MUSIC

The 2012 Sounds of Texas Music Series presents the The Flatlanders, Saturday, August 4, 2012 at 8PM in the Crighton Theatre. With Folk Family Revival Opening!

Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely and Butch Hancock have been friends for almost 40 years, and members of that not-really-a-band, life-of-its-own musical entity known as The Flatlanders for nearly as long.

But when the trio decided to collaborate on songwriting for Hills And Valleys, the fourth in a rather elongated string of Flatlanders albums, they realized it wouldn’t be easy. They’d done it before for one thing, first for the soundtrack to the 1998 film The Horse Whisperer, then for their “reunion” album, 2002’s Now Again. So they already knew they’d be as likely to spend hours trading tales and laughing uproariously as they would trying to agree on a lyric.

But here they are, 37 years after they were prodded into recording together the first time, still collaborating—and still the best of friends. In his soft Texas drawl, Ely sums the philosophy behind their creativity: “We might as well write music and make songs up, because there’s not anything that we’d rather be doing.”

Folk Family Revival's inimitable sound has been described as Americana-folk-country music. Folk's "Unfolding" debuted in 2011.

Some local music lovers in Conroe, Texas began the Sounds of Texas Music Series in 1997 after they had spent an evening attempting unsuccessfully to listen to one of their favorite singer-songwriters in a noisy local club. The series began as a single show featuring Guy Clark in the acoustically perfect historic Crighton Theatre. Over ten years later, they are still producing one of the best music series in the state of Texas by offering patrons a chance to hear a wide variety of new, undiscovered artists as well as seasoned veteran performers in a listening room environment.

Photo by Steve Gullick.