Fiddler Johnny Gimble: Livin' in Western Swing Time
For Johnny Gimble, America's greatest fiddle player, it's all just jazz
It’s a Thursday evening in Dripping Springs, Texas, and Johnny Gimble is ready to eat some Mexican food. Gimble is heading over to nearby Austin and Guero’s Taco Bar, a popular restaurant known for its Mexican cuisine and down-home music. Guero’s plays host to Gimble, his son, guitarist Dick, and his granddaughter, singer and pianist Emily, every fourth Thursday. On this night, Gimble and family eat a nice meal around five o’clock, and then, from six o’clock onwards Gimble—one of country music’s all-time greatest fiddle players—regales the taco-munching patrons to a three-hour show—a world-class western fiddle fete with a taco and tequila background. “It’s our jam session, is what it amounts to,” says Gimble, who packs an extra fiddle case for the drive in from Dripping Springs should another fiddler drop in unannounced from, say, Houston (a mere three-hours’ drive).
The gigs at the taco bar have been going on for a year or two for Gimble, whose name is as synonymous with western swing music as is the legendary Bob Wills. It was Wills who made Gimble a permanent member of his Texas Playboys in the 1940s, a decade after Gimble and his brothers—Jack, Bill, and Gene—tuned in to listen to Wills and Milton Brown (members of the Light Crust Doughboys and later the proto-swing band Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, featuring the twin fiddle attack of Cecil Brower and Jesse Ashlock) play a noontime show on WBAP radio out of Fort Worth. That was in the rural East Texas town of Tyler, where the Gimble brothers grew up on a 100-acre farm.
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