Jimmie Dale Gilmore

Jimmie Dale Gilmore has one of the most instantly recognizable voices in American music, a tremulously high, soulful twang that makes Lefty Frizzell sound like an investment banker by comparison. Starting with the Flatlanders in 1973, his career path has been fitful and elusive, and even if he hadn't spent the better part of the '70s getting his mystic on in an ashram in Colorado, his musical concept — a fusion of honky-tonk and neo-psychedelic folk rock — would never have sounded at home on country radio, even at its most progressive. Gilmore sings every song as if it were a personal dedication to the desolate, sun-scarred landscape of his native Lubbock, Texas, as if he knows the loneliest of stories and can give them the most necessary and undiluted of country voices.