Roots music legends, Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, have been friends for 30 years, but only recently realized they had never played music with each other before. So in 2017, Grammy winner Alvin and Grammy nominee Gilmore, decided to hit the highway to swap songs, tell stories, and share their life experiences.

Though Texas born Gilmore was twice named Country Artist of the Year by Rolling Stone, and California native Alvin first came to fame in the hard rocking rhythm and blues band The Blasters, they discovered that their musical roots in old blues and folk music are exactly the same. In these spontaneous shows, audiences enjoyed classic original compositions from the two, and also songs from a wide spectrum of songwriters and styles from Merle Haggard to Sam Cooke to the Young Bloods. Mutually energized and inspired by these performances, Dave and Jimmie agreed to hit the road again …..

Alvin got his start making a unique mix of rockabilly, country, early rock and roll, blues and R&B with the Blasters, the band he started with his brother Phil in Downey, California in the late ’70s. Mentored by blues vocalist Big Joe Turner (who the brothers would follow from gig to gig in Los Angeles), the two brothers were as seasoned as a pair of musicians in their 20s could be when the Blasters came together with drummer Bill Bateman and bassist John Bazz.

Alvin’s more recent efforts have teamed the guitarist with a variety of co-conspirators. He has worked extensively with backing band the Guilty Women and reunited with his brother for a couple of albums featuring blues covers, toured with the Flesh Eaters and recorded the band’s first album in decades — 2019’s I Used to Be Pretty — and founded the mostly covers project the Third Mind that found him playing psychedelic versions of Alice Coltrane and Roky Erickson songs with bassist Victor Krummenacher (Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker, Monks of Doom), guitarist David Immergluck (Counting Crows, Monks of Doom, John Hiatt), and drummer Michael Jerome (Richard Thompson, Better Than Ezra). 

A native of the Texas Panhandle, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, a veteran songwriter, was born in the 1940s in Amarillo and raised in Lubbock. Though shaped by the music of Hank Williams and the honky tonk sounds his musician father played, Gilmore was also inspired by a concert he saw in 1955 featuring Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. In the early ’70s, he teamed with fellow Texas songwriters Joe Ely and Butch Hancock to form the Flatlanders, who would garner some acclaim and a regional following. The band’s debut recording All American Music did not see proper release and the group dissolved by 1973, but the three principles all went on to successful solo careers and the album — reissued in 1991 by Rounder Records with the new title More Legend Than Band — found the outfit being hailed as one of the pioneering acts of alternative country long before the term existed.