Jimmie Dale Gilmore
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Jimmie Dale Gilmore (born May 6, 1945) is a country singer, songwriter, actor, recording artist and producer, currently living in Austin, Texas.
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[edit] Biography
Gilmore was born in Amarillo, Texas and raised in the West Texas town of Lubbock, Texas. His earliest musical influence was the honky tonk brand of country music that his father played as a bar-band guitarist. In the 1950s, he was exposed to the emerging rock and roll of other West Texans such as Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison. He was profoundly influenced in the 1960s by the likes of The Beatles and Bob Dylan and the folk music and blues revival in that decade.
With Joe Ely and Butch Hancock, Gilmore founded The Flatlanders. The group has been performing on and off since 1972. The band's first recording project, from the early 1970s, was barely distributed. It has since been acknowledged, through Rounder's 1991 reissue, (More a Legend Than a Band) as a milestone of progressive, alternative country. The three friends continued to reunite for occasional Flatlanders performances, and in May of 2002 released a long-awaited follow-up album, Now Again, on New West records.
Gilmore spent much of the 1970s in an ashram in Denver, Colorado, studying metaphysics with teenaged Indian guru, the 'Maharaj Ji'. Jimmie asked the guru what he should do with his life, and the guru told Jimmie to help manage a motel he had bought with contributions.. In the 1980s, he moved to Austin. His first solo album, Fair and Square, was released in 1988.
Gilmore's fans admire his fine tenor voice, which delivers expressive, pure, country singing.
Gilmore also had a small but memorable role in the 1998 movie, The Big Lebowski as a bowler named Smokey, an aging, emotionally "fragile" pacifist threatened with a pistol by the main character's right-wing sidekick (John Goodman).
Gilmore's son, Colin Gilmore, is a budding singer-songwriter, also based in Austin, TX.
[edit] Discography
- Fair and Square, 1988
- Jimmie Dale Gilmore, 1989
- After Awhile, 1991
- Spinning Around the Sun, 1993
- Braver Newer World, 1996
- One Endless Night, 2000
- Come On Back, 2005
[edit] Further reading
- In The Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music, Nicholas Dawidoff, Vintage Books, 1998. ISBN 0-679-41567-X
