Kimmie Rhodes : Archives

NO DEPRESSION MAGAZINE – HYPNOTIZED

Kimmie Rhodes — Hypnotized

It’s a long way from Knopfler’s classic Britain to Rhodes’ mythic Texas, but music has a way of bridging such distances. In 2006, Knopfler duetted with Emmylou Harris on “Love and Happiness,” a song Rhodes co-wrote. Rhodes is probably better known for her collaborations with Willie Nelson — they made an album of duets together, and Rhodes wrote the title track of Nelson’s 1995 record Just One Love — but she’s also made more than a dozen records of her own. Hypnotized, produced by Rhodes’ son, Gabriel Rhodes, might well be her best album, solely on the strength of the songs. “No Tom Petty” is the instant hook, a folk-rock tune spiked by Bill Carter’s harmonica that wonders aloud exactly how we’ll get by without the music of legends such as David Bowie and Tom Petty (“the world was bad enough already”). On the other hand, we’ve still got Alejandro Escovedo, who turns up as Rhodes’ duet partner on “If You Closed Your Eyes.” The record’s most intriguing track is “Invisible Mary,” a minor-key fever-dream that pushes Rhodes out of her country-rock comfort zone. On the album’s closing track, “Automatic Music Inc,” Rhodes grapples with a world of Auto-Tune and AI with observations such as “I feel like an old jukebox” and “I got flipped to the B-side of life” — but the song’s beautiful melody and exquisitely minimal arrangement underscore her point about the old-school methods of making music.  —    PETER BLACKSTOCK

Glastonbury 2022 – The Buddy Holly Educational Foundation Retreats

It’s always such fun to be with other writers at The Buddy Holly Educational Foundation retreats! Besides I always come home with new songs I would not have written on my own. Once a year I attend an early summer retreat in Glastonbury UK at a historical mansion, The Pennard House in Summerset. My friends, always including Beth Nielsen Chapman and Donna Taggart, to name a couple, are housed at a cottage about 1 mile down a pastoral tree covered lane. I always hang back and skip the  “great room” breakfast with the others so I can have my walk alone and get inspiration for the day of writing.

After breakfast Chris Difford (Squeeze) posts a list of who will be writing with who on the old grandfather clock in the entry hall. We head into our various groups and write a song which we perform every evening at the Carriage House on another part of the grounds. At the end of the week invited guests from the nearby village attend our concert in the ancient private chapel at the back of the gigantic garden and grounds, where we play the “best of” songs of the week. By that time we are all in a peaceful “love bubble” and are our heads and hearts are full of songs! Oh… and did I mention the stellar catering and dinner plates the size of roses?!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s a picture of the year’s 2022 retreat taken at the end of the show with Chris Difford front and center

Recording “Picture In A Frame” Duet Album with Willie

Willie & Kimmie singing ‘Love & Happiness For You” – written by Kimmie & Emmylou – Bonus Track

Just before Christmas one year a bunch of friends and I were hanging out at Willie’s place, happy he was home from the road. He played his new song, It Always Will Be for me and I’m thinking to myself, “Man, this guy just never stops being able to crank out a killer song,” when he walks up to me and says, “Hey, after Christmas is over wanna cut a duet album?” “Sure!” Then he says, “Be thinking about what songs then and we’ll pick.” Without even thinking about it I blurted out, Let’s do Rodney Crowell’s song Till I Gain Control Again and your song Valentine ‘cause I’d love to sing those with you.” (Actually, Valentine is my favorite track on the album, but please don’t tell the other songs… and don’t tell Rodney!)

So, I started thinking and remembered the Tom Waits song, Picture in a Frame. I’d heard it on the Mule Variations album and had immediately thought what a great Willie cover that would be. I could just hear him singing, “I come callin’ in my Sunday best.” It was soooo right up his alley!

Joe Gracey and I had recently installed a new studio at Willie’s “World Headquarters Luck Texas” his western town movie set (built to shoot Red-Headed Stranger) in a tiny little wooden room just off the big room where the old antique saloon bar and kitchen were and where everybody would sit around the woodstove and play songs surrounded by Willie’s pictures and posters and memorabilia that cover the walls.

