By Hannah Means Shannon
Jimmie Dale Gilmore is known in many different areas of music and popular culture. Some know him from his lifetime of work with The Flatlanders, some from his solo work, some from his beloved character Smokey in The Big Lebowski. For a fortunate group, he’s also known as a teacher of songwriting and a collaborator.
In recent years, Gilmore has taken part in The Flatlanders album Treasure of Love and performance dates that followed, and his new album with Dave Alvin and The Guilty Ones, titled TexiCali, is due out on June 21st, 2024. Gilmore’s perspective on music spans many decades, but it also spans many genres and many approaches to sharing music with the world. I spoke with him about songwriting, in particular, and how we pass music on to others, as well as about the importance of cross-pollination among fields and genres to foster creativity.
Hannah Means-Shannon: Something that I’m very interested in is songwriting and, since I have a background as a teacher, I’m also interested in how songwriting continues and gets passed from generation to generation. I know that you are also very committed to teaching songwriting, but were there experiences in your youth that set you on that road?
Jimmie Dale Gilmore: Yes, I’ve taught songwriting for many, many years now. I teach one week each year at the Omega Institute in upstate New York, and I’ve also done it a few times at Esalen, out on the West Coast. Then, there was a place here in Austin for a few years called “Omega at the Crossings” and so I did it here. For more than 25 years, I’ve done it at least once a year, except for the one Covid year, and we did it online that year! Since 1996.
HMS: That adds up to a lot of teaching!
JDG: Yes. I’ve told a lot of people that it’s my favorite thing that I’ve done in my music career. The way it works for me is that, one thing I’ve done is that we use collaboration when we’re in the class. So the whole thing is built out of people talking with each other. These are people all the way from total rank beginners that don’t even play an instrument to real, professional songwriters and performers. Everybody adds some kind of perspective to it, some kind of insight. The whole subject matter is songwriting and that turns out to be pretty vast.
My career has been built on that, mainly. I say that, but I always have to point out that I never have been very prolific. I don’t put down my songwriting. I know that I’ve written some really quality material, but I’m slow at it and maybe too much of a perfectionist. [Laughs] And I’ve been around people, Butch [Hancock] being a prime example, who are hugely prolific. He also maintains a high level of quality, even with the output he has. I know a lot of people who have a high output and small amount of quality! [Laughs] But I’ve been around some people who are prolific but also consistent.
HMS: Not everyone would put people in a room who are coming from different levels of songwriting, like you’ve just described. They’d say, “That would be too stressful for the new beginners and too boring for the professionals.” But people used to interact more on different levels, like in the old schoolhouses where all the classes interacted, or like in a family situation, where you’re learning from older siblings and elders. Everyone picks up what they can on their own level.
JDG: I really like that comparison. I think there’s really something to that. The different backgrounds and contexts that they are coming from can really open up doors for others. Sometimes that’s accidentally.
HMS: Even the total newbie might notice something that others don’t. They can bring something.
JDG: Right. After all these years of doing it, I can say that the system that we’ve worked out works so reliably, too.
HMS: What do you say at the beginning of a class like that? What is day one like?
JDG: Well, first, I talk quite a bit about my own background. It’s odd because sometimes there are people in the class because they are fans of mine, then there are some who are in the class who have never heard of me before, but they are fans of the Omega Institute and they are into some kind of creative endeavor. The mix of that is always quite interesting.
My career is strangely spotty like that. I’ve been this hybrid for many, many years. In some circles, I’m very well known, and somewhat of a noted personality. Then, in most circles in the world, I’m just a regular person, an unknown. I’m never really sure which one of those environments I’m in. [Laughs] And in the songwriting class, it’s a mixture, which leads to funny things happening. But what we do is that we break into groups of three people, and we try to make sure that no one is acquainted with each other. We don’t put couples together.
We set it up in such a way that there’s such open-ended expectations about it from the beginning so there’s not a kind of pressure to things, or nervousness. I have a little formula where I tell them, amongst the three, to come up with either a title, or one line, or just a subject or topic that all three can agree on, that they would like to do something with. It’s a class about communications, not just songwriting, really. Songwriting is a kind of pinnacle of communication, a perfect form for it.
What we do is we have that session, then we reconvene as the big class, and discuss what has just happened via each group’s spokesman. And they’ll be at different levels, but the discussion about it is where some of the learning starts to happen. They’ll come up with two verses for a song at that point, or sometimes people are just stuck. But we start on Monday morning, and then on Thursday evening, we do a performance of the song that has been written. So, as the week goes on, the deadline starts to appear. The deadline is really an instigator of creativity! It’s kind of like creating a little microcosm.
HMS: Have you had experience of collaborative songwriting that you’re bringing to this?
JDG: I haven’t done a lot of collaboration, myself, but I’ve done some. Some of my favorite music that I’ve done has been co-written with friends of mine. But most of my stuff has just been me, solo. So the process that we use in the class isn’t really my process, but what gets learned about the process is important. Some of the objective of the class is to take away things that you can use when you go home, when you’re not with a bunch of musicians. That’s it.
HMS: It’s really reassuring to hear about your approach to teaching songwriting because I think there’s a lot of interest in songwriting right now. There’s been a rise in recent years of people who are curious about it, and that may never go anywhere if someone doesn’t see a road ahead. Like you said, the deadline is a great creative force. Are you someone who has had to work to deadlines?
JDG: There have been a few projects where I had to work to a deadline. It’s occurred to me that I might have been more prolific if I had more deadlines! I’ve said this to a lot of people, but it’s interesting because I have never thought of myself so much as a songwriter as much as an interpretive singer. My singing always overshadowed both my writing and my playing. I don’t play at the level of my singing. I’ve always surrounded myself with people who play better than me. I’m adequate for what I need to do as a musician, and I got good enough at it to depend on that for songwriting and playing rhythm.
When I did solo stuff, I had to really work on it, and get the picking down right. But I never did perceive myself as songwriting or guitar playing being my main thing. I always thought of myself as a singer. I think that’s kind of silly now, though. For anyone to hem themselves in in that way is sort of artificial. But I can see that, looking back on it.
HMS: I think it has been normal for a long time now to say, “There is one task that’s my thing and I need to perfect it. If I do any other thing, I’m taking away from that.” But there’s been more of a change in music in recent years where people want to do more than one thing, even more than one genre. You almost have to give yourself that permission to be multi-faceted. One task may not be the whole story for you.
JDG: I completely agree with that. The whole idea of specialization is really useful and has accomplished a lot, but I also kind of think that it’s messed up the world in a lot of way. [Laughs] Not just in music, but in everything.
HMS: I was reading a psychology book from the 1940s and 50s and it said, “All this overspecialization could lead to problems in the future.” I thought, “Yep. That’s exactly what has happened.”
JDG: There were people who foresaw that. As a matter of fact, I studied the writings of Buckminster Fuller, and he was a “comprehensivist”, which is what we’re talking about. It’s the broad range of everything. It was a big thrust in his work, to try to introduce inter-disciplinary studies. He recognized early-on that it was a problem.
HMS: These days we talk a lot about “crosspollination” where creativity from one field may help light up another field that’s gotten a little stagnant.
JDG: That’s exactly what I’m talking about.
HMS: Musicians often talk about this when it comes to genre and genre-constraints.
JDG: Early-on, I noticed that. I come from real Country music, like Hank Williams, and Ernest Tubb. To this day, I love it. But when Rock ‘n Roll came along, a lot of my contemporaries, who were young when that happened, said, “I love this! I’m not going to have anything to do with Country music anymore.” It was extreme! Back in that time, in the 50s and 60s, amongst my friends, I loved Rock ‘n Roll as much as anybody. I loved Elvis, and I loved Buddy Holly, but I didn’t stop loving the music that I’d come from.
We’re talking about crosspollination, and part of my own personal motif in life has been about that. It also happened when I discovered the Blues. I figured out that the Blues was underpinning all the music that I liked, all the Country music, all the Rock ‘n Roll. That was always a very odd thing to me, that people didn’t know that. I also noticed fairly early on that musicians were never quite as exclusive as the fans were. Musicians always tended to like a lot of different kinds of music.
HMS: Yes, that does tend to happen a lot. I know what you mean.
JDG: Some musicians were really close-minded or cliquish about it growing up, and I’ve also known some very good Country musicians who just despised the Blues.
HMS: In some ways that’s improved, but in some ways it’s like that right now. There’s kind of an entrenched Country versus Rock thing that’s still going on, which is bizarre in mind. I can understand that people are afraid of losing traditions if they don’t guard them, but I think there are ways of doing that without being so oppositional about it.
JDG: Yes. Also, I think that people who tend to be that way are sometimes unaware of the backdrop to whatever it is they love. They don’t realize that genres have been created artificially. They were marketing ploys that then became so entrenched that they became realities to some people. Somehow for me, it was just really easy to see this. When I figured out when Jimmie Rodgers, who I was named for because he was my dad’s favorite musician, totally got his music from Black musicians, that made sense to me. The great, original spark of creativity came from these Black musicians in the Blues, and Elvis picked it up. Elvis loved it so much and was able to recognize it and use it. I’m forever grateful.
But the odd thing, especially in the Country world, is that people don’t recognize this. Lots of the real session musicians were also Jazz and Blues guys. They created Country music in the studios, but they were from this other music.
