Biography
Raised in the somewhat-fabled West Texas town of Lubbock, home of Buddy Holly, Prairie Dog Town and “world famous sunsets”, Jimmie Dale Gilmore first responded to the honky-tonk brand of country music his father played as a bar-band guitarist. This was before he heard the rock `n’ roll siren call issued by his West Texas brethren, Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, the folk and deep Delta blues, Bob Dylan or The Beatles.
Joe Ely was a boyhood buddy of Gilmore in West Texas and is similarly steeped in the music that makes up Come on Back. Over three decades ago, along with Butch Hancock, Ely and Gilmore founded The Flatlanders, a local term for folks who live in the kind of landscape the southwest has to spare. More of a song-swap than a commercial endeavor, the band’s sole recording project in 1973—released only in the short-lived 8-track format—was barely distributed. It has since been recognized as a landmark in progressive, alternative country music. (The record was re-issued by Rounder in 1991 under the title More a Legend Than a Band). Disillusioned by the poor sales of their first release, the group disbanded, though the friendships continued. But the Flatlanders occasionally reunited for special occasions. Robert Redford had them reconvene for a song on the soundtrack to The Horse Whisperer in 1998. By two years later, the legendary group became a bona fide working band, making two highly acclaimed new albums—Now Again (2002) and Wheels of Fortune (2004).
But following the disbanding of The Flatlanders, Gilmore did not make another record for 16 years. He spent much of the `70s in a Denver ashram, while his songs, especially “Dallas” and “Treat Me Like a Saturday Night,” were establishing his reputation through Joe Ely’s recordings. It wasn’t until 1988 that Gilmore released his first solo album, the Ely-produced Fair & Square, his first attempt to merge his spiritual quest with a recording career.
A second, eponymous album followed a year later, and the next decade saw the full flowering of this late, but glorious, bloomer. Three albums he recorded for Nonesuch/Elektra between 1991 and 1996 elicited global accolades—After Awhile (highlight of the label’s American Explorer series), Spinning Around the Sun and Braver Newer World. Rolling Stone named him Country Artist of the Year two years straight and he received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk Artist. Gilmore’s last solo album was One Endless Night, which Rounder released to critical praise in 2000.
In part because Jimmie Dale Gilmore was so close with his father, Come on Back is a portrait of his own life as well as his Dad’s. He explains, for example, “‘Jimmie the Newsboy’ is a Carter Family song, though I learned it from the Flatt & Scruggs recording. I actually met Earl Scruggs backstage one night in Lubbock in the mid-60s. I have to say he was a great guitar player, though he was best known for the banjo. He gave me some good guitar advice, told me to get myself a Gibson Country & Western guitar. I wore it out entirely. It has a cool, mirror image pick-guard, the same shape above and below the sound hole. There’s a great portrait of it on the record, and there’s a shot of Dad’s Fender too.”
Making the album, Jimmie Dale Gilmore was reminded of lessons he learned about singing early on: “All these songs, the thing about them is that the original recordings were all by great singers. Country music made it OK for a singer to have less than a perfect voice—as long as you had a sound that was identifiable and had a great feeling.” One of his theories about the origin of his own vocal sound arises from a memory of driving across Arizona early in the 1960s listening to a reservation radio station. The program was toggling between old-timey and Indian recordings and Jimmie was astonished to hear voices so much like his grandfather’s in the Native American chants. Brian Gilmore was raised in the Primitive Baptist Church and Jimmie remembers vividly the quavering insistence of the congregation’s shape-note singing.
“Marty Robbins’ ‘Don’t Worry `Bout Me’ was probably the biggest song, in terms of popularity, because it was both a country hit and a pop hit. As for ‘Train of Love,’ the Johnny Cash song, well, Dad always loved Johnny and one night he took my sister and me to see Johnny and Elvis on the same bill. Might have been at the Fairpark Coliseum in Beaumont. Sled Allen was Terry’s Dad [Terry Allen was another founding Flatlander] and he was a colorful character; used to bring a lot of musicians and barnstorming baseball teams to what he called the Sled Allen Arena in Lubbock.”
The record’s title, Come On Back, has nothing to do with any sad fantasy. Instead, the phrase comes from “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down,” the Harlan Howard track that opens the record, and was intended as an invitation to come back to the real country music, “back where you belong.” “Since I’ve been teaching songwriting [at Omega Institute and Esalen], I think I’ve learned probably more than my students have. Teaching forced me to articulate my ideas about songwriting and I think that between teaching and thinking so much about the music that my Dad and I loved, I had a renewed appreciation for these unpretentious songs. They’re short, to the point, economical, like folk art, really. Joe kept saying, ‘We just gotta stay out of the way of these songs,’ and I think he was right.”