It’s a really soulful little studio and recording songs four feet away from Willie, us sitting, just a few feet away, facing each other, no need for headphones, everything is gonna “bleed” so no second chances or “fixes” later. Gracey was facing the corner at the computer, Gabe Rhodes on guitar and David Zettner on upright bass, set up on either side of us.

It’s how a record like this one should be made, good friends playing songs as they come to you, so into it you get it right on the first take, no fuss no muss– just love and songs. At one point I remember thinking that the sound in the little room made me feel like we were all sitting inside Willie’s famous guitar he was playing that day, Trigger. It felt like recording with my dear friend, hero and mentor in West Texas Heaven!

We also recorded a song I had written with Emmylou Harris that day, Love and Happiness For You, but I didn’t include it on the album in the end. I held it back because Emmy had just recorded it for her duet album with Mark Knopfler. Now its time has come! I am happy and proud to be able to unveil it as the bonus track on this special addition re-release of Picture In A Frame!

Willie and Kimmie swapping new songs with each other at Luck, Texas

Click here to back the project and pre-order now!  > https://qrates.com/projects/23599-picture-in-a-frame

Austin Book People – Texas Heritage Songwriter’s Assc. Buddy Holly – Southwest Collections Inventory

Austin Book Event for Radio Dreams Austin, Texas – February 2019 Texas Heritage Songwriter’s Assc. Buddy Holly

Texas Tech Southwest Collections Library Inventory Listing

First of all… I’m thrilled with this article written by Peter Blackstock for the Austin American Statesman. It has lots of great pictures of Joe Gracey and me that were taken by the newspaper’s archives throughout our years here in Austin. Here is the link below:

https://www.austin360.com/entertainmentlife/20190130/kimmie-rhodes-remembers-life-with-joe-gracey-in-radio-dreams

The feature includes a podcast of the interview you can listen to as well! Just click this link is below:

https://www.austin360.com/entertainmentlife/20190215/new-on-i-love-you-so-much-kimmie-rhodes-on-making-music-and-life-with-joe-gracey

(Photo by Jay Jenner Austin American Statesman)

We had an Austin book signing event at Austin’s cool indie store, Book People, that was a huge success. So many friends and fans from the past showed up that it felt like a scene out of “This Is Your Life!” 

(photo by Nancy Coplin)

(photo by Dan Bullock)

Fun things and many accomplishments have taken place since the release of my dual memoir “Radio Dreams: The Story of the Outlaw DJ and The Cosmic Cowgirl” last spring. We’ve been really busy here at Dancing Feet Press and Sunbird Music. All of the many archives from Joe Gracey’s and my own careers have now been 99% processed, preserved and placed at both Crossroads of Music Archives/Southwest Collections Library – Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas and at The Country Music Hall of Fame Museum in Nashville, TN. Last fall I worked with the folks in the archives department at CMHoF to finish making notes on the artifacts, documents and recordings that have been donated there in honor of Joe Gracey and his contribution to American Music. It’s an honor and it’s so great to know that the treasures from our decades of making music together have joined those two important collections where they will be readily available for study and research. It’s been quite a journey!

Check out the full inventory and listing of the Kimmie Rhodes Papers at this link:

https://txarchives.org/ttusw/finding_aids/40081.xml

Maria Elena Holly bestowed to me the honor of reading her acceptance speech for Buddy Holly’s induction into The Texas Heritage Songwriter’s Association in 2018 as an ambassador to The Buddy Holly Educational Foundation. There was an article in The Austin Chronicle about that night which you can check out at this link: https://www.austinchronicle.com/photos/texas-heritage-songwriters-hall-of-fame-2018/31/

(Photo by Jay Janner Austin American Statesman)

To listen to me reading the speech written by Maria Elena Holly click play:

 

If you are in Nashville be sure to visit the Country Music Hall of Fame exhibit “Outlaws and Armadillos: Country’s Roaring 70s! Here’s a link to that: https://countrymusichalloffame.org/exhibits/exhibitdetail/outlaws

 

You can download a free track of my song Radio Dreams written with Gary Nicholson on the home page here: https://kimmierhodes.com</a

(Photo by Jay Janner Austin American Statesman)

