Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

It’s a Thursday evening in Dripping Springs, Texas, and Johnny Gimble is ready to eat some Mexican food. Gimble is heading over to nearby Austin and Guero’s Taco Bar, a popular restaurant known for its Mexican cuisine and down-home music. Guero’s plays host to Gimble, his son, guitarist Dick, and his granddaughter, singer and pianist Emily, every fourth Thursday. On this night, Gimble and family eat a nice meal around five o’clock, and then, from six o’clock onwards Gimble—one of country music’s all-time greatest fiddle players—regales the taco-munching patrons to a three-hour show—a world-class western fiddle fete with a taco and tequila background. “It’s our jam session, is what it amounts to,” says Gimble, who packs an extra fiddle case for the drive in from Dripping Springs should another fiddler drop in unannounced from, say, Houston (a mere three-hours’ drive).

The gigs at the taco bar have been going on for a year or two for Gimble, whose name is as synonymous with western swing music as is the legendary Bob Wills. It was Wills who made Gimble a permanent member of his Texas Playboys in the 1940s, a decade after Gimble and his brothers—Jack, Bill, and Gene—tuned in to listen to Wills and Milton Brown (members of the Light Crust Doughboys and later the proto-swing band Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, featuring the twin fiddle attack of Cecil Brower and Jesse Ashlock) play a noontime show on WBAP radio out of Fort Worth.

That was in the rural East Texas town of Tyler, where the Gimble brothers grew up on a 100-acre farm.

In 1938, the siblings formed their own band known as the Peacemaker Boys, playing fiddle tunes from the bed of a truck parked in front of a Sherman, Texas, grocery store while helping to promote Peacemaker Flour. After graduating from high school, Gimble joined the Sunshine Boys, playing radio shows in Dallas before heading overseas in 1943 for a hitch in the US Army and service in World War II.

After the war, his big break came in 1949, when the band the Rhythmaires opened for Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, who already were stars of radio and Hollywood cowboy films. Recruited while onstage by Wills’ legendary mandolin player Tiny Moore, Gimble signed on with the Texas Playboys and moved to Oklahoma City for a stint with the premier western swing band that lasted throughout most of the 1950s.

That tenure sealed his fame as a world-class fiddler, leading to an active 40-year career on stage, TV, radio, and records. He won two Grammy Awards with the western swing band Asleep at the Wheel and an NEA National Heritage Fellowship Award.

These days, things are slowing down a bit for Gimble, 84. He no longer plays at his annual Swing Week camp, and touring and recording aren’t as easy since a stroke about a decade ago, though he enjoys telling the joke that, when a doctor told him one side of his brain had become a black hole, he hoped the ubiquitous “Orange Blossom Special”—the “Free Bird” for live fiddle players—had fallen into it.

This year, Gimble released his latest CD, the striking Celebrating with Friends (CMH). Those friends include such impressive folks as Willie Nelson, Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel, Garrison Keillor of A Prairie Home Companion, Merle Haggard (with whom Gimble has recorded for almost 40 years), his fiddle protégé Jason Roberts of Asleep at the Wheel, and granddaughter Emily, who provides vocals on a rendition of “If I Had You.”

The record label had originally tacked “America’s Greatest Fiddler” onto the beginning of the album title, but Gimble put an end to that. Mention “Greatest Ever” status to him and he’ll immediately change the subject—usually shifting attention to one of the greats he has played with, like Wills or New Orleans jazz clarinet player Pete Fountain. “That was the epitome for me,” Gimble will say. “I said, ‘This is as high as I can get.’ If he’d ask me to blow the jug, that’d be OK with me.”

Or mention that Gimble has played on most of the 73 million albums sold by that fella George Strait. All Gimble will say of Strait is “he was nice,” before telling the story of how Haggard, before letting Gimble play session fiddle on one of his records, asked if he could play “Brown Skinned Gal” just like Bob Wills did.

Gimble told him, “Yeah,” and then did it.

“I feel bad for most of those musicians in the recording bands,” Gimble says now. “[The session leaders or frontmen] want you to play exactly what’s on the record.”

During his ten years in Nashville, Gimble remained one of the most sought-after session fiddler players around, playing with Nelson, Haggard, Strait, Carrie Underwood, and Dolly Parton, among others. But if any kind of maxim led Gimble through his career, that session playing sentiment ain’t it.

Playing exactly what’s on the record isn’t at all like “hokum,” the term Gimble first used for extended improvisation—and what eventually became his music’s lifeblood.

He once watched and listened to Texas Wanderers front man Cliff Bruner—who had played with Milton Brown before the pioneering musician’s death in a 1935 automobile accident—rip through a fiddle solo after a four-bar break. “That just knocked me out,” Gimble says. “So I asked him—there was an expression that people would say, ‘Aw, he’s not playing anything, just a bunch of hokum’—so I asked him, ‘How do you play all that hokum? How did you learn how to play it?’”

Bruner responded by asking: “Can you hum it?”

“I said, ‘Yeah, I hum it everywhere I go,’” Gimble says.

Then Bruner told him, “If you can hum it, you can think it. Go and practice on your instrument until you can play what you think.”

Gimble took that notion with him to war, which saw him playing in a jazz trio on the troop ship bound for Europe at the tail end of World War II. The European war theater also is where he acquired a “liberated” five-string violin (handed to him near Hitler’s mountain retreat, known as the Eagle’s Nest, in Berchtesgaden, Germany), where Gimble first listened to Strauss waltzes, and where he wowed German-speaking house bands with his American fiddle playing.

To this day, he plays that liberated fiddle.

Maybe it was during the war that a lifelong love for jazz music was born. Or maybe it was before, when Gimble heard Light Crust Doughboy member Zeke Campbell and seminal swing-jazz player George Barnes play their guitars.

After all, there’s a secret to western swing music, you know: it’s jazz.

Once, at his summer music camp in New Mexico, Gimble had just finished performing when a fiddler approached him to ask about Gimble’s thought process. “I took some long solos right before intermission,” he recalls. “A fella from England, I believe, came up to me and asked, ‘That solo. What were you thinking?’

“I was thinking, ‘How do you think of jazz?’ but all I told him was, ‘I was thinking about we need to take us a break and get us a beer.’”

That lesson sufficed for the moment, but now, years later, Gimble wishes he’d included an addendum. “I forgot to tell him, ‘Play what you feel,’” he says. “Because jazz is whatever happens, you know?”

What Johnny Gimble Plays

There aren’t a lot of details about Gimble’s instruments or bows, but the information he offers is colorful. That old violin he acquired during the war, date unknown, was most likely made in Czechoslovakia and has since been converted to a five-string acoustic-electric fiddle. He also has a four-string fiddle, “from the 1800s,” that has Bob Wills’ name stamped on the outside. His primary bow, which has an ivory frog, was a gift from country legend Merle Haggard, from a time when Haggard was learning to play the fiddle (with a little help from Gimble). At the time, “Merle was buying every bow he saw,” Gimble reports.