A New York Evening With Dave Alvin & Jimmie Dale Gilmore

In partnership with Americana Music Association, the GRAMMY Museum is thrilled to present an intimate conversation with GRAMMY Award-winning artist Dave Alvin and GRAMMY Award-nominated artist Jimmie Dale Gilmore followed by a performance at The Greene Space at WNYC and WQXR in New York City. The conversation will include a discussion moderated by Warren Zane about the making of their new album, TexiCali, their collaboration, creative process, and more. 

Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore are one of the many artists to be featured in the GRAMMY Museum’s New York City program series, which includes bringing a slate of the GRAMMY Museum’s renowned GRAMMY In The Schools Education Programs and Public Programs to the East Coast. “A New York Evening With…” is generously supported by the Dawn and Brian Hoesterey Family Foundation.  

ABOUT DAVE ALVIN & JIMMIE DALE GILMORE

When GRAMMY winner Dave Alvin and GRAMMY nominee Jimmie Dale Gilmore made the album Downey To Lubbock together in 2018, they wrote the title track as a sort of mission statement. “I know someday this old highway’s gonna come to an end,” Alvin sings near the song’s conclusion. Gilmore answers: “But I know when it does you’re going to be my friend.”

Six years later, they’re serving notice that the old highway hasn’t ended yet. “We’re still standing, no matter what you might hear,” they sing on “We’re Still Here,” the final track to their new album TexiCali. Released this June via Yep Roc Records, TexiCali continues to bridge the distance between the two troubadours’ respective home bases of California (Alvin) and Texas (Gilmore).

The geographic theme reflects Alvin’s repeated journeys to record in Central Texas with Gilmore and the Austin-based backing band that has toured with the duo for the past few years. As Alvin puts it in the liner notes, those road trips informed the music they made on TexiCali:

From one part of the borderland to another, through concrete swaths of traffic, tract homes and shopping malls, across vast rocky deserts of Joshua trees, saguaros and ocotillo, speeding by forgotten battlefields, remote mining towns, corrido barrooms, cinder block churches and abandoned houses filled with abandoned dreams, past Mission San Xavier del Bac, Cochise’s Stronghold and Apache Pass, into the shimmering lights of El Paso/Juarez before the seemingly eternal emptiness of West Texas, traveling those 1,400 miles somewhere between Nothingness and Everything.

The 11 songs on TexiCali also connect the duo’s shared fondness for a broad range of American music forms. On their own, both have been prominent artists for decades. A philosophical songwriter with a captivating, almost mystical voice, Gilmore co-founded influential Lubbock group the Flatlanders in the early 1970s. Alvin first drew attention as a firebrand guitarist and budding young songwriter with Los Angeles roots-rockers the Blasters in the early 1980s.

Just as important, however, are the choices they made for non-original material. Any projects that involve Gilmore invariably will lead to a song by his longtime friend and Flatlanders bandmater Butch Hancock. Thus we get the hypnotic “Roll Around,” set apart by the reggae-tinged playing of Pankratz, Fordham and Miller.

But it’s Brownie McGhee’s “Betty And Dupree” that strikes closest to the heart of this musical partnership. Their first album together also included a McGhee song, “Walk On.” Long before they knew each other, a teenage Alvin and a twentysomething Gilmore got to hear folk-blues legend McGhee (with his longtime partner Sonny Terry) at L.A. blues club the Ash Grove, during Gilmore’s brief time in California in the late ’60s. Gilmore actually befriended McGhee during a short stay in the Bay Area, where Tennessee native McGhee resided in his later years.

Alvin recalls how they discovered these connections when they first toured together as an acoustic duo in 2017. “Jimmie would pull out something and I’d be like, ‘Wow, you know that song?’ And if I was feeling comfortable, I’d chime in singing. So (the McGhee covers) are a way of harkening back to those early few months of touring together.”

“Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee were part of the group of people that Dave and I had both been deeply influenced,” Jimmie agrees. “It’s a real good example of the glue that keeps Dave and me together.” So will there be another Alvin/ Gilmore record? And if so, will they turn to McGhee’s songbook once again? Alvin doesn’t hesitate: “Yeah!”

Check-In: 6:30pm

Show Time: 7:30pm

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