Outlaws and Armadillos: Country’s Roaring 70’s – Country Music Hall of Fame

“T for Texas – T for Tennessee”

David Conrad & Kimmie Rhodes visiting the Outlaws & Armadillos exhibit on opening night

It was one of those weekends for the music history books as artists from Texas and Tennessee joined the staff of The Country Music Hall of Fame for the opening weekend of “Outlaws and Armadillos: Country’s Roaring 70s” an exhibit that aims to put to rest the notions of rivalry and division between Nashville and Austin. In fact the exhibition is a marvel of teamwork between Texans and Tennesseans. At the heart of the exhibit are vignettes of footage produced by filmmaker Eric Geadelmann. Kimmie has served as a liaison and associate producer for that documentary which is still in progress. “They Called Us Outlaws” once completed will be a six part twelve hour series. Eric co-curated the exhibit with staffers Peter Cooper and Michael Gray.

Museum board member as well as Kimmie’s music publisher for a decade, David Conrad, put the museum in touch with her six years ago in 2012. Michael Gray in his introduction to a guest performance Kimmie did with, Bobby Earl Smith said, “In some ways Kimmie was a major catalyst for us launching this whole exhibit. It kind of started with that meeting. She’s opened a lot of doors for us and introduced us to people in Austin.” (Press link below to watch that introduction and Kimmie’s show with fellow “Jackalope Brother” Bobby Earl Smith, Jolie Goodnight Gracey and Marcia Ball.)

https://countrymusichalloffame.org/exhibits/exhibitdetail/outlaws

Kyle Young (CEO) acknowledged Kimmie in his opening remarks saying,  “A special thanks to Kimmie Rhodes whose passion offered guidance and inspiration.” Jolie Gracey also assisted in a major way, sifting through mountains of archival materials belonging to her mother, Kimmie, and father late and legendary DJ for progressive country station KOKE-FM, Joe Gracey. (See blog below for details and pictures of their visit to the archives department at the museum prior to the opening of the exhibit.)

The stellar line-up assembled for the opening night concert. Texans and Tennesseans were backed by an all-star house band put together by Dave Cobb and Shooter Jennings.

Click on this link to see footage of panels and concerts that took place over the weekend of events:

https://countrymusichalloffame.org/exhibits/exhibitdetail/outlaws

Kimmie Rhodes, David Conrad, Jolie Goodnight Gracey and Bill in front of the display case which features Joe Gracey’s hat signed by Ernest Tubb, test pressing of Double Trouble Stevie Ray Vaughan, magic slate used by Gracey and rare KOKE-FM poster.

 

Kimmie and Jolie in front of Joe Gracey exhibit at CMHoF

 

(l-r) Jolie Gracey, Peter Cooper (curator) Billy Joe Shaver, Kimmie Rhodes, Bobby Bare, Joe Ely, Jeremy Tepper (Sirius XM Radio)

 

Mother daughter Outlaw Sweethearts – Jolie Goodnight Gracey and Kimmie Rhodes

 

(l-r) Ray Wylie Hubbard, Kimmie Rhodes, Jolie Goodnight Gracey

 

(l-r) Jolie Goodnight Gracey, Eddie Wilson and Kimmie Rhodes

(l-r) Marcia Ball, Jolie Goodnight, Kimmie Rhodes, Bobby Earl Smith, Eric Smith – CMHOF Outlaws reception on May 25, 2018. Photos by Donn Jones Photography

 

(l-r) Jay Orr, Kimmie Rhodes, Jolie Goodnight, Michael Gray – CMHOF Outlaws reception on May 25, 2018. Photos by Donn Jones Photography

 

The Buddy Holly Educational Foundation – Lafayette

The Buddy Holly Educational Foundation  Lafayette, Louisiana 

Much gratitude to Mayor Pro-tem Jeff Griffith, The Buddy Holly Education Foundation and The South Louisiana Songwriters Festival & Workshop for a great few days in lovely Louisiana… especially to my home town Lubbock Texas for the special recognition and wonderful introduction to my show in Lafayette! A great honor!

