Pop Music Reviews : Wisdom, Wisecracks by Gilmore and Hancock

You’d be hard pressed to find a more literate pop-music gathering than the folks at McCabe’s for Friday’s concert by Texas song-poets Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock. These people cheered clever turns of phrases--and there were plenty of ‘em--the way a rock audience might acknowledge hot guitar solos.

The two folky-tonkers, who in the early ‘70s performed with Joe Ely as the Flatlanders, are longtime mainstays of this singer-songwriter sub-genre, which is currently experiencing a renaissance spearheaded by Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith. But neither Gilmore nor Hancock (performing separate half-hour solo sets before teaming for more than 1 1/2 hours) seemed like stuffed shirts leading a poetry seminar--they are Texans, after all.

The show’s vivid images offered wisdom and wisecracks a la Dylan (recalled by Hancock’s epic tales) and Hank Williams (conjured by Gilmore’s aw-shucks manner), and harked back to those giants’ own influences like Jimmie Rogers and Blind Lemon Jefferson. And if perhaps it’s stretching it a bit to call Gilmore a song-poet (he wrote just two songs on his new album “Fair & Square”), his nasal twang--similar to, but less laconic than Willie Nelson’s--is plenty poetic in itself.