Dirty Linen #99

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen Magazine #99 (April / May 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.

Jimmy LaFave
Roots Along a Red Dirt Road
by Kerry Dexter

For Jimmy LaFave, music comes out of the landscape. "I write about 90% of my stuff when I'm traveling," he said. "When you get on the road and things just kind of open up... That's where I seem to do most of my writing, because I think when you're looking out a car window or a train or bus and you just pass things, it's almost like watching a movie out of that window," he explained. "You see two people talking on a corner, and you imagine things, or it helps inspire things. Or you'll see a sign, maybe just a sign with a word you like.

"If you're down in New Orleans, you can feel why jazz came from there, or if you're on Highway 61 in the Delta, you can almost feel the blues progression, or the kind of music that might come from a city like San Francisco if you're out there," LaFave said. His own landscapes of choice and heritage are Texas and Oklahoma, and though he's been influenced by and often pays tribute to musical heroes of the region including Buddy Holly and Woody Guthrie, LaFave has wrung his own compelling roots-rock and folk style from the red dirt roads of his native places.

That combination of influence and originality has held through all of LaFave's six records, and it's a direction he's explored most deeply in his latest release, Texoma. "Texas and Oklahoma have a lot more in common than they like to admit, what with the football rivalry and all," said LaFave, who spent his growing years in both states and is now based in Austin. "There is a real spiritual attitude toward music among the people who live there," he said. "That's how I grew up learning about music, and Texoma is kind of a tribute to that."

On the disc LaFave evokes the landscape directly in the vivid images of his "Red Dirt Song" and pays tribute to one of his heroes in the tune "Woody Guthrie." "Growin' up in Oklahoma, you just automatically know a lot of Woody's songs," LaFave recalled, "and we used to go down to Okemah, were he was from, and hang out — at that time the walls to his old homestead were still standing, but they're completely gone now."

In recent years LaFave has been instrumental in starting the Woody Guthrie Festival, held each July in Okemah, and he was one of the headliners in "A Texas Tribute to Woody Guthrie," an event that also featured Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Mary Cutrufello, Monte Montgomery, and Arlo Guthrie, held at the historic Paramount Theater in Austin and sponsored by NARAS (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences).

LaFave began early with music. "It started when I lived in Texas. They had these things called Green Stamps that you got at the grocery store. My mother bought me a guitar with Green Stamps, and shortly after that, I got a drum set from Sears and Roebuck,"he said. That was in junior high school. "I kinda played both for a while, and then by the time I got out of high school, I was just playing my guitar. I was writing songs, too. I was just attracted to music; I loved all kinds of music. I listened to the radio a lot on old transistor radios."

LaFave moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, when he was 17. "It's a college town there, and college towns — people come there from all over the place, and they bring their record collections. Stillwater was probably about 40,000 people at the time, and 20.000 or so were students. It was a young city, there was a lot of music there, a lot of bars and a lot of places to play music. I just got even more immersed in music there. It's really not a big city; you kind of made your own fun. But it was on the circuit: We got all these guys who came up from Austin. You know: Townes Van Zandt, Joe Ely, Guy Clark, and all those guys. It was kind of a kinship."

Another college kid gigging around Stillwater at the time was named Garth Brooks. "He used to do some happy-hour gigs, and he was in college there, on a track scholarship. He did a lot of cover songs, Dan Fogelberg and stuff like that, and the fraternity guys would come to hear him play. My drummer at the time also played with Garth in the same band. In a town that small there's a limited pool of musicians, so you pretty much know everybody. We weren't like buddies or anything. But from Stillwater Garth went to Nashville and I decided to move to Austin, and look at what happened!" LaFave laughed.

This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #99 (Apr./May '02). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.