Jimmy Lafave Jimmy LafaveJimmy Lafave has just recorded a brilliant new record, a collection of songs which makes it clear right from the start that Lafave has made his big move. Scheduled for release on Bohemia Beat in September '95, Buffalo Return To The Plains seems destined to become a classic. It covers every soulful inch of Lafave territory, and goes on to stake claims on surprising new ground. Audiences who have heard recent live previews of the new songs claim to have been officially "blown away." Many have ventured that the new one may just be even more wonderful than their beloved Austin Skyline ('92) or their cherished Highway Trance ('94).
That's saying something.... To listen to 
Highway Trance, the follow-up to Jimmy's critically acclaimed Bohemia Beat debut, the live Austin Skyline, is to hear the work of a man who refuses to be bound by the normal constraints of stylistic boundaries. There are soul-tingling ballads (When Tears Fall Down, Prayer For You, Dark Dancing Eyes), riot-inciting rockers (Shakin' In Your Hips, Austin After Midnight, Route 66 Revisited), and excursions ranging from bluesy jazz to a Dylanesque waltz in between, scattered across an album that seems to be held together with rusty barbed wire and velvet ropes.
Without a hint of the slick or a trace of the formulaic, Highway Trance knocks you down in the early rounds and sends you back to your corner gratefully reminded how sweet it is to fall head over heels in love with an album and an artist. Highway Trance is one of those classic albums devoid of tricks, yet full of surprises, lifting and satisfying the listener with music that is unerringly, almost mystically, real.
Rock music has blessed us with a handful of voices able to send notes and words to places inside us so intimate and subltle that they seldom, if ever get touched by other means. Jimmy LaFave has one of those voices. Bob Johnston, producer of Dylan, Cash, and Aretha, and major LaFave fan, once gave Jimmy a wee hours guarantee that "One day when your voice gets heard on the radio, from that day on, nothing can stop you. You have one of those voices that just cuts through all the clutter, and no one is going to be able to resist it."
Jimmy's peers have long been his biggest champions. As Lucinda Williams gushes, "Jimmy's songs move me 'cause he sings them with passion, grit, and uncommon beauty." Highway Trance propels LaFave from artist's artist to national treasure.
Jimmy was born in Wills Point, Texas, a small rural town 
just outside of Dallas, and began elementary school down the road in Mesquite. By junior high he began making music, perched behind his Sears and Roebuck drum kit. It wasn't long before Jimmy's mother traded a drawer full of Green Stamps for his first guitar - and the switch from foundation to front man was in progress. "I like to sing and it's real hard playing drums and trying to sing. Still, I'm glad I started drumming, because I'm pretty good about not dragging or speeding up the beat..."
His family later moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, where Jimmy finished high school, graduating with a notebook full of self-penned songