Nimble Gimble
Here’s a nice story about Johnny Gimble, fiddle player now living in Austin, TX area.
Now a couple of local anecdotes—Background first: Johnny had a long gig with Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Wills was fiddler who used saxophones and other instruments and played what was dubbed “Texas Swing” He’s been in every movie made by Willie Nelson but has never been a regular with Nelson’s band. One of the quotes from Willie Nelson about Johnny, “Johnny plays jazz, just calls it country!”
In the early 80s when Jazz Society of Pensacola was just getting started, we were having a jazz jam session on a Sunday afternoon, a handsome, smiling gentleman came in and introduced himself, “Hi, I’m Johnny Gimble!” My reply, after “glad to meet you” was “I certainly hope you brought your fiddle!” Reply” I’ve got it in the car. Johnny made the jam session a smash event and played for 1 ½ hours! In talking with him, he had discovered Pensacola and our Ft Pickens state park at Pensacola beach ( Ft. Pickens park is now part of the US National Seashore, under the National Park system) He and wife had driven over with their travel trailer from Texas to spend time at our beach.
Subsequently, Johnny played two Jazz Festivals for us in the mid-80s and was also invited to the Great Gulf Coast Arts Festival to perform. One of the tricks he does is to take the bow apart and reconnect so that the arm of the bow is below the neck of the violin, thereby allowing the hairs of the bow to touch all four strings. ( As normally played, because of the curvature of the bridge of the violin, hairs of the bow can only touch two strings , max, at the time.) So, if one is REALLY good, he can play certain songs in 4 part harmony in first position.
On TV I saw Joe Venuti do that trick when performing with Boston Pops. “What a Friend we Have in Jesus” is one song which can be played -4 parts, first position.
We were pleased to have Johnny to perform for the Jazz Society, summer a couple of years ago when he and family were vacationing in our area. We also made contact with nearby “Farmers Opry” and they did a show there, too. Other member of the Gimble family band were son Dick on guitar, granddaughter on piano and vocals and grandson-in-law on bass.
I’m pleased to be the recipient of Johnny’s record which is reviewed in the WSJ article below.
A Wall Street Journal feature on Johnny was published March 25, 2010. Follow this link to the article, which also contains photos and links to several clips you can listen to from the new CD.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704543804575065263393970980.html#articleTabs %3Darticle
MARCH 25, 2010
Nimble Gimble Hums Along
By BARRY MAZOR
It was 16 years ago that the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Texan Johnny Gimble a National Heritage Fellowship, the closest American equivalent to the "living national treasure" titles bestowed in Japan. He had already played singularly swinging fiddle for over 50 years by then, and for most of that time equally swinging electric mandolin.
Mr. Gimble, who will be 84 in May, has regularly been referred to as "the best American fiddle player, period" over the course of the nearly seven decades he's been at it—playing dances in east Texas before World War II, as a featured regular in Bob Wills's band beginning in the late '40s, as a Nashville session musician in the '60s, in Willie Nelson's band in the '70s, and as a frequent guest on the "Prairie Home Companion" radio show and "Austin City Limits" TV show since. He figures his musical dexterity and longevity have had something to do with humming.
"When I was 15," he recalled in a recent phone interview, "I was working for a radio band in Shreveport. Cliff Bruner, the hottest Texas fiddler of them all, was on the same package shows, playing for Jimmie Davis. I asked him, 'Cliff, how do you play that hocum?,' which is what we still called swing there. And he said: 'Can you hum what you're thinking? Practice till you can play what you can hum.'
"Later, when I was in the Army, in Austria, they didn't play any country music on the Armed Forces radio, just big band, and I'd hear Slam Stewart [of Slim & Slam] humming along with his bass, so I started practicing that—humming some hot licks and then trying to find them on the fiddle. When I got with the Wills band in 1949, Bob would let me hum along on the bandstand. My son Dick sometimes does that playing bass, too, and my granddaughter Emily Gimble can scat, humming along with her jazz piano solos."
While a multigenerational "Hums of the Swinging Gimble Family" CD has not yet been scheduled, a highly enticing new one, "Johnny Gimble: Celebrating With Friends" has just been released on CMH Records. Joining the celebration on lead vocals and instrumental back-up, too, are Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Vince Gill, Dale Watson and Ray Benson—front man of the Western Swing group Asleep at the Wheel and producer of the CD. The disc concludes with an on-air "Prairie Home Companion" tribute in which host Garrison Keillor notes that the "fiddler named Gimble, whose fingers were nimble...could play 'Daring Nelly' or Stephane Grappelli"—which not only rhymes but is an accurate description of the range of Mr. Gimble's career.
For the past decade, however, there have been some physical restraints on Mr. Gimble's playing. As he explained, "I had a stroke in December of '99, and it affected my left side—my fingering side. I played a gig with old Floyd Domino on the piano, and he said, 'Johnny, play "Fiddlin' Around," a song of mine that has a difficult fingering. And I had to say, 'But I can't reach the S.O.B. now.' A fiddler in Dallas heard that I'd said that and said, 'Now you know how the rest of us feel!'"
On the new CD, that challenging Gimble composition is played by Asleep at the Wheel's longtime fiddler Jason Roberts, a Gimble protégé since childhood. Mr. Gimble does play some fiddle on the album, and much jazzy electric mandolin, completely unaffected by the stroke, including "Mandelopin'," a hot mandolin duet with Mr. Roberts.
"That's a tour de force," producer Benson noted in a separate interview. "Any modern mandolin or guitar player would aspire to play that like that. Johnny Gimble's tone is still unmistakable; when he draws his bow across a fiddle, within four notes you know it's him. That's fundamentally unchanged."
Mr. Gimble also provides the lead vocal on another of his self-penned tunes featured on the disc, "(What Do You Do When You Just Can't) Do What You Did, When You Did?" which he admits has some self-mocking autobiographical edge to it at this point: "I got the idea for that one 20 years ago as we were driving up to Nashville at about 65 miles an hour. That led me to think that I was almost 65 myself."
Mr. Gimble had taken stabs at songwriting as early as the '40s, but he turned attention to it in earnest beginning in the mid-'60s, while living in Nashville and working as an atypically swing-oriented session musician. For someone who counts improvisation-heavy performances with Dixieland clarinetist Pete Fountain among his favorite musical memories, Music Row's factory-like production set-up was not always made to order.
"I tell my audiences today that I served 10 years in Nashville! That's a joke, of course; I was grateful for the work. Bob Ferguson, who produced Connie Smith, Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, started calling me in. When we did 'If It Ain't Love' with Connie, she asked to have my name put on the label as the soloist, which RCA wouldn't do, so she included a handwritten note with disc jockey copies that said 'that fantastic fiddle is Johnny Gimble.' That record was a major hit, so overnight every D.J. in the country knew who I was."
Today, "Johnny Gimble and Texas Swing," as his band of family and friends is called, is still very active, playing for hours, for example, the third Thursday of every month at Guero's beer garden in south Austin, not far from his home. And just what does the man, whom so many great performers have loved having on hand for his wit and warmth almost as much as for his legendary musical mastery, hope this new CD will accomplish?
"Well, I just hope it can pay for itself."
Mr. Mazor, the Nashville-based author of "Meeting Jimmie Rodgers" (Oxford University Press), writes about country roots and pop music for the Journal.
Now a couple of local anecdotes—Background first: Johnny had a long gig with Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Wills was fiddler who used saxophones and other instruments and played what was dubbed “Texas Swing” He’s been in every movie made by Willie Nelson but has never been a regular with Nelson’s band. One of the quotes from Willie Nelson about Johnny, “Johnny plays jazz, just calls it country!”
In the early 80s when Jazz Society of Pensacola was just getting started, we were having a jazz jam session on a Sunday afternoon, a handsome, smiling gentleman came in and introduced himself, “Hi, I’m Johnny Gimble!” My reply, after “glad to meet you” was “I certainly hope you brought your fiddle!” Reply” I’ve got it in the car. Johnny made the jam session a smash event and played for 1 ½ hours! In talking with him, he had discovered Pensacola and our Ft Pickens state park at Pensacola beach ( Ft. Pickens park is now part of the US National Seashore, under the National Park system) He and wife had driven over with their travel trailer from Texas to spend time at our beach.
Subsequently, Johnny played two Jazz Festivals for us in the mid-80s and was also invited to the Great Gulf Coast Arts Festival to perform. One of the tricks he does is to take the bow apart and reconnect so that the arm of the bow is below the neck of the violin, thereby allowing the hairs of the bow to touch all four strings. ( As normally played, because of the curvature of the bridge of the violin, hairs of the bow can only touch two strings , max, at the time.) So, if one is REALLY good, he can play certain songs in 4 part harmony in first position.
On TV I saw Joe Venuti do that trick when performing with Boston Pops. “What a Friend we Have in Jesus” is one song which can be played -4 parts, first position.
We were pleased to have Johnny to perform for the Jazz Society, summer a couple of years ago when he and family were vacationing in our area. We also made contact with nearby “Farmers Opry” and they did a show there, too. Other member of the Gimble family band were son Dick on guitar, granddaughter on piano and vocals and grandson-in-law on bass.
I’m pleased to be the recipient of Johnny’s record which is reviewed in the WSJ article below.
A Wall Street Journal feature on Johnny was published March 25, 2010. Follow this link to the article, which also contains photos and links to several clips you can listen to from the new CD.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704543804575065263393970980.html#articleTabs %3Darticle
MARCH 25, 2010
Nimble Gimble Hums Along
By BARRY MAZOR
It was 16 years ago that the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Texan Johnny Gimble a National Heritage Fellowship, the closest American equivalent to the "living national treasure" titles bestowed in Japan. He had already played singularly swinging fiddle for over 50 years by then, and for most of that time equally swinging electric mandolin.
Mr. Gimble, who will be 84 in May, has regularly been referred to as "the best American fiddle player, period" over the course of the nearly seven decades he's been at it—playing dances in east Texas before World War II, as a featured regular in Bob Wills's band beginning in the late '40s, as a Nashville session musician in the '60s, in Willie Nelson's band in the '70s, and as a frequent guest on the "Prairie Home Companion" radio show and "Austin City Limits" TV show since. He figures his musical dexterity and longevity have had something to do with humming.
"When I was 15," he recalled in a recent phone interview, "I was working for a radio band in Shreveport. Cliff Bruner, the hottest Texas fiddler of them all, was on the same package shows, playing for Jimmie Davis. I asked him, 'Cliff, how do you play that hocum?,' which is what we still called swing there. And he said: 'Can you hum what you're thinking? Practice till you can play what you can hum.'
"Later, when I was in the Army, in Austria, they didn't play any country music on the Armed Forces radio, just big band, and I'd hear Slam Stewart [of Slim & Slam] humming along with his bass, so I started practicing that—humming some hot licks and then trying to find them on the fiddle. When I got with the Wills band in 1949, Bob would let me hum along on the bandstand. My son Dick sometimes does that playing bass, too, and my granddaughter Emily Gimble can scat, humming along with her jazz piano solos."
While a multigenerational "Hums of the Swinging Gimble Family" CD has not yet been scheduled, a highly enticing new one, "Johnny Gimble: Celebrating With Friends" has just been released on CMH Records. Joining the celebration on lead vocals and instrumental back-up, too, are Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Vince Gill, Dale Watson and Ray Benson—front man of the Western Swing group Asleep at the Wheel and producer of the CD. The disc concludes with an on-air "Prairie Home Companion" tribute in which host Garrison Keillor notes that the "fiddler named Gimble, whose fingers were nimble...could play 'Daring Nelly' or Stephane Grappelli"—which not only rhymes but is an accurate description of the range of Mr. Gimble's career.
For the past decade, however, there have been some physical restraints on Mr. Gimble's playing. As he explained, "I had a stroke in December of '99, and it affected my left side—my fingering side. I played a gig with old Floyd Domino on the piano, and he said, 'Johnny, play "Fiddlin' Around," a song of mine that has a difficult fingering. And I had to say, 'But I can't reach the S.O.B. now.' A fiddler in Dallas heard that I'd said that and said, 'Now you know how the rest of us feel!'"
On the new CD, that challenging Gimble composition is played by Asleep at the Wheel's longtime fiddler Jason Roberts, a Gimble protégé since childhood. Mr. Gimble does play some fiddle on the album, and much jazzy electric mandolin, completely unaffected by the stroke, including "Mandelopin'," a hot mandolin duet with Mr. Roberts.
"That's a tour de force," producer Benson noted in a separate interview. "Any modern mandolin or guitar player would aspire to play that like that. Johnny Gimble's tone is still unmistakable; when he draws his bow across a fiddle, within four notes you know it's him. That's fundamentally unchanged."
Mr. Gimble also provides the lead vocal on another of his self-penned tunes featured on the disc, "(What Do You Do When You Just Can't) Do What You Did, When You Did?" which he admits has some self-mocking autobiographical edge to it at this point: "I got the idea for that one 20 years ago as we were driving up to Nashville at about 65 miles an hour. That led me to think that I was almost 65 myself."
Mr. Gimble had taken stabs at songwriting as early as the '40s, but he turned attention to it in earnest beginning in the mid-'60s, while living in Nashville and working as an atypically swing-oriented session musician. For someone who counts improvisation-heavy performances with Dixieland clarinetist Pete Fountain among his favorite musical memories, Music Row's factory-like production set-up was not always made to order.
"I tell my audiences today that I served 10 years in Nashville! That's a joke, of course; I was grateful for the work. Bob Ferguson, who produced Connie Smith, Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, started calling me in. When we did 'If It Ain't Love' with Connie, she asked to have my name put on the label as the soloist, which RCA wouldn't do, so she included a handwritten note with disc jockey copies that said 'that fantastic fiddle is Johnny Gimble.' That record was a major hit, so overnight every D.J. in the country knew who I was."
Today, "Johnny Gimble and Texas Swing," as his band of family and friends is called, is still very active, playing for hours, for example, the third Thursday of every month at Guero's beer garden in south Austin, not far from his home. And just what does the man, whom so many great performers have loved having on hand for his wit and warmth almost as much as for his legendary musical mastery, hope this new CD will accomplish?
"Well, I just hope it can pay for itself."
Mr. Mazor, the Nashville-based author of "Meeting Jimmie Rodgers" (Oxford University Press), writes about country roots and pop music for the Journal.
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