after the family moved to Lubbock just as Jimmie was entering the first grade. Gilmore remembers there being a couple of good country stations in Lubbock, principally KDAV, which he believes was the first station in America to adopt an all-country format. On KDAV he heard many of his early, and enduring, favorites: Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Snow and Webb Pierce, among others. (Gilmore was a little too young to hear his namesake, Jimmie Rodgers, on the radio, though he soon became acquainted with his music via the Frizzell album that paid tribute to the Singing Brakeman.) Later on, Lubbock’s KLLL (“K triple L”) began playing country music, and it was there, where Waylon Jennings was a disc jockey, that Gilmore remembers hearing Willie Nelson and Roger Miller long before either singer broke nationally.
Border radio was a presence in Lubbock as well, as was, by the mid-to-late ’50s, rock ‘n’ roll — notably the town’s favorite son, Buddy Holly. Yet as pervasive as Holly’s influence in West Texas was, a double bill that came to Lubbock featuring Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley constituted Gilmore’s first musical epiphany. “I saw Johnny Cash several times when I was very small, but the first time Elvis was also on the show,” he explains. “It was a very long time ago, in the ’50s — ’56 or ’57 — well before I started picking up the guitar. But I think in a lot of ways that was a turning point in my life. It wasn’t like I went, ‘Oh boy, that’s what I want to do!’ I think it just affected me in a way that kind of colored everything that came afterwards.”
Gilmore’s nascent musical sensibility may have been shaped by what he heard on the radio and from national touring acts — that is, by the commercial country and rock ‘n’ roll music of the day. But by the early ’60s, the countercultural rumblings of the East Coast folk revival began to hold sway over his picking and singing as well. The folk boom’s influence persists in his music today: Witness the versions of “Darcy Farrow” and “Mack The Knife” on his new album, songs Gilmore learned some 30 years ago, respectively, from recordings by Ian & Sylvia and Dave Van Ronk.
“I had a friend, Pat Patrick, who had lived in New York City and gone to NYU and was friends with Dave Van Ronk; he also knew Bob Dylan before he got his recording contract,” says Gilmore. “Pat had perhaps the biggest influence on me of all because he turned me onto that world of folk music, which never did happen in Lubbock, as far as the general public was concerned. There was no station that played Bob Dylan or Dave Van Ronk, or even Ian & Sylvia.”
Gilmore certainly considered himself a folkie when he and Joe Ely began hanging around together in the late ’60s. “Joe and I were folk singers,” he explains. “We went to each other’s gigs. We’d known each other for awhile but we didn’t start spending any time together until one day, when he called me and said, ‘I picked up this guy hitchhiking and he gave me this record. You gotta come hear it.'” The singer with his thumb in the air, headed for Houston, was Townes Van Zandt, who by this time (1970) already had a couple albums out.
