PrintJimmy Baldwin
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EnlargeJust a few miles outside of Mineral Wells, Texas, an old ranch with a great history and a whole lot of possibility felt like fate for all-around creative couple Jimmy and Jane Baldwin. Singer-songwriter Jimmy — aka the “Cactus-Headed Troubadour” — and his yoga-therapist-writer-anthropologist wife, Jane, discovered the ranch when it was used as a location for one of Jimmy’s music videos. When the 12 acres of Brazos River cliff top became home, Jimmy’s and Jane’s varied artistic and cultural interests became the creative bedrock of what they like to call a “modern-day Chautauqua,” evoking the ’20s movement that brought entertainment and culture to rural communities through musicians, teachers, speakers, and specialists of different ilk.
They christened the newly rehabilitated spread the Double J Hacienda & Art Ranch and invited guests to come share the experience. It’s the kind of place that encourages visitors to grab life by the horns. If you’re that sort of lover of life, Jimmy would call you a vivador, which happens to be the title of his new CD. Recorded at the historic ranch with some of Dallas’ best-known musicians, Vivador (due out May 2010) puts 11 new Baldwin compositions into the Americana repertoire. “You meet a twang queen and a peace-loving chicken fried steak eater, ride a tequila train, and hang out with vivadors,” Jimmy says. And you’ll hear his signature sound, a blend of all the good stuff the El Paso native grew up on: classic country, rock, border norte"o, and the spontaneous freestyle of the mariachi street musicians of Juárez.
EnlargeAs creative director for The Richards Group in Dallas, the Top 40 tunester has written award-winning commercials (for Motel 6 and Corona), but it’s the music he writes when he’s off the clock that really taps into his creative core. Case in point, his latest CD. Vivador’s a perfect soundtrack for the 1940s ranch Jimmy and Jane reinvented. Together, they’ve made the old Seybold place, where well-known sharpshooter and horseman Elmer Seybold and his fashion model wife, Dorothee, entertained the likes of John Wayne and Bette Davis, into the perfect backdrop for Jimmy’s musical explorations.
EnlargeJack Kinslow, KYOTE FM deejay in Terlingua, Texas, says Baldwin’s indie brew “inhabits a space between Bob Wills, Bob Dylan, and Bob Marley.” Wonder what that might sound like? Check out his three CDs on the Diego Bob Music label and visit the Double J Hacienda & Art Ranch, where Baldwin plays regularly. It’s music that pulls up to the gravel shoulder like an old pickup, throws open the passenger door, and invites you to climb in for a ride on the Texas back roads with a driver who’s got a gift for visual storytelling (and some otherwise colorful language).
If you do visit the home of Baldwin’s “ranch rock,” you’ll share in an environment that feeds the inner vivador with everything from concerts and yoga retreats to cooking classes and sunset-viewing sessions on what has to be the best and biggest porch ever perched above the Brazos River. Jimmy and Jane describe their place as a “creative outpost to inspire the human spirit.” I say it’s Old West meets Texas art colony, in a marriage so fertile that even the name of the county in which the ranch sits, Palo Pinto, spurs the dormant soul to a gallop.
To experience the part of Texas that inspires Jimmy Baldwin, drive an hour west from Fort Worth to Mineral Wells. But don’t leave town for Jimmy and Jane’s place just yet — there’s a lot of Lone Star history right in Mineral Wells. Billed in the early 1900s as “the South’s Greatest Health Resort” and the place “Where America Drinks Its Way to Health,” the old Texas town was once a thriving spa destination famous for its mineral waters. There are ghosts of that heyday all around, most spectacularly in the huge, abandoned Baker Hotel, once a bustling nucleus, now an empty invitation to a prospective investor with deep pockets and a vision to return the place to its former glory. In the embrace of that totally Texas Brazos River and with some Jimmy Baldwin in the CD player, it’s not a stretch to imagine the place as it might be if the creatives really took over.
• For more on Jimmy Baldwin’s music, visit www.jimmybmusic.com.
• Downloads available at iTunes.com/jimmybaldwin and Amazon.com.
• To find out about creative retreats, including yoga workshops, at the Double J Hacienda & Art Ranch, visit www.djartranch.com.
