Kimmie Rhodes

Kimmie Rhodes, born in Lubbock, Texas, launched her singing career at age six by performing with her family’s gospel trio. In her teenage years she picked up guitar and began composing her own material, then relocated to Austin in 1979, where she encountered Joe Gracey, who would become both her husband and producer. Her first album, Kimmie Rhodes and the Jackalope Brothers, appeared in 1981, followed four years later by Man in the Moon. For her third release, Angels Get the Blues, issued in 1989, she tracked the sessions at Sun Studios in Memphis. Although mainstream commercial breakthrough remained out of reach, fellow artists gravitated toward her catalog; Wynonna included a version of “I Just Drove By” on Tell Me Why, while Trisha Yearwood and Willie Nelson recorded “Hard Promises to Keep” for Yearwood’s The Song Remembers When. Rhodes herself joined Nelson for two duets on his Just One Love collection, and he later contributed to her 1996 album West Texas Heaven, which also featured appearances by Waylon Jennings and Townes Van Zandt. Rich From the Journey arrived in spring 2000. Love Me Like a Song, her sixth studio effort, came out in 2002. The next year she and Nelson issued the collaborative Picture in a Frame. Lost & Found, released in 2004, gathered previously unheard tracks cut between 1996 and 2003. Windblown, from 2005, served simultaneously as the soundtrack to a performance-art work that premiered that January. Small Town Girl, appearing the following year, incorporated material drawn from Rhodes’ stage musical of the same title, and Walls Fall Down followed in 2008.