Johnny Gimble (1926 to 2015) was the swing fiddler who carried the Bob Wills sound from the Texas dance halls of the 1940s to the Nashville studios of the 1970s and back home again. He played with Wills’s Texas Playboys, cut thousands of sessions for Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, and George Strait, and won five CMA Musician of the Year awards and two Grammys. The Country Music Hall of Fame inducted him in 2018. His electric mandolin work has its own page.
Why Gimble matters
Gimble is the reason a country fiddle break can swing. He took the breakdown fiddling of east Texas, mixed it with big band jazz, and made a style built on long, loose lines, jazz chords, and a five-string fiddle that reached down into viola range. Every twin fiddle part on a Nashville record from the 1970s on owes him something. So does every Texas contest player who plays a swing tune.
Life and career
John Paul Gimble was born on May 30, 1926, in Tyler, Texas, and grew up on a farm near Bascom. By fourteen he and his brothers had a band, the Rose City Swingsters, on local radio. After high school he played on KWKH in Shreveport, and by 1943 he was playing banjo in the campaign band for Jimmie Davis’s run for governor of Louisiana. He served in the Army in World War II.
Back in Texas he joined Buck Roberts’s Rhythmairs in Corpus Christi and made his first record with them in 1948. There he showed a trademark he kept for life: scat singing in unison with his fiddle. Bob Wills hired him in 1949, and Gimble played fiddle and electric mandolin with the Texas Playboys, often in duets with mandolinist Tiny Moore. He left Wills in 1951 to lead his own group, rejoined in 1953, and worked with the Playboys on and off into the early 1960s. In between he settled in Dallas, played the Big D Jamboree, and cut sessions at Jim Beck’s studio with Marty Robbins and Ray Price. His fiddle is on Robbins’s number one hit I’ll Go On Alone.
In 1955 Gimble moved to Waco, where he cut hair at the Veterans Administration hospital by day and played dances on weekends. He hosted Johnny Gimble and the Homefolks on KWTX-TV, and a young bass player from Abbott named Willie Nelson worked on the show. In 1961 Gimble was staff fiddler on NBC’s 5 Star Jubilee from Springfield, Missouri.
In 1968 he moved to Nashville with his family and five thousand dollars in savings. He arrived as the fiddle was coming back into fashion and became one of the busiest session players in town. He played on Merle Haggard’s If We Make It Through December, Conway Twitty’s You’ve Never Been This Far Before, and records by Lefty Frizzell, Loretta Lynn, and Chet Atkins. In 1974 he released his first solo album, Fiddlin’ Around, and in 1975 he won the first of his five CMA Instrumentalist of the Year awards.
Gimble moved back to Texas in the 1980s. He toured the world with Willie Nelson from 1979 to 1981 and appeared in Nelson’s film Honeysuckle Rose. In 1982 he played Bob Wills in Clint Eastwood’s Honkytonk Man, and his single One Fiddle, Two Fiddle from that film reached country radio. He co-led the Wills revival band Playboys II with steel guitarist Herb Remington and became a regular on Austin City Limits and A Prairie Home Companion. The National Endowment for the Arts gave him a National Heritage Fellowship in 1994. He won Grammys with Asleep at the Wheel for Red Wing in 1994 and Hightower in 1996. Texas named him its State Musician for 2005. His last album, Celebrating with Friends (2010), paired him with Haggard, Nelson, Vince Gill, his son Dick, and his granddaughter Emily.
Gimble died on May 9, 2015, in Marble Falls, Texas, three weeks short of his 89th birthday. The Country Music Hall of Fame inducted him in 2018.
Playing style
Gimble played a five-string fiddle with an added low string, which let him drop below the normal fiddle range for chord tones and bass runs. He also played electric mandolin, and the two instruments fed each other: his fiddle lines have the chord awareness of a mandolin player, and his mandolin solos have a fiddler’s slides.
