SAN FRANCISCO -- Acclaimed West Texas country troubadour Jimmie Dale Gilmore has had an unusual career trajectory to say the least. Influenced by classic honky tonk and the early rock and roll stylings of such Texas icons as Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly as well as sound of the '60s ranging from the blues and folk revival of the era to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, Gilmore first made waves when he founded the forward-thinking band the Flatlanders with Lubbock contemporaries Joe Ely and Butch Hancock. Though the group only recorded one largely unheard album during the early '70s, the Flatlanders would later be rediscovered and hailed as pioneers of a unique new sound in country music.

When the group first disbanded not long after that failed release, Ely and Hancock gradually established themselves as talented songwriters and performers while Gilmore focused on more spiritual concerns. Living in a Denver Ashram for much of the decade, his reputation as a songwriter grew thanks to recordings of his songs by Ely and others. Gilmore eventually returned to the studio and stage in the 1980s and has built a loyal following with his heartfelt songs and the rare emotional resonance of his fragile, high tenor voice. A perennial favorite at San Francisco's annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Gilmore recently spoke with KTVU.com about his experience performing at the yearly roots-music celebration and what lies ahead for the songwriter as both a solo artist and a member of the Flatlanders.

KTVU.com: You've played a majority of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festivals that have been held since its inception in 2001. How have you ended up being such a regular and what has your experience been playing the Fest?

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: Well, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that it's my very favorite of all the music festivals I'm involved with. Everything about it is so much fun. It's so well organized. I think for the audience and for the musicians, the thing is so well thought out and so considerate. Actually, I wasn't there the first year, but I have been there every year since.

KTVU.com: Really? I thought from what I saw on the festival Web site that you were listed as playing from the second year through 2005…

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: I may have some of my memories tangled up, but I think the year before last I played the preliminary day [the first time the festival hosted a Friday afternoon show] with Butch Hancock. And last year I was there with the Flatlanders. There are so many positive things about this Festival for me personally. One thing is that it's become like a giant reunion for a lot of my musician friends. We have a lot of close friendships with people that we don't get to see very much because of touring and the non-coinciding of schedules. So Hardly Strictly has become the place where I catch up with a lot of my friends every year.

I'm fairly certain I was first invited by the Slim's people Bonnie and Don [bookers for the SF club who help organize the event every year]. And then I got to be friends with Warren [financier Warren Hellman, who funds the festival]. Warren just kind of took a particular liking to my music. And even though I wasn't one of the great stars of the stature of say Steve Earle or Emmylou Harris, I think Warren just put me down on the list to be there every time. On a number of the years, I've brought several members of my family with me and my wife usually comes with me, so it's almost like a little vacation; we just love San Francisco so much.

KTVU.com: When I was doing research for our talk, I came across an interview you did on NPR discussing your last album Come On Back, which was a collection of old country and folk standards that you dedicated to your late father. I found it interesting that he was an electric guitarist while your primary instrument has always been the acoustic guitar. I was wondering to what extent did you play with him once you got interested in guitar and what influence did he have on you beyond the music he introduced you to?

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: Well, he never was really a pro, but he was a pretty good player. He never played for a living; it was more for fun, though he did make a few dollars playing dances and stuff like that. Oddly enough, my dad taught me a few chords when I first got interested in the guitar, but we didn't play together very much until he got older. Because I became interested in a whole lot of music that he didn't have a lot of connection with, both the folk stuff and the rock 'n' roll and blues stuff. He tended to really like the stuff that I introduced him to, but he didn't have any knowledge of how to play it. But then when he got older and then especially when he got sick, when he was still physically capable before his body deteriorated to a point where he couldn't play [Gilmore's father died of ALS], every time we were around each other we would always make it a point to get our guitars out and play for an afternoon.

KTVU.com: And from what I learned, you've taken your son -- Colin Gilmore -- under your wing in some respects. I'm not that familiar with his songwriting, but I read that you two have toured together. Did he develop an early interest in music?

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: Well, I never was aware of how deep an interest he had in it. My wife - who is his stepmother, but they're very close - the first we went and saw him play at a gig, both of us were really shocked at how good he was. We just hadn't been aware that he was learning that much. At one point during one of the songs, Janet - my wife - turned to me and said 'He was actually listening all that time!' [laughs] On the surface, he didn't play with us sitting around the house or anything, but obviously his ears were open.

It was real amazing to me 'cause when I first started actually hearing him play, even just sitting around the house, when he'd show me songs, he was already a really good songwriter. So it kind of leapt from me not thinking of him as very interested in music - I knew he liked music - but I had no idea that he had any aspiration to be a musician. And then all of a sudden he was one. It was a very interesting thing…

KTVU.com: In the tours you've done together, has it been the kind of thing where he'll play his own material with you playing support and then switch around to him backing you on your material?

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: We don't do that very much anymore, although he is going to be with me next week at Hardly Strictly. And the Flatlanders are just putting the finishing touches on our new record and we did one of Colin's songs on it. Butch and Joe have both become real fans of Colin's and have been really impressed by the quality of his songwriting. But he's just basically going to play rhythm guitar with me and I'll ask him to perform one or two songs. We have a fairly short set this time, so I'm going to try to run through as many as I can and try not to talk as much as I usually do when I'm performing.

KTVU.com: I didn't see you with the Flatlanders at Hardly Strictly last year, but I did see you perform a while back at Slim's on one of those uncharacteristically hot San Francisco nights that had the walls dripping. The big, multiple electric guitar sound and the trade-off between the band's three songwriters was quite a departure from the stripped-down acoustic sets I'd seen you perform…

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: Yeah, it's really a lot of fun. After all these years, we still really like performing together and just being together.

