While Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Dave Alvin were making their second collaborative album TexiCali, Gilmore happened to dust off an old reel-to-reel tape he’d long forgotten about with a song entitled “Trying To Be Free.” Recorded in the mid-1960s while Gilmore was still playing coffee shops around Lubbock, TX, “Trying To Be Free” predates his hometown’s booming and underrated singer-songwriter scene by about a decade, but its story involves perhaps the city’s most famous musical export: Buddy Holly. After Buddy’s untimely death in 1959, his parents became something of musical patrons in Lubbock, discovering a young Jimmie Dale Gilmore while he was performing around town. Buddy’s father L.O. helped finance Gilmore’s original recording of “Trying To Be Free,” paving the way for Gilmore to break out in earnest with The Flatlanders by the early 1970s.
Gilmore had forgotten all about “Trying To Be Free” when he found that old tape last year, but he brought it into his next recording session with Alvin, who loved the tune and began working with his backing band The Guilty Ones on a fresh arrangement.
This song came from well before The Flatlanders. It was on a demo I recorded with the T. Nickel House Band in the mid-sixties, financed by Buddy Holly’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. L.O. Holley. My wife Janet discovered it on an old reel-to-reel tape last year when she was organizing my archives.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore
It was never on any of my commercially-released recordings and I had forgotten all about it, but Janet liked it and suggested I should show it to Dave. He and the band came up with a whole different treatment from the original recording and it became like a brand new song to me.
TexiCali features more original collaborations between the two Americana legends than ever before as Alvin and Gilmore retrace their decades on the road, working with contemporaries like Terry Allen and Butch Hancock, and formative shows from blues legends like Brownie McGhee. Together, they build on a close-knit partnership that’s already delivered them a Billboard #1 blues album (2018’s Downey To Lubbock), a spotlight on CNN, and the friendship of a lifetime.
With the release of “Trying To Be Free,” Alvin and Gilmore have also announced more North American dates for this Fall, expanding the aptly-titled We’re Still Here Tour into November. The tour will begin this July in Alvin’s native California, before swinging through Gilmore’s home state of Texas and the rest of the U.S., including the near-instant sellouts in Berwyn, IL at Fitzgerald’s Sept 13 and New York’s City Winery on August 27.
