All contemporary photos taken at the Remedy Room
in Aledo, TX by Alan Mercer
In her three-decade-plus career, Austin-based singer-songwriter Kimmie Rhodes has released 16 solo albums, written and produced three musical plays, published a novella/cookbook and written many multi-platinum songs, recorded by such stellar artists as Willie Nelson, Wynonna Judd, Trisha Yearwood, Amy Grant, CeCe Winans, Joe Ely, Waylon Jennings, Peter Frampton, Mark Knopfler, Emmylou Harris and others. A native Texan, she was raised in Lubbock, where she cultivated the spirited mix of talent and determination that still fuels her success.
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Kimmie began her singing career at the age of six with her family gospel trio. She moved to Austin in 1979, where she met DJ at the legendary KOKE-FM and producer Joe Gracey, an instrumental figure in the Austin progressive country scene, who she eventually married. Joe was her constant companion, muse, bass player and general "partner in crime" until he died of cancer in November 2011.
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Kimmie with Joe Gracey
After several years of sifting through archives and journals left behind by her late soul mate, beloved radio personality Joe Gracey, Kimmie Rhodes has put the finishing touches on her latest labor of love, "Radio Dreams: The Story of the Outlaw DJ and the Cosmic Cowgirl," a "duet memoir" that weaves her own poetic prose with wry and witty musings from Gracey.
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Released in spring 2018,"Radio Dreams" invites readers into their private world, returning Joe to the conversation to help tell the fascinating story of their lives. Her trippy songwriter’s tales and his alternately hilarious and poignant writings take readers on a time-machine adventure, from Saturday mornings spent watching country-and-western TV stars to the wild ‘70s era in which Vietnam war-protesting hippies, weary of the fight, kicked back with rednecks to play some music in the “Groover’s Paradise” of Austin, Texas.
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In 1981 she recorded her first album, Kimmie Rhodes and the Jackalope Brothers when Willie Nelson invited her to use his studio. In 1985 she recorded her second album Man In the Moon. Her third album Angels Get The Blues, recorded at the original Sun Studio in Memphis, was released in 1989. Kimmie’s 1998 CD release is a compilation of original songs from these three albums called 'Jackalopes, Moons & Angels.'
Kimmie's promotional tours created a solid fan base in the U.K., Ireland and Europe. She has headlined with her band at festivals all over the world and has appeared on many European and American TV and radio broadcasts. She has also appeared at many of Willie’s Farm Aid concerts and July 4th Picnics. Willie dubbed Kimmie “an undiscovered superstar” and together they recorded two of her originals for his album ‘Just One Love’ and a duet CD, ‘Picture in a Frame.’
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Photo by Alan Messer
Kimmie Rhodes has been serving as an associate producer on filmmaker Eric Geadelmann’s six-part documentary, ‘They Called Us Outlaws.’ Dedicated to the memory of Joe Gracey and Waylon Jennings, it is being presented in association with The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum ‘Outlaws and Armadillos: Country’s Roaring ‘70s’ exhibit which opened May 2018 and will run until 2021.
In her role as honorary ambassador for The Buddy Holly Educational Foundation, Kimmie visits Glastonbury, England annually to attend Squeeze co-founder Chris Difford’s songwriting retreat at Pennard House, where established singer-songwriters share knowledge and co-write with aspiring young talents. Foundation co-founders and Holly’s widow, Maria Elena Holly, celebrated Kimmies’ efforts by presenting her with a custom-made guitar crafted by famed luthier Alistair Atkin. A replica of Buddy Holly’s 1943 J-45, the guitar is encased in hand-tooled leather featuring the words “Lonesome Tears,” the Holly song for which it’s named. Fellow ambassadors with whom Rhodes shares this special honor, each presented with a uniquely titled guitar, include Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Brian Wilson, Dolly Parton and Bob Dylan.
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Kimmie with Willie Nelson
Kimmie appeared on Austin City Limits with Emmylou Harris, Dave Mathews, Patty Griffin, and Buddy & Julie Miller, where she and Emmylou performed their song “Ordinary Heart”. She guested on Late Night With David Letterman, performing “West Texas Heaven” at his request. Kimmie’s TV appearances also include a songwriter “guitar pull” Austin City Limits show with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Billy Joe Shaver. New West Records recently released a DVD of that show titled “Outlaw Country”. She performed in two segments of The Nashville Network’s “Legend Series” hosted by Willie Nelson and another hosted by Waylon Jennings. Waylon said, “When I hear Kimmie sing it makes me know what the phrase ‘pulling on your heart strings’ means.” Kimmie co-wrote a song, “Lines”, with Waylon for his release 'Right For The Time.'
