Boudoir Cowgirl Kimmie looks back on her life of song

Texan singer/songwriter Kimmie Rhodes is a true star of the down-home ‘outlaw’ prog-country music scene, known for her rich vocals, what she calls a ‘cowpunkadelical’ sound that references her unique range of musical influences from the Stones to the Beatles and a welter of country artists she is also known for having collaborated with, including Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson and Billy Joe Shaver.

Rhodes released her first album in 1981 and has released 16 collections since as well as having penned a substantial catalogue of songs that were recorded by other artists including Wynonna Judd, Trisha Yearwood, Amy Grant, CeCe Winans, Peter Frampton, Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris.

In many ways she remains best known for her collaborations with Willie Nelson - especially their 2002 duet album Picture in the Frame.

Talking to the News Letter ahead of a winter tour to promote the March release of her new album, Boudoir Cowgirl, which will see her perform in Antrim and Lisburn, the Austin-native is effortlessly charming, her sing-song Texan accent gorgeously exotic to the local ear, and her backstory so very rich.

“My dad was orphaned during the Great Depression in America and he was used to having to make it on his own from about the age of seven,” she muses, when asked how she came to find her path as a singer. “He really didn’t have much of a clue about how to be a dad. Looking back I can see what he did, he started teaching me to sing and taking me on his rounds - there were all these car lots in Lubbock, Texas where I grew up. What I didn’t realise at the time was that these car lots were really fronts for gambling organisations, book making was illegal, and he’d have me in the front singing songs for dimes while he’d be in the back checking his bets. So actually I started my career in this wild, really sort of carnival atmosphere. I became used to entertaining I guess from a very young age. I think my dad was always looking at me and saying, ‘if she had to make it on her own, what talents could she develop?’ And I always had my voice and my love of singing.”

With a background like that, Kimmie was surely destined to be an artist, although for a time she confides that she was mesmerised by flower arranging too.

“As a kid I used to always take my lunch money and walk down a busy street I wasn’t supposed to go down. My mother would be at work and I’d take my money and go by this flower shop on the busy side of the street. I love flowers and always have them in my house, but back then I used to be fascinated by the paper and the way they’d wrap these bunches of flowers up so pretty. By the time I’d got back to school I would have always given someone my bunch of flowers away. That was another way I had of exploring my creative side.”

Now touring the UK, with two dates in Northern Ireland just around the corner - at the Old Courthouse in Antrim on January 21 and the Island Arts Centre in Lisburn on January 22 - she is also currently writing a book called Radio Dreams, much of it detailing her 30-year marriage to music producer and DJ Jim Gracey, a pioneer of the whole ‘Austin-centric freak musical revolution’ as she describes it, when country music began to take on an ‘outlaw’ grittyness that incorporated roots music and a defiant cowboys-and-cowgirls attitude.

She describes the release of new album Boudoir Cowgirl as having helped her overcome her grief at the death of her husband and begin to creatively and personally look to the future once more.

Though the CD includes three tracks that touch on her husband’s death such as Don’t Leave Me Like This, Rhodes says she was finally ready to sing about moving forward.

“For 30 years, he would breathe out and I would breathe in. But I had to find my autonomy and let some light into that place where I was.”

Kimmie is joined on her new string of dates by her musician and producer son Gabriel Rhodes who she credits as having kick-started a new enthusiasm in her work.

Her career proper was hugely influenced by her second husband. She first arrived in Austin in 1979 after the end of her first marriage and some years spent living on a farm raising two sons, and swiftly met and fell in love with Gracey, who became her constant compaion, muse, bass player, record producer and business partner until he died of cancer at the age of 61 in November 2011.

“We got married but he had lost his voice to cancer and he didn’t say one word for 30 years. We had 30 wonderful, blissful years of being together and working in the music industry and he passed away four years ago leaving all these memoirs and recordings. So now I am trying to write our story which I hope to release alongside a musical retrospective of my career.”

Back in the early 80s she and Gracey formed a band with Bobby Earl Smith, Kimmie Rhodes & The Jackalope Brothers and they would write and record songs in Gracey’s basement studio. Rhodes recorded her first album at Willie Nelson’s privately owned Pedernales Studios in Spicewood, Texas in 1980 and then fronted The Texas Tunesmiths led by steel guitarist, Jimmy Day, as well as continuing to tour, playing traditional and prog-country music and western swing in dancehalls.

Her career to date has been dizzyingly eventful; she appeared on Austin City Limits with Emmylou Harris, Dave Matthews, Patty Griffin, and Buddy and Julie Miller, where she and Emmylou performed their song Ordinary Heart. She has also collaborated repreatedly with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson.

She doesn’t hesitate when asked who she most enjoyed performing with - the one and only Willie Nelson; in many circles she remains best known for her work with him - two of her originals for his album Just One Love and their album, Picture in a Frame. “Just for the sheer wild, showbiz entertainment of it all I suppose I’d have to say working with Willie Nelson was the highlight,” she laughs. “The world of a superstar is like no other. It’s always fun and interesting to get to share that world with Willie, his entourage of crazy that he likes to call ‘Willie and family’. I’ve done movies and TV shows with him and that’s the thing too - the projects are always so interesting.”

Rhodes co-wrote a song, Lines, with Waylon Jennings for his Justice release and in the late 1980s, she filmed a weekly television series, cast as the Outlaw Sweetheart for The Johnny Gimble Show for Nelson’s satellite Cowboy Channel. Because she was never part of a straight country scene, but rather part of the ‘outlaw’ rootsy genre - a stubborn, ornery breed of country music that developed in Nashville and Austin in the 1960s and 70s championed by Nelson and Waylon Jennings - she is currently working as associate producer for a documentrary for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, entitled They Called Us Outlaws.

She describes her own unique musical trajectory thus: “I never once focused on what I felt was mainstream, and always just made the kind of art I was most passionate about.

“That just led me to working with Willie or Cowboy Jack Clement or anybody else, who accepted me as one of them, so that was rewarding enough. I just stayed on my own path, rather than jump on some superhighway.”

lAs part of her current tour Kimmie will perform two Ulster dates at the Old Courthouse, Antrim on January 21 and the Island Hall in Lisburn on January 22. Contact the relevant venue for tickets and booking information.