“The message in our kind of music is ‘Have a good time,’” the late Texas fiddler Johnny Gimble once said. “Even if you’re doing a brokenhearted song, you can’t help but play it with a happy beat.”
That’s a perfect description of Still Swingin’, the 1980 album by Gimble and the Western Swing Pioneers, which came out for the first time on digital and streaming services on May 17. Cut mostly in North Dallas at the legendary Sumet-Bernet studio, eight years after the Rolling Stones recorded there, Still Swingin’ also features tunes performed live on KRLD radio. The 21 songs are classic Gimble, from “Don’t Be Ashamed of Your Age” to “Fort Worth Hambone Blues.”
Born in Tyler, Gimble (1926-2015) lived in Dallas in the ‘50s and was a regular on the radio show The Big D Jamboree. He later moved to Nashville and Waco, recorded with a slew of country legends, and helped launch Willie Nelson’s career (Willie returned the favor by casting him in Honeysuckle Rose.) He was a fine singer and mandolin player — and part-time barber, too — but he’s best known for his virtuosic fiddle playing, especially with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, who hired him in 1949.
“It was the thrill of my life, like going to the New York Yankees if you were a ballplayer,” he says in Gimble’s Swing, a 1981 short documentary by the late Dallas filmmaker Ken Harrison, available for free on YouTube.
