Johnny Gimble

Fiddle Legend Johnny Gimble Goes Solo 

With CMH Records’ Johnny Gimble: Celebrating with Friends

Ray Benson-Produced Project Features Vince Gill, Willie Nelson, Garrison Keillor, Merle Haggard and more.

Los Angeles – With a career that spans close to seven decades of recordings and performances with some of the true giants of music, Johnny Gimble and his fiddle have long since become an indelible part of the American musical fabric. From Bob Wills to Merle Haggard to Willie Nelson to Vince Gill, all the way to Carrie Underwood, Gimble has spent his amazing career injecting the virtuosic sounds of his pure-Texas fiddle and the unflappable power of his personality into the hit recordings of the biggest artists in the business. 

Now it’s his turn. With the February 16 release of CMH Records’ Johnny Gimble: Celebrating with Friends, the venerable sideman takes center stage, joining a star-filled list of friends on a project that alternately swings, jumps and waltzes its way across Texas and beyond. For fans of authentic country music, Celebrating with Friends is a dream come true. For the man himself, it’s the album of a lifetime.

Born in Bascom, Texas, in 1926, Gimble began his career playing with and learning from his musical uncles, John and Paul, who played fiddle and mandolin. By 1940, the youngster was proficient enough on both those instruments to join his brothers performing as the Rose City Swingsters on a local radio show in Tyler, Texas. After a long series of formative gigs, Gimble joined the great Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys in 1949. 

By 1951, Gimble was leading his own band, and in the late ‘60s he moved to Nashville, performing on countless sessions before returning to the Lone Star State. Over the years, his brilliant playing has earned him many awards, among them several CMAs and ACMs as well as a National Heritage Fellowship Award, presented by First Lady Hillary Clinton in 1994. 

With the release of Celebrating with Friends, the master fiddler comes full circle, joining a group of old and new friends – including Vince Gill, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and album producer, Asleep at the Wheel’s Ray Benson. Augmented by younger Gimble disciples like Dale Watson and Jesse Dayton (as well as his granddaughter, Emily Gimble, on vocals, and son Dick on bass), the album is less of a tribute than a living, breathing musical triptych that somehow manages to sound utterly contemporary even as it celebrates deeply held musical traditions. 

Every player on Johnny Gimble: Celebrating with Friends pours his or her heart and soul into these performances. A Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor weighs in with an appreciative tune he wrote called “Owed to Johnny Gimble.” But it was longtime Gimble collaborator and Western Swing/jazz guitar legend Kenny Frasier who perhaps said it best: “Johnny Gimble was a big influence on me because he never told me what to play; he just set an example.”

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