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Kimmie with Waylon Jennings
Kimmie’s movie soundtrack credits include “A Heart That’s True” for the “Babe: A Pig in the City” CD, “I’m Not An Angel” featured in the soundtrack of “Mrs. Winterbourne” and a song in the “Daddy’s Dyin’ Who’s Got the Will” soundtrack.
Her song “Shine All Your Light”, co-written with Beth Nielson Chapman, was recorded by Amy Grant for the Touched By An Angel TV series soundtrack and CD, which reached the Top Ten in Billboard’s CD charts.
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Kimmie Rhodes album covers
Kimmie’s 1996 CD West Texas Heaven features 12 of her original songs and includes duets with Waylon Jennings, Townes Van Zandt and Willie Nelson. USA Today said, “listening to West Texas Heaven is like a sweet unhurried ramble through bluebonnets”, picking the album for their “Best Bets” section. USA Today later picked the CD as one of the Top Ten Country Records of 1996.
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Riding with fellow outlaws Willie, Waylon, Emmylou, Cowboy Jack Clement, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Doug Sahm and other famous — and infamous — characters, they helped turn Austin into a music scene and outlaw country into a sound before facing Gracey's final cancer battle. Through triumph and tragedy, grief and gratitude, their story speaks of the extraordinary life and inspiring love they shared.
Alan Mercer: Can we talk about your newly published book, ‘Radio Dreams’ Kimmie? It’s fun, very interesting and easy to read.
Kimmie Rhodes: I had never done anything like that before. I’ve written hundreds of songs and plays and musicals. I’ve written a lot of different things. I’ve actually written a novella cookbook that just fell out of me one day. But this is so different. When I met Joe Gracey in 1979, he had just lost his voice to cancer. He had been in radio since he was just a kid.
AM: So, you never knew him with a voice?
KR: I never knew him with a voice. He had just completed the seventh operation and it took his voice completely. I never heard his radio show. I didn’t live in Austin until right after all that. He didn’t quit radio because he lost his voice, he quit radio to go make records with Jack Clement.
AM: And this is all before you ever met him?
KR: Yes, I met him in 1979 and he was a record producer. He had produced Stevie Ray Vaughn. That stuff didn’t come out until many years later. I had the test pressing for the Country Music Hall of Fame now on display. We knew each other for a couple of years before we became lovers and eventually married.
AM: So, you have stories of the two of you before you were a romantic couple.
KR: One day I was staying at his house in the guest bedroom. He threw this thing down for me to read and he left the room. It was actually the beginnings of a book. He started the book called ‘Radio Dreams’ and DJ’s love it. They understand the title immediately.
AM: What is a radio dream?
KR: If you’re a DJ, you never stop having dreams that you will be on the radio and be doing something that will cause dead air. Until the end of his life, Joe had radio dreams.
AM: Wow, that makes sense.
KR: He didn’t talk for thirty years so he had written many, many things. When you don’t talk, you write a lot, plus he was a great writer anyway. He had written the first Rock Column for the American Statesman in Austin. I was a writer in my own right, writing songs mostly, at that point.
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AM: You are a prolific songwriter.
AM: You are a prolific songwriter.
KR: Through the years we both had written so many different things and thirty years later when we lost him to cancer in 2011, the dust settled on everything we had been through and I was left alone to think, “Wow, what do I do with all this?”
AM: That does seem overwhelming.
KR: I had this book that I always encouraged him to finish. He would revisit it from time to time and I don’t know why he never did finish it. He was the worlds greatest procrastinator too. I think it’s kind of hard to know how to end a story about yourself.
AM: That’s true.
KR: I had hundreds of reel to reel tapes of all types of rare things. I had every photo and backstage pass, everything from thirty years of touring together.
AM: You had a huge job in front of you for sure.
KR: I thought to myself, that when I get ready to let go of the past; the past won’t let go of me until I deal with all this stuff. So, I went to the Country Music Hall of Fame and talked to them. They connected me with a documentary filmmaker named Eric Geadelmann. He was working on a documentary titled, ‘They Called Us Outlaws.’ Then I did a radio program I called ‘Radio Dreams’ where I interviewed a lot of people too. I actually called it the ‘Radio Dreams’ project, it wasn’t just the book.
AM: So, the book added up to more than just the book.
KR: The book has become the brochure for the project. I placed items in the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech and the Crossroads of Texas Music where they have a lot of Terry Allen and different West Texas musicians’ archives. My generation is just figuring out what to do with these things and we are realizing that people care about this stuff. It’s become history.
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AM: Does that change the way you view your past?
KR: It does now because after six years of processing archives, I sent a whole moving van of stuff to the Country Music Museum. Guys wearing gloves came and put everything in acid free plastic and paper. All the tapes had to be transferred. It’s a very long process. I worked with the Historian at Texas Tech for weeks. You can now go to a link and you can find everything there including years of theater stuff I did.
