Jolie & The Jackalopes, a real gone country, jump blues, rockabilly, honky tonk band taking you on a journey of tunes all the way from when western was swinging, to the boppin’ days of rockabilly, and finally to the days of the cosmic cowboys of Texas.
Jolie & The Jackalopes is a freewheeling, skinny dipping, hot rodding, high rolling "cosmic-billy" band. Jolie & The Jackalopes combines the hi-tone sound of rockabilly with the groover’s paradise of the Austin Sound, playing both original and old school tunes. Daughter of legendary producer Joe Gracey and singer songwriter Kimmie Rhodes, singer Jolie Goodnight has decided to carry the torch of the vast array of rockabilly cowboy poets of the cosmic persuasion. She was raised in the world of Rockabilly, Country and Americana music under the tender love and care of coloring on Willie Nelson’s tour bus, of matching shirts and happy-birthday-answering-machine-messages from Waylon Jennings, and of nights spent backstage watching Kimmie with Rosie Flores and Ray Campi. As a throwback to her parents' band “Kimmie Rhodes & The Jackalope Brothers” Goodnight has a rocking array of modern rockabilly musicians including Dylan Cavalier (Chop Tops, Chadd Thomas,) Jorge Harada (Dragstrip 77, Rosie Flores,) and Paul Vezelis (.) Jolie & The Jackalopes honors a legacy while energetically rocketing into the future!
By the grace and rustic powers of Kimmie Rhodes and Joe Gracey I was blessed with a showbiz life, surrounded by musicians of all kinds, but mostly those of a country variety - a vast array of Americana song-writers, country swing fiddle players, cowboy poets of the cosmic persuasion, and country heroes. I grew up in some kind of central Texas hill country beautiful lunacy, one to which I care very deeply to pay homage. And in my mind I was having a beautiful life (coincidentally, this phrase made its way into a song Mama and Waylon wrote together.) In the scrapbook of my childhood mind there is a melange of country music images and moments: of cranking peach ice cream out on the porch with guitar player Bucky Meadows, of Stubbs in the kitchen making BBQ sauce, of crayons on Willie Nelson’s tour bus and he calls me the best colorer in the world, of Waylon Jennings and I picking out matching shirts and his happy-birthday-answering-machine-messages, and of Blaze Foley giving me a flashlight and a teddy bear.
Fast forward and I’m in my twenties exploring the rockabilly scene that Austin had to offer. Luckily into my life arrived two folks who welcomed me and loved me and made me feel right at home, Dylan Cavalier and the late Chadd Thomas. It makes me simply giddy that Dylan is the man slapping the bass for Jolie & The Jackalopes. From then on, the rockabilly family has been a wonderful haven for me in cities across the nation.
Before I was born (and a little while after) Mama, Daddy, Bobbly Earl Smith and a bunch of other Austin cronies had a band called Kimmie Rhodes & The Jackalope Brothers. And so, the mythical jackalope is my heritage and I find it my duty as an Austin gal to carry on the name of such a creature.