KTVU.com: The band also has one of the most unusual reunion stories ever with the gap between your first album [recorded and released in 1972 as 'Jimmie Dale Gilmore and the Flatlanders,' the effort wasn't widely available until Rounder reissued it in 1991 under the title 'More a Legend Than a Band'] and the success you've enjoyed since getting back together to record new material in the late 1990s…

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: On this new one, we actually three-way co-wrote eight of the songs on it. I think in that respect, it's the best thing we've done as far as the collaboration part of it. I'm really anxious to see how everybody else feels about this record, because I just love it.

KTVU.com: I saw on the band's site that you have some live dates set for October and November, but they look more like one-off festival type dates.

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: Yeah, the record probably won't be coming out until after the first of the year. I don't think we'll do a heavy touring schedule, but we will tour to promote the record and to just be out together again. So next year, we will be putting some more miles on our old odometer.

KTVU.com: With that album already being in the can and the tour planned, do you have another solo venture in the works?

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: I've got most of the material together for it. I've always been so slow. I've always been the slowest one in the group. Both Butch and Joe have been really prolific writers. But then because the Flatlanders thing came around, all of my energy has been going into that for the last few months. It probably will be later in the year or the next year before mine comes out.

KTVU.com: When I went back to listen to 'Braver Newer World' from 1996 prior to this interview, I was thinking that the album had been produced by Daniel Lanois [who has made important records with U2, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris and many others] because of the atmospheric sound it has. I was a little surprised when I saw that it was actually T-Bone Burnett who produced the recording. I wanted to ask what the experience was like working with him? He was obviously a successful musician and producer prior to the album, but in some ways it seems like 'Braver Newer World' was at the cusp of a real resurgence in his career that continued with the 'O Brother Where Art Thou' and 'Walk the Line' soundtracks and more recent work with John Mellencamp and the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss album 'Raising Sand.'

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: Yeah, I think at that period T-Bone was going through a whole lot of changes himself; lots of personal changes and stuff. He and Sam Phillips were still together at that point. You know, he's one of the people I was talking about; the last time I saw him was at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass last year. I wasn't around much when all the big changes happened in his personal life, so really I haven't had a lot of chance to discuss it. I don't think my record had anything to do with being a turning point. I think it just happened at that time.

KTVU.com: Another recording of yours I revisited recently is one of my favorite things you've done, which is the collaborative EP you did with Mudhoney from 1992.

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: You know, that just came into my mind like a couple of days ago. I hadn't even thought about it in a long time. I was going to suggest to Colin that he learn the Townes Van Zant song from it, "Buckskin Stallion."

KTVU.com: I was wondering how that recording came about? Mudhoney is not the Sub Pop band I would expect any country artist to collaborate with …

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: People were always really surprised about that. We had a mutual friend who worked at Elektra Records at the time, and she just suggested it and kind of made the necessary communications to find a time we could meet each other and all that. And when we did, we all really liked each other. I very much had a feeling that they had an attitude kind of like the attitude the Flatlanders had early on. It's not necessarily a musical similarity; it's more of a temperament and a sense of humor. Anyway, we just hit it off when that happened. We just did it in a little garage in Seattle. I was really happy with the eventual product.

KTVU.com: I love the twist you put on their original song "Blinding Sun." For your next album, do you know what kind of approach you're going to take? It seems like the last couple of things you've done have been more pared down, acoustic collections as opposed to this collaboration with Mudhoney or 'Braver Newer World.'

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: I never go into a recording project with a pre-formed idea of what it's going to sound like. I'm such a song-oriented person that that's really all that occupies me. I have to really love a song to be able to do it at all. Then for me it's always just a great pleasure to find out how it evolves. It always depends on the producer, of course, and also who the players are. I'm looking forward this time to collaborating with Robbie Gjersoe. He's been my partner, my guitar player, for many years now. We've never really done a recording project that was our work together. So it will be mostly my material, but Robbie will have a strong imprint on it. And he has on my last two records and on the Flatlanders records, since he's the lead player with them. Robbie is one of these guys who is so versatile. He's a great acoustic player. He also can play just fabulous, raunchy rock and roll or slide blues stuff. So I really can't anticipate a specific style. It will just be determined by the emotions of the songs and how they translate to the musicians.

KTVU.com: One last thing I wanted to bring up is the small but very significant role you had in the movie 'The Big Lebowski' [Gilmore played the fragile Vietnam Vet Smokey who has a confrontation with the Dude's gun-toting bowling partner Walter Sobchak as portrayed by John Goodman]. I was wondering how that came about and if you ever thought of pursuing more acting roles? And how often does it come up, given the iconic status the movie has?

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: Well, it is a phenomenon. It's so amazingly strange. I tell you, as far as just sheer numbers, I'm known by a lot more people for that than for being a musician. It's really true. It's just the strangest thing. And I love Joel and Ethan [Coen, the brothers who made the film] and I couldn't be prouder to be part of it. If I was going to have a movie association, that's a good one. I love that movie and I loved all the people that worked on it. Jeff Bridges and I became good friends as a result of that. But it is a very strange, unexpected phenomenon.

I think they just released the tenth anniversary edition of it. Of course, at the beginning, it just fell out of site. It wasn't a hit. But now, it's become one of the greatest hits of the decade. Like you said, it's iconic. Over and over, people have told me it's their favorite movie. It was ten years ago, so I've done a lot of stuff since then and done a lot of traveling. Even in Scotland and Ireland, I've had young college kids come up to me on the street and say 'Are you Smokey?' [laughs]