AM: That is really awesome.
KR: It feels so good to have all that stuff placed and out of my house. Carolyn Tate at the Country Music Hall of Fame asked me how can we get this stuff out of your house? It makes them nervous. That’s when I realized how important they thought these things were. All this led to a really great exhibit that’s there now that includes many people’s stories called ‘Outlaws and Armadillos.’ Eric Geadelmann’s documentary, which is still a work in progress, is at the heart of it. You gotta see it.
AM: I want to see it.
KR: It will be up for at least two more years and it will probably travel after that. It’s a killer exhibit and it’s a major exhibit with major installation in the big room. It was a privilege to do that. So, at the end of the day I had many, many things that I had written, and that Joe Gracey had written. I thought I’d love to finish the book as a tribute to him.
AM: It gives your stories a chance to be heard.
KR: We have some wonderful stories about working with Willie and Waylon, Cowboy Clement and each other with our tours. There are funny stories like the day they sent me out to buy tape for Dolly Parton’s nipples to the time I got haunted in a castle. Gracey told a lot of these stories in emails and his blog so I pulled from them. I also have all these letters because he had a pen pal in the seventies before I came along, and she gave me all his letters. They were just amazing.
AM: This has a “meant to be” feeling.
KR: My whole life was “meant to be.” I can’t deny that. I feel like I’m Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road.
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AM: Even your early life. It’s so unique.
KR: Yeah, we both had interesting beginnings. I was the kid of two orphans who were the children of two immigrants from Yugoslavia. We are a true American Immigrant story. I’m just one generation removed from immigrants. I have my grandfathers ship manifesto from Ellis Island when he came in and I have the document where he applied for citizenship. It turns out I had everything. Gracie’s family was from Charles Goodnight who blazed the Goodnight–Loving Trail to Fort Worth.
AM: Wow, that is a legacy.
KR: My Dad was raised in a carnival, so he was a carny during the depression because he was an orphan.
AM: Your life is a movie!
KR: Yes, it is. Maybe a TV mini-series. This was all so I could honor Joe Gracie and it liberated me from songwriting.
AM: What do you mean?
KR: I did not want to write a bunch of sad songs. When it comes to writing sad songs I always waited until I could see a place of light, and then I would write from that point of view.
AM: I love that.
KR: You know how at daybreak the darkness and the light are up against each other and they start mixing until it’s all light. I was up against so much darkness, I wanted some light to come in before I wrote songs about it.
AM: How did you know where to start with this process?
KR: I had been overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start. We did go through a traumatic incident at the end when I had to fly him back from France in a private jet. It was terrible.
AM: That would be traumatic. I don’t know how you pulled through.
KR: Sometimes the best way you can help yourself is to help somebody else by passing your experience on. I was a caregiver for three and a half years for someone who had cancer. Then I had to grieve the loss. I’m totally not alone there. I’ve lost a lot but there are people who’ve lost more.
AM: Still, it’s your personal experience and it’s tough to process. I can see how writing the book could help.
KR: I thought it would help people if I told our story. It’s a story where the hero dies. I was left with many things, the least of which were these memoirs, but they had to be organized. In the meantime, I went on tour for six weeks in Europe and while I was gone my water filter broke and flooded my house.
AM: Oh no!
KR: Luckily, I had everything already wrapped in acid-free plastic. Just when I thought I was ready to start living again, my kitchen and the downstairs had to be torn apart. I had to move to a hotel, which was the best thing that could have ever happened.
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AM: Oh wow! How so?
KR: My insurance paid to set me up in a hotel suite with my graphics computer and my pro tools and all my archives. So, I got up every morning for those three months and worked on the book. I started thinking of the chapters as pearls and our life was a string of pearls. It turned out to be a really good way to get it done. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to do it.
AM: You have found a way to keep him with you with this book.
KR: He’s always with us and I felt he was with me a lot while I wrote the book. One of the things that kept us together for many years was our sense of humor. It was a wonderful journey and I loved it. It was also very liberating to write where the words didn’t have to rhyme. At least I was all muscled up from song writing so I found being a songwriter made me a better writer.
AM: Are you writing songs now?
KR: Oh yeah! I write all the time. I’m writing another book and I’m always writing songs.
AM: I’m so impressed that you are part of the original Outlaw movement.
KR: I was just right in the big, fat middle of all of it. Our goal in our school of artists was to maintain our artistic integrity in a world where commercialism was diluting our craft. We had something to say and we were going to say it and we did. Birds of a feather flock together and I was just lucky I got to be in that flock.
To learn more about Kimmie Rhodes visit her web site https://kimmierhodes.com/