Perhaps you remember Gary Kirkland as co-host of Folk Waves on KCUR-FM. Perhaps you were at the International Jimmy Rodgers Yodeling Championship in 1981 where Gary took top honors for his yodeling talent.
Gary Kirkland’s release “Shootin’ The Works On Love” (April 2003) on Darkhorse Productions label, produced at Weatherby with fine Kansas City musicians, family and friends, and including nine original compositions from local and area songwriters, is certainly his best work ever.
In music as in life, with age comes maturity, experience, expression, wisdom and finesse. Gary has put his voice and heart in touch with his roots and soul to produce a genuine original work of art. Gary has woven lost jewels from the past, contemporary classics and fresh original material into a masterpiece of true American sound.
The Kansas City Star has called Gary Kirkland “A champion yodeler … [who] can interpret a country classic with quiet authority”.
The Kansas City Pitch magazine has said about Gary’s recordings (As Is, 1977; Plain and Fancy, 1983; Bluesabilly, 1990), “Don’t expect a Top 40 sound at all. This is real music, recorded professionally by those who know how to preserve the past as well as the future. Gary Kirkland has brought us a gift from the past and applies it to the present in fantabulous fashion”.
With his unique voice, Gary sings about love, chickens, trains, TV dinners, mules, grandpas, churches, dance halls, outhouses, fishing, taking it easy, taking it hard, sunshine, moonshine, cows, cowboys, cowgirls, and no telling what else. Listening to Gary sing will make you laugh one minute, and cry the next.
Oh, by the way, Gary is still, as proclaimed by the KC Star, “Kansas City’s gift to yodeling”.
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