She married the ZZ Top guitarist in 2005 and wrote the opening track on his second solo album. Nearly everything on file about her comes from a Texas marriage record or from Gibbons himself.
Gilligan Stillwater was in Memphis in May 2019 to collect an award that belonged to her husband. Billy Gibbons could not make the Blues Music Awards that year. His solo record The Big Bad Blues had won Blues Rock Album of the Year, and she accepted it on his behalf.
No music publication covered her being there. The only account of the night turned up roughly a year afterward, in a short post on Gibbons’ own website.
She has been married to the ZZ Top guitarist since December 2005 and handles much of the business behind his career. In more than twenty years she has not sat for a single interview.
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Ellen J. Oetjen, before the name nobody has explained
Her name at birth was Ellen J. Oetjen. That comes from the Texas Marriage Index, the public record that also documents the wedding on December 14, 2005. Sometime before then she began going by Gilligan Stillwater. Neither she nor Gibbons has ever said when the change happened or why.
It was Gibbons’ first marriage. He was 55, two days short of his 56th birthday, and had spent more than three decades in one of the most recognizable bands in American rock without marrying anyone. The couple have no children.
No public record confirms her date of birth. HollywoodLife put her at 57 in April 2022, and reporting from the year before had her at 56, which points to a birth year of 1965 and would make her 61 now. Gibbons was born in Houston on December 16, 1949, and turned 76 last December.
A writing credit alongside Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley
The Big Bad Blues came out on Concord Records on September 21, 2018, three years after Gibbons’ first solo record, Perfectamundo. He wrote most of it. The rest is blues material he covered, two songs from Muddy Waters, one from Bo Diddley, and one from Diddley’s percussionist Jerome Green.
The opening track is the exception. “Missin’ Yo’ Kissin'” runs three minutes and nineteen seconds, and the writing credit reads Gilly Stillwater. Every other name in the album credits belongs either to Gibbons or to one of the blues musicians he was covering.
Gibbons has said the lyrics came from a notepad his wife was filling on the studio couch while the band worked at Foam Box Studios in Houston. The engineers read what she had written before he did. AllMusic, reviewing the record, called it the keynote track and named her as the writer. American Songwriter noted it as a rare credit for Gibbons’ wife.
The album took Blues Rock Album of the Year at the 40th Blues Music Awards the following May, which is what put her in Memphis.
The work behind ZZ Top’s touring operation
Gibbons has said in interviews that his wife handles much of the business behind his career, including the touring side of ZZ Top. He started the band in Houston in 1969 with bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard, put out its first album in 1971, and went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside them in 2004. Hill died in 2021.
What she earns from that work is not public. No filing and no credible report establishes a figure for her personal wealth.
Four screen credits, all of them small
Stillwater has a short record as an actor, none of it in studio productions:
- Miscommunication (2005), a short made for the Hollywood 48 Hour Film Project, in which she played a character named Elena
- Pickin’ and Grinnin’ (2010), as a bartender
- The Snake and Mongoose Chronicles (2011), a short, as a saloon keeper
- Snake and Mongoose (2013), the drag racing drama, credited as Brenda Greer
The 2013 film also lists her under a different version of her name, Ellen “Gilligan” Gibbons. She and Gibbons walked the carpet at its premiere in Avon, Indiana, on August 29, 2013.
Two decades of photo captions
Getty’s editorial archive has been captioning Billy Gibbons’ wife at public events for twenty years. The trail runs:
- April 2005, Los Angeles, at an event with Gibbons while they were still dating
- February 2006, a red carpet weeks after the wedding
- 2012, the Classic Rock Roll of Honour Awards
- December 2013, the American Country Awards in Las Vegas
- November 2017, a visit to the White House
- April 11, 2022, the CMT Music Awards in Nashville
- April 2022, Steven Tyler’s Grammy viewing party for Janie’s Fund
- November 2023, the BMI Country Awards
- February 26, 2025, the Texas Medal of Arts Awards in Austin
She keeps an Instagram account under the handle @gilligangibbons. It has around two thousand followers and almost nothing posted to it.
In more than twenty years she has not spoken publicly about the marriage or about the song she wrote. Gibbons turned 76 in December, and the credit on the first track of The Big Bad Blues still reads Gilly Stillwater.
Reporting draws on the Texas Marriage Index, Concord Records album credits, Billboard, AllMusic, American Songwriter, Getty Images editorial archives, and posts published on Billy Gibbons’ official website.