Special Recognition Certificate presented to Kimmie by the City of Lubbock, Texas

 

Kimmie with board member of TBHoF (l-r) Stephen Easley, David Hirshland, Peter Bradley Jr. Sonny West (songwriter “Oh Boy” and “Rave On”) Rick French, Kimmie Rhodes

 

Kimmie Rhodes with Alphonse Ardoin at The South Louisiana Songwriters Festival & Workshop

Kimmie hosts a set with fellow songwriters (l-r) Robert Vincent (Liverpool) Grace Pettis (Austin) Kimmie Rhodes and Miles Myerscough-Harris (Oxon)

A Curious Math

 

Kimmie Rhodes as a child on a horse

Kimmie at Bobby Carol’s house in Wichita Falls Texas summer 1958

Looking back on my
girlhood I’m grateful that destiny gifted me with a loving musical role model who shaped my future and taught me the joy of writing songs. When I was an infant, only two weeks old, my mother, the breadwinner of the family, was forced to hand me over every morning so she could go to her job at the telephone company in Wichita Falls, Texas. One of my earliest memories is of a big plastic yellow radio that sat in the pass through window between the kitchen and dining room of the earthy clapboard middle class home where I spent weekdays with my babysitter, Bobby Carol. From the speakers of the radio, Buddy Holly, (who had by then died in the fateful plane crash) posthumously sang along with Bobby while she cleaned, ironed and baked homemade pies and biscuits. “That’ll Be The Day” and “Peggy Sue” and “Heartbeat…” She had a rich alto voice so I took her lead, parroting the harmony parts as if they were the melody.

Bobby was a paradox, a magnificently uncomplicated person with an ocean for a soul. She was one of those exceptional spirits so centered in her desires and beliefs that she could manage to be basically the same everyday, never moody, morose or overly dramatic. Happy or sad she dodged “the slings and arrows outrageous fortune” fires at even a lowly housewife without being knocked from her horse. She never said no when she could reasonably say yes and I loved her with all my heart.

There was, as in most houses of that time, a formal “living room” oddly named because it went unoccupied for the most part unless one was perusing the National Geographic magazine collection, decorating the Christmas tree, being inoculated by the family doctor making his occasional house call or greeting other guests who were too unknown to be invited into the “den” off the kitchen area where all the real living took place and where cartoons were watched. Sometimes, out of the blue and always when just the two of us were alone in the house of an afternoon a rare and beautiful hour would occur. Bobby would finally take a break, seating herself on the swiveling stool of the ornate pump organ, which was the centerpiece of the room. I would sit in the floor quietly watching in awe as she transformed from the hard working substitute mother in a cotton dress and homemade apron into an angel who brought down a very powerful magic by way of the tones exhaled from her chest in concert with the bellows of the fascinating instrument. As she rocked back and forth pumping with her feet, manipulating the keys and the stops with her elegant work worn hands, she and the clunking wooden machine became one. I followed as she drifted into a time continuum that was strangely different from our task based mediocrity into a place where everything, the timbre of her voice, the overtones from the organ and the space that surrounded each note hung absolutely still in the vibrating air that filled the room.

 

It was a truly holy experience, though the pieces were not always hymns. Show tunes and campfire cowboy and old world folklore ballads were decoded by a curious math, black and white spaces, staffs and circles and sophisticated symbols, scribed inside paper folders decorated with colorfully illustrated covers. I would practice drawing G and treble clefs. Notes and rests on lines intermingled with crayon daisies and houses and sunshines with faces and rays for hair and eyelashes. “What a Friend We Have In Jesus”, “Tumbling Tumbleweed” “Pennies From Heaven” “Stardust”, clever, trippy words and melodies took us far away as we wandered through songs and songs and songs!

Innocently I discovered that this new realm existed and began to experiment and found that by singing whatever was happening, whether playing or bathing or even drifting off to sleep, I could filter reality back into that wonderfully still place where what is can be named and better understood by way of a mysterious alchemy… where the metal of a normal life becomes gold.

pump-organ-painting

Oil on Canvas by Kimmie Rhodes

I learned to think in this way as a kid and to this day when I‘ve gone to “that place” in my mind people tell me they say things to me several times before I hear them. My own children laugh and tease me about how they became accustomed to having to bring me back from dreamland by finally yelling, “Mama, Mama, MAMA!” I’ve heard it referred to as “having your head in the clouds.” I call it writing, though there is no pen and paper involved.

