Jimmie Dale Gilmore is a dapper, long-haired, cowboy-booted Texan, equal parts Hank Williams, Roy Orbison and Zen poet. One Endless Night is a sterling collection of well-crafted songs that amply reflect the man’s artistry.
Gilmore wrote the title track and co-wrote one other song on One Endless Night. Most of the rest were penned by other Texas singer-songwriters, including the late Townes Van Zandt, Butch Hancock, Willis Alan Ramsey and Walter Hyatt.
A unifying theme among the songs is longing for loves past, present and future. Delivered in Gilmore’s quavering tenor, lines like “Your gift to me/is nothing I can hold/The silence fades away/to find the song,” from the title track, and “We slept like time itself/under diamond skies,” in Hancock’s “Banks of the Guadalupe,” are rare gifts. Gilmore made many good choices of material to cover, including Van Zandt’s “No Lonesome Tune,” with it’s refrain of “Your lost high-roller’s comin’ home today,” Hancock’s lively honky-tonk shuffle, “Ramblin’ Man,” and Jesse Winchester’s “Defying Gravity.”
Three other songs are not so obvious choices for this country-tinged album, but each works excellently in its own way. The Sixties folk chestnut “Darcy Farrow” has been recorded by Ian and Sylvia, John Denver and Nanci Griffith (among others), and Gilmore’s version is a strong one with an excellent arrangement featuring swelling B3 organ, rumbling tom-toms, jangling bouzouki and soaring electric guitar.
Gilmore takes the Grateful Dead’s Zen anthem “Ripple” and displays it as the classic American folksong it is. Rob Gjersoe’s Dobro and Tammy Rogers’ fiddle add just the right touches, as do Jim Lauderdale’s spare backing vocals.
Most curious of all is the Brecht-Weill standard, “Mack the Knife.” Gilmore has slowed the tune down to a langourous, torchy ballad that perfectly fits his vocal style, and once again Gjersoe’s guitar and Phil Madeira’s organ are right on the money. Ol’ Mack has moved gracefully from the cabarets of Berlin to a nightclub in Dallas without losing any of his glamor or his dangerous edge.
Touching yet another of the cultural bases of Texas is the Mexican cantina ballad “Blue Shadows,” penned by Gilmore and Hal Ketchum, with lovely backing vocals by the group Cry Cry Cry — Richard Shindell, Lucy Kaplansky and Dar Williams.
In fact, much of the credit for the easy way One Endless Night settles on the eardrums goes to Gilmore’s choice of collaborators. They include Emmylou Harris, Victoria Williams and Julie Miller on vocals, Darrell Scott on a variety of stringed instruments, Jim Hoke on autoharp, and sideman extraordinaire Buddy Miller on guitars and backing vocals. The rhythm section of bassist Byron House and drummer Don Heffington is similarly solid.
Some of the songs stray perilously close to over-production, but never quite cross the line. Gilmore and Miller, who did the producing, may have been tempted to add strings to some of the slower tunes, but thankfully, they resisted. A couple of the tracks don’t quite measure up to the rest of the material, particularly John Hiatt’s sentimental “Your Love is My Rest” and Walter Hyatt’s by-the-numbers “Georgia Rose.” But overall, _One Endless Night_ is an excellent album. That extends to the packaging and liner notes, which are simple but effective. Lyrics, more photos and additional information are available at Gilmore’s website.
(Rounder, 2000)
