[Photo by CLAUDE SHADE/CC MEDIA via FRESH AIR]

FRESH AIR

“His voice would make even Hank Williams cry,” Nicholas Dawidoff once wrote of Jimmie Dale Gilmore in The New York Times Magazine. Gilmore, a singer from West Texas, writes songs that would be described as alternative country. But for his forthcoming album, Heirloom Music — in which Gilmore teams up with the band The Wronglers — he says he was thinking more in terms of bluegrass music — although that’s not an exact description. “We were calling it old-timey music, but that still wasn’t quite accurate,” he says. “But [bluegrass musician and investor] Warren Hellman had said that someone had referred to this sort of music as ‘heirloom music,’ and I loved that phrase. There’s something dismissive about [the term ‘old-timey’] and our point is that this music is old, but it’s really good and really still pertinent.” MORE