Johnny Gimble (1926 to 2015) is best known as a western swing fiddler, but the Country Music Hall of Fame names him as an electric mandolinist too. He grew up playing fiddle and mandolin with his brothers around Tyler, Texas. Bob Wills hired him after Tiny Moore heard him play mandolin, and from 1949 to 1951 Gimble played fiddle and electric mandolin in the Texas Playboys, often in duets with Moore. His fiddle career, from Nashville sessions to the Country Music Hall of Fame, is on his fiddle page.
Why Gimble matters
Gimble and Tiny Moore played twin electric mandolins in the Texas Playboys. The Country Music Hall of Fame describes their duets as intricate, and the two were still playing together on Austin City Limits in 1981. Gimble also made his electric mandolin his own. He wired it himself, tuned it low like a mandola, and got a sound that sat below Moore’s.
Life and career
John Paul Gimble was born on May 30, 1926, in Tyler, Texas, and grew up on a farm near Bascom. His family played guitars, fiddles, and mandolins after a day in the cotton fields. His older brother Bill started on fiddle and mandolin and passed along what he learned when Johnny was nine. By his early teens Johnny was playing with his brothers on a radio show in Tyler, three days a week for 15 minutes at a time.
After World War II he joined the Roberts Brothers Rhythmaires. He had already met Moore at Mattie’s Ballroom in Longview, where the Texas Playboys played, and had once sat in with the band. In 1949 the Rhythmaires opened for Wills at the Trocadero Ballroom in Corpus Christi. Gimble was on stage playing mandolin when Moore walked in, heard him, and yelled, “I’m gonna kill you.” At the break Moore told him fiddler Jesse Ashlock was leaving and asked if Gimble wanted the job.
Gimble joined the Texas Playboys in 1949 and stayed until 1951. He played fiddle and electric mandolin, often in duets with Moore. His mandolin was a Gibson A-50 that he wired himself with a guitar pickup from Montgomery Ward. Soon after he joined, it broke down while the band was in California. Leo Fender fitted it with a Telecaster-style pickup and new volume and tone controls for $15, and Wills paid the bill.
After he left Wills in 1951, Gimble stayed in Texas and played fiddle and mandolin on records by Marty Robbins, Lefty Frizzell, and Ray Price at Jim Beck’s studio in Dallas. In 1981 he joined Moore, Jethro Burns, and guitarist Eldon Shamblin on Austin City Limits, with Gimble on four-string electric mandolin and fiddle. In 1985 Buddy McPeters interviewed him at length about his electric mandolin for Frets magazine. When the Austin Chronicle visited his Dripping Springs home in 2002, a mandolin stood set up beside his fiddle. Gimble died on May 9, 2015, in Marble Falls, Texas.
Playing style
Gimble played electric mandolin with four single strings, not the usual eight. He tuned it a fifth below standard mandolin pitch, the same as a mandola, and he bought Gibson mandola strings in the 1950s and 1960s while they were still made. In the 1980s he strung it with gauges from .011 to .046. The result, by McPeters’s account, was a sound a little lower and thinner than Moore’s.
In the 1981 Austin City Limits set, three mandolins share the stage: Jethro Burns on a standard eight-string, Moore on his five-string Bigsby solid body, and Gimble on his four-string electric.
Influences and legacy
Gimble learned from his brothers and from the western swing fiddlers around him, including Cliff Bruner and J.R. Chatwell. Tiny Moore was his mandolin partner in the Texas Playboys and the man who brought him into the band. He played beside Bob Wills, Eldon Shamblin, and later Jethro Burns.
Asleep at the Wheel, the band Gimble won two Grammys with, later carried the Wills repertoire with Dennis Ludiker on fiddle and mandolin.
Awards and honors
CMA Instrumentalist of the Year, later Musician of the Year (five wins, first in 1975) NEA National Heritage Fellowship (1994) Grammy Award, Best Country Instrumental Performance, Red Wing with Asleep at the Wheel (1994) Grammy Award, Best Country Instrumental Performance, Hightower with Asleep at the Wheel (1996) Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (1999) Country Music Hall of Fame (2018)
Watch and listen
Gimble joins Tiny Moore, Jethro Burns, and Eldon Shamblin on Austin City Limits in 1981. Watch for three different mandolins in one band: Burns’s eight-string, Moore’s five-string Bigsby, and Gimble’s four-string electric.
What to learn from Gimble
Learn a swing melody such as Faded Love as single notes on mandolin, with no tremolo, the way an electric player would. Then find a second mandolin player and work out a twin part a third below the melody. That is the Gimble and Moore sound in its simplest form. The technique to steal is voicing. Gimble’s low tuning put his mandolin in a different range from Moore’s. If you play twin parts with another mandolin, have the lower player stay down the neck and the higher player stay up, so the two parts do not crowd each other.
Sources
Johnny Gimble, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Johnny Gimble, Wikipedia King of the swing fiddle, Jim Caligiuri, Austin Chronicle (2002) Johnny Gimble, the common man as master, Michael Corcoran (2011) Johnny Gimble, Tiny Moore and Gibson EM-150 electric mandolins, Vintage Mandolin Mandolin special: Johnny Gimble, Tiny Moore, Jethro Burns, Eldon Shamblin, BatesLine (2017) Johnny Gimble, NEA National Heritage Fellow, National Endowment for the Arts
Related players
See the mandolin players hub and the mandolin guide. Tiny Moore was Gimble’s twin mandolin partner, and Jethro Burns joined them both in 1981. Dennis Ludiker played fiddle and mandolin in Asleep at the Wheel. Gimble’s fiddle career is on his fiddle page.