Somewhere on a level beneath what happens the meaning of life is hidden and it’s a poets’ work to find and bring it into the daylight. I’m hooked on spotting the irony that’s buried slightly below the obvious because it brings me clarity and peace of mind. Without writing I would be trapped inside with no way out of myself. The added pleasure of being able to communicate through underscored rhymes, using sounds that speak deeper than words is to me like the eighth wonder of the universe.

 

Here are links to some of my songs, which I think best express the meaning and happiness of those wonderful childhood days.

Love & Happiness For You (Love Me Like A Song CD)

I Just Drove By (Ten Summers and Jackalopes, Moons & Angels CD)

Me Again (Cowgirl Boudoir CD)

This Is The Gift (Rich From The Journey CD)

 

The sound of the precious old pump organ, which now resides in my studio can be heard on these recordings:

Wild Roses (West Texas Heaven CD)

We’ve Done This Before (Picture In A Frame CD)

Witness To The Crime (Love Me Like A Song CD)

Darkness Lifting (Love Me Like A Song CD)

 

Note: This and future archival posts include excerpts from “Radio Dreams” the combined memoirs of Kimmie Rhodes and Joe Gracey scheduled for release Spring 2018.  Read Synopsis

 

 

RAY BENSON READS HIS LETTER TO JOE GRACEY

In May 1978 upon hearing that legendary DJ Joe Gracey of KOKE-FM in Austin, Texas had lost his voice to cancer, his friend Ray Benson of Asleep at The Wheel, wrote him this poignant letter of encouragement. This is Ray Benson reading the letter he wrote back then.

 

 

 

 

Joe Gracey’s 1st Letter to Kimmie

Joe Gracey’s 1st Letter to Kimmie

The day I first met Joe Gracey at his studio “Electric Graceyland” in the basement of KOKE-FM in Austin, Texas he had just undergone seven major surgeries and finally lost his voice to cancer. A mutual friend, TJ McFarland, who introduced us had already filled me in on some facts about him, the most poignant being that he had not only been a ground-breaking DJ on the favorite local station KOKE-FM, but also a great singer-songwriter who had been on the brink of having his first album produced by the legendary Cowboy Jack Clement. I was stunned by Gracey’s courage and determination to not just survive in a world where he could no longer speak, let alone sing, but actually thrive as a songwriter and record producer. My own “singer’s heart” immediately found cause though it would take some time before just how important that meeting really was to be revealed.

I recorded the handful of my first songs I’d written that day with his help but in the days that followed he taught me some of his own songs. One day soon after that I went to my mailbox and found an unexpected letter from Gracey saying that he loved the way I sang his songs. How it felt to be able to bring him joy by singing his songs for him is still, after many decades, a feeling that is too deep for words.

I kept that letter written January 9, 1980 and it is by far my most prized worldly possession. When I read it I laugh and think had he known when he wrote it what he was really signing on for he might never have mailed it! We married a couple of years later and raised three kids and spent many decades making beautiful music together. He gave the better part of his life to supporting me as an artist by believing in me and “helping me in my career in any way he could.”

Recently I was honored to be asked to place this letter in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, TN. So, I proudly offer this letter to the public as “Exhibit A” in proof of what gifts will come sailing in, right out of the blue, when you remember to trust life. That we are living at all is witness enough that anything can happen when we believe.

Kimmie Rhodes

 

This is an excerpt from Radio Dreams a dual memoir written by Joe Gracey & Kimmie Rhodes. To pre-order the book or the companion audio documentary produced by Bob Harris,  due out Spring 2018, or to support the Radio Dreams project in preserving and donating archives important to Texas music history please click here for more information > http://bit.ly/RadioDreams 

Push play to hear Kimmie’s first recording of a Joe Gracey penned song, “You’ll Take Care of You” recorded & produced by Gracey in 1981.

 

Kimmie in 1980 (photo courtesy of photographer Nancy Wheeler)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 To purchase music from Kimmie’s first three album releases, click here > https://kimmierhodes.com/album/jackalopes-moons-angels/