In 1979, influential DJ and aspiring singer-songwriter Joe Gracey made a fateful decision. He had written a batch of songs that he had been planning to record, but then cancer surgery took a piece of his tongue. He picked part-time flower shop employee and unknown vocalist Kimmie Rhodes to take the mic. It was, as they say, the beginning of a beautiful relationship. “From that point on,” Rhodes says, “I became his voice.”

The singer/poet/painter spoke to me via Zoom from her home in Briarcliff, Tex., just outside of Austin. She reminisced about her life with Gracey—who died in 2011—her music and other creative projects keeping her busy during the pandemic.

“After Gracey’s death,” she says, “I wasn’t ready to write right away.” She felt she had earned her the right to do a covers album called, appropriately, Covers. About half are heavily trod territory by the likes of Dylan and the Beatles, and the other half are more country—Townes Van Zandt, Rodney Crowell, Leon Russell. Each of them is delivered with a confident intimacy that re-animates even the most familiar compositions.

Rhodes started putting her own records out “before it was cool” and came up with a way of financing her work via subscription before Patreon came along. (Details here.) She has also devoted herself to helping organize the Outlaws & Armadillos exhibition for the Country Music Hall of Fame and the writing and editing of the hilariously poignant “duet memoir” Radio Dreams: The Story of an Outlaw DJ and a Cosmic Cowgirl.

The passages written by Rhodes have a sincerity borne of grief and contemplation:

"Instruments, including the human voice, which is the most soulful because it is filtered through the heart, are like tarot cards or Ouija boards, a way to unlock the realm beneath the veil and momentarily release secrets about the mystery, whether named in poetry or in feeling tones that speak just as loudly.”

The Gracey parts, meanwhile, carry the barroom whiff of a natural raconteur.

“Everybody started howling and puking and mewling as babes in arms and saying, ‘Oh My God. What is this?!’ We got phone calls out the ass! I was working the afternoon drive shift. We had a storm of protest. But I knew, not because I’m smart, but because of my cultural background in country radio in Fort Worth, I sensed this was an occurrence, an event, just like San Francisco in the Psychedelic Era, just like when Basie and Boys went to New York in the ‘30s. I knew this was an event.”

Waylon, Willie, Townes, Emmylou and Dolly all make appearances—the latter stars in an anecdote concerning her best-known non-musical attributes. Austin in the 1970s comes alive as a wacky, utopian, miraculous cultural moment, but the love between Kimmie and Gracey transcends boldface names. On the pages of Radio Dreams, they kid each other affectionately and dance to their own personal rhythm across the years—and through his struggle with and demise from cancer.

Rhodes is rebuilding her home studio with air purifiers and soundproof glass and planning to record her first new songs since losing Gracey. “I don’t overthink them,” she says, recalling how “Just One Love” came to her while driving to record it with Joe Ely. “That song just fell on me at the intersection of Route 620 and Highway 71.”

Rhodes is fiercely attached to the more personal songs, even if she knows they don’t have commercial potential. “I’m always the protector of the obscure,” she says, referring to a tune she wrote with her son Gabriel, containing the line I drew a page in my book of dreams of you.

Van Zandt, a friend and duet partner, whom Rhodes hails as “the Shakespeare of what we now call Americana,” remains her biggest songwriting inspiration. “He trusted people to get it,” she says, “and either they did or they didn’t.”

-Mark Swartz