His right hand is loose and jazzy. Where a breakdown fiddler saws in straight eighth notes, Gimble swings them, lays back behind the beat, and leaves space. His left hand is full of chromatic passing tones and jazz double stops, the harmony he heard in the horn sections of the swing bands. On Gardenia Waltz he plays wide, sweet double stops. On Black and White Rag he plays fast and clean and still swings. And he sang along with his solos, scatting the same notes his bow played.
Influences and legacy
Gimble learned from the breakdown fiddlers around Tyler and from the first generation of western swing fiddlers: Cliff Bruner, Louis Tierney, Jesse Ashlock, and J.R. Chatwell. Working beside Bob Wills put him at the center of the music. Jim Day of the Texas Old Time Fiddlers Association called him the most gifted fiddler who ever played in Wills’s band.
His reach ran through Nashville and Austin. Mark O’Connor recorded Fiddlin’ Around with him on the 1993 album Heroes, which brought Gimble a Grammy nomination. Asleep at the Wheel’s Ray Benson produced his final album. Benny Thomasson and Eck Robertson share a place with him in the Texas Fiddlers Hall of Fame. His son Dick Gimble played bass in his bands, and the two ran a western swing camp. His granddaughter Emily Gimble played with Asleep at the Wheel and was named Texas State Musician for 2020.
Signature tunes and songs
Fiddlin’ Around Gardenia Waltz Under the X in Texas Slow ‘N Easy Blues One Fiddle, Two Fiddle Faded Love Right or Wrong.
Essential recordings
Fiddlin’ Around (1974) Johnny Gimble’s Texas Dance Party (Columbia, 1976) The Texas Fiddle Collection (CMH, 1981) Still Fiddlin’ Around (MCA, 1988) Celebrating with Friends (2010)
Awards and honors
CMA Instrumentalist of the Year, later Musician of the Year (five wins, first in 1975) Academy of Country Music fiddle player award (multiple wins, counted as nine by the Country Music Hall of Fame) Grammy nomination, Best Country Instrumental Performance, Live from Austin City Limits with the Nashville Super Pickers (1980) Grammy nomination, Best Country Instrumental Performance, The Texas Fiddle Collection (1982) Grammy nomination, Best Country Instrumental Performance, Still Fiddlin’ Around (1989) Grammy Award, Best Country Instrumental Performance, Red Wing with Asleep at the Wheel (1994) Grammy nomination, Best Country Instrumental Performance, Fiddlin’ Around with Mark O’Connor (1994) NEA National Heritage Fellowship (1994) Texas Fiddlers Hall of Fame (1995) Grammy Award, Best Country Instrumental Performance, Hightower with Asleep at the Wheel and Béla Fleck (1996) Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Musical Influence category, with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (1999) Texas State Musician (2005) Country Music Hall of Fame (2018)
Watch and listen
Gimble plays Black and White Rag on television in 1981. Watch how relaxed his bow arm stays at speed.
Gimble and Mark O’Connor play Fiddlin’ Around together. Listen for Gimble’s scat singing under his own solo.
What to learn from Gimble
Learn Gardenia Waltz. It teaches swing double stops at a slow tempo, where you have time to hear each chord change and find the two notes that fit it. The technique to steal is his swing feel. Take a breakdown you already know, such as Sally Goodin, and play the eighth notes long-short instead of even. Lay back a hair behind the guitar, then add one chromatic note on the way into each chord change. That is the door from fiddle tunes into western swing.
Sources
Johnny Gimble, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Johnny Gimble, NEA National Heritage Fellow, National Endowment for the Arts Johnny Gimble, Grammy Awards and nominations, Recording Academy Johnny Gimble passes, Bluegrass Today Texas Fiddlers Hall of Fame, Fiddlers’ Frolics Official Texas State Musicians, Texas State Library and Archives Commission Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Johnny Gimble, Wikipedia
Related players
See the fiddle players hub and the fiddle guide for more swing and contest fiddlers. Gimble played beside Bob Wills and recorded with Mark O’Connor. For the Nashville session world he joined in 1968, see Buddy Spicher and Tommy Jackson. For the Texas fiddle roots he grew from, see Benny Thomasson and Eck Robertson. His twin mandolin work with Tiny Moore is on his mandolin page.