Jimmy Gourley (James Pasco Gourley Jr.) was an American-born guitarist who spent more than half a century of his working life in France. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 9, 1926, sailed for Europe in April 1951 and settled in Paris, and lived in and around the city until he passed away on December 7, 2008, aged 82, at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges. Apart from three years back in Chicago (late 1954 to the end of 1957) and a spell in the Canary Islands (1970 to 1972), Paris was his base for the rest of his life, and he took French nationality in 1994. AllMusic calls the 1950s his French period and counts him among the most accomplished members of the jazz expatriate community.

His father, a traveling salesman, moved the family to Chicago in 1932 and founded a school of music there, and Gourley took up the guitar as a boy. In a high-school band he sat beside Lee Konitz, whom he later credited with pushing him to take music seriously, and he left school to play with a band in Oklahoma City. He spent 1944 to 1946 in the U.S. Navy, two years on a Pacific island without playing. Back in Chicago in June 1946 he worked in Jimmy Dale's orchestra, where he found Konitz again, and fell in with the players around Jay Burkhart's modern orchestra: Lou Levy, Sandy Mosse, Cy Touff and, above all, the guitarist Jimmy Raney. In January 1948 he took Raney's chair with Burkhart, and he also played with Vido Musso and in the group of the singer Jackie Cain and the pianist Roy Kral. English Wikipedia adds Anita O'Day, Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons among the people he worked with in Chicago clubs. At the end of 1950, worried about the damage drugs were doing to his fellow musicians and told that France had a lively scene, he decided to leave.

In Paris he made a lasting friendship with the pianist Henri Renaud, who helped him find a place in the city's music world. He played at the Tabou, the Club Saint-Germain and the Bœuf sur le Toit, led a quartet with Martial Solal at the Ringside, and accompanied the American musicians who passed through. In 1953 and 1954 he was on a long run of Paris recording sessions: with Renaud's orchestras and small groups, with Bobby Jaspar, Lee Konitz (September 17, 1953), Zoot Sims and Frank Rosolino (September 18, 1953), Clifford Brown and Gigi Gryce (September 29 and October 8, 1953), The Third Herdsmen (May 5, 1954), Bob Brookmeyer (June 5, 1954), and Roy Haynes with Barney Wilen (October 26, 1954). In November 1954 he formed a quintet with Renaud and Wilen, then went back to Chicago.

There he led a quintet with Sandy Mosse and the pianist Eddie Baker, recorded in July 1956 on the album Chicago Scene, and recorded with the orchestra of the bassist Chubby Jackson in 1956 and 1957. He accompanied Anita O'Day in 1957, and at the end of that year he returned to Paris. In spring 1958 he played the newly opened Mars Club with the pianist Art Simmons and the bassist Michel Gaudry, and after the summer his quartet became the house rhythm section at the Blue Note, backing Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Lester Young, Sonny Stitt, Bud Powell and J.J. Johnson. He was on guitar for Lester Young's last recording sessions in Paris in March 1959.

The 1960s tied him to the drummer Kenny Clarke and the organist Lou Bennett. The Lou Bennett trio recorded the album Amen in Paris in July 1960, and Gourley and Clarke were also on Bennett's Hot Hammond session in Cologne on October 7, 1960. In December 1960 he recorded the soundtrack of the film Paris Blues, with music arranged by Duke Ellington, and played a guitar solo behind Louis Armstrong, Guy Lafitte and the trombonist Billy Byers. In October 1961 the pianist Krzysztof Komeda invited him to the Jazz Jamboree in Warsaw, where he played in a quartet with Adam Skorupka and Adam Jedrzejowski. In 1963 he toured Europe and North Africa with Clarke, and in 1966 Eddy Louiss replaced Bennett in the trio. After the Canary Islands he came back to the Paris clubs, among them the Club Saint-Germain, the Bilboquet and the Caveau de la Montagne. Even in 1981 the Clarke, Bennett and Gourley trio was working abroad: Gourley's future companion, Rolande Hugard-Gourley, met him that year at the Grill Joss in Douala, Cameroon, where the trio shared the bill with Manu Dibango.

From the 1970s he recorded under his own name. Sessions of September 6 and 7, 1972 with Kenny Clarke, René Urtreger, Eddy Louiss and André Ceccarelli were not issued until 1984, as Jimmy Gourley and the Paris Heavyweights. Graffitti (Promophone, 1977) came from November 1976 sessions with Henri Texier, Daniel Humair and Bernard Lubat, and No More (Musica, 1981) from a Paris session with Lou Levy, Marc Johnson and Victor Lewis on which Stan Getz appears on two tracks under the pseudonym Dju Berry. The Jazz Trio (Bingow, 1983) paired him with Johnson and the drummer Philippe Combelle. On visits to the United States he played duets with the guitarist Mundell Lowe and recorded The Left Bank of New York for Uptown on August 25, 1986 at Rudy Van Gelder's studio, with Ralph Moore, Don Sickler, Marc Johnson and Victor Lewis. A December 23, 1987 concert recording with Barney Wilen came out in 1999 as Double Action. Later albums on the Elabeth label were made with the bassist Dominique Lemerle and Combelle, including Our Delight (1995), and Straight Ahead Express (2003) with his son, the guitarist Sean Gourley. He also recorded Flyin' the Coop (1991) with the accordionist Richard Galliano, appeared with Christian Escoudé in 1989, and is credited on albums with Stéphane Grappelli in the mid-1970s.

AllMusic notes that he can be seen in the film 'Round Midnight, and that on a later trio record with Philippe Combelle and Dominique Lemerle his own liner notes described him as still searching. His life was told in a 2025 book by Rolande Hugard-Gourley, his companion from 1982 until his death, published by Frémeaux & Associés with a three-CD anthology of his recordings from 1951 to 2002. Jazz Journal's review describes the pianist Henri Renaud crediting him with helping French listeners discover the importance of Lester Young and Charlie Christian.

Gourley described his first influence as Charlie Christian and the second as Jimmy Raney, whom he met in Chicago in 1946 and made a lasting friend; in a 1972 interview in Jazz Hot he also named the Chicago guitarist Ronnie Singer, and said he had been marked by the tenor saxophonists Al Cohn, Zoot Sims and Stan Getz. French Wikipedia says he played a Gibson ES-150, the Charlie Christian model. AllMusic hears a bebop guitarist with a rhythmic edge solid enough for rhythm and blues, and the notes to the Frémeaux anthology single out the elegance of his playing, his melodic invention and the rigor of his rhythmic placement. His repertoire mixes bebop and cool-school standards and tunes by Tadd Dameron, Clifford Brown and Neal Hefti with his own blues and originals, and he sang on some of his records. He worked mostly in small groups built around a piano or organ, a bass and drums.