Joe Ely was a boyhood buddy of Gilmore in West Texas and is similarly steeped in the music that makes up Come on Back. Over three decades ago, along with Butch Hancock, Ely and Gilmore founded The Flatlanders, a local term for folks who live in the kind of landscape the southwest has to spare. More of a song-swap than a commercial endeavor, the band’s sole recording project in 1973—released only in the short-lived 8-track format—was barely distributed. It has since been recognized as a landmark in progressive, alternative country music. (The record was re-issued by Rounder in 1991 under the title More a Legend Than a Band). Disillusioned by the poor sales of their first release, the group disbanded, though the friendships continued. But the Flatlanders occasionally reunited for special occasions. Robert Redford had them reconvene for a song on the soundtrack to The Horse Whisperer in 1998. By two years later, the legendary group became a bona fide working band, making two highly acclaimed new albums—Now Again (2002) and Wheels of Fortune (2004).
But following the disbanding of The Flatlanders, Gilmore did not make another record for 16 years. He spent much of the `70s in a Denver ashram, while his songs, especially “Dallas” and “Treat Me Like a Saturday Night,” were establishing his reputation through Joe Ely’s recordings. It wasn’t until 1988 that Gilmore released his first solo album, the Ely-produced Fair & Square, his first attempt to merge his spiritual quest with a recording career.
A second, eponymous album followed a year later, and the next decade saw the full flowering of this late, but glorious, bloomer. Three albums he recorded for Nonesuch/Elektra between 1991 and 1996 elicited global accolades—After Awhile (highlight of the label’s American Explorer series), Spinning Around the Sun and Braver Newer World. Rolling Stone named him Country Artist of the Year two years straight and he received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk Artist. Gilmore’s last solo album was One Endless Night, which Rounder released to critical praise in 2000.
In part because Jimmie Dale Gilmore was so close with his father, Come on Back is a portrait of his own life as well as his Dad’s. He explains, for example, “‘Jimmie the Newsboy’ is a Carter Family song, though I learned it from the Flatt & Scruggs recording. I actually met Earl Scruggs backstage one night in Lubbock in the mid-60s. I have to say he was a great guitar player, though he was best known for the banjo. He gave me some good guitar advice, told me to get myself a Gibson Country & Western guitar. I wore it out entirely. It has a cool, mirror image pick-guard, the same shape above and below the sound hole. There’s a great portrait of it on the record, and there’s a shot of Dad’s Fender too.”
Making the album, Jimmie Dale Gilmore was reminded of lessons he learned about singing early on: “All these songs, the thing about them is that the original recordings were all by great singers. Country music made it OK for a singer to have less than a perfect voice—as long as you had a sound that was identifiable and had a great feeling.” One of his theories about the origin of his own vocal sound arises from a memory of driving across Arizona early in the 1960s listening to a reservation radio station. The program was toggling between old-timey and Indian recordings and Jimmie was astonished to hear voices so much like his grandfather’s in the Native American chants. Brian Gilmore was raised in the Primitive Baptist Church and Jimmie remembers vividly the quavering insistence of the congregation’s shape-note singing.
“Marty Robbins’ ‘Don’t Worry `Bout Me’ was probably the biggest song, in terms of popularity, because it was both a country hit and a pop hit. As for ‘Train of Love,’ the Johnny Cash song, well, Dad always loved Johnny and one night he took my sister and me to see Johnny and Elvis on the same bill. Might have been at the Fairpark Coliseum in Beaumont. Sled Allen was Terry’s Dad [Terry Allen was another founding Flatlander] and he was a colorful character; used to bring a lot of musicians and barnstorming baseball teams to what he called the Sled Allen Arena in Lubbock.”
The record’s title, Come On Back, has nothing to do with any sad fantasy. Instead, the phrase comes from “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down,” the Harlan Howard track that opens the record, and was intended as an invitation to come back to the real country music, “back where you belong.” “Since I’ve been teaching songwriting [at Omega Institute and Esalen], I think I’ve learned probably more than my students have. Teaching forced me to articulate my ideas about songwriting and I think that between teaching and thinking so much about the music that my Dad and I loved, I had a renewed appreciation for these unpretentious songs. They’re short, to the point, economical, like folk art, really. Joe kept saying, ‘We just gotta stay out of the way of these songs,’ and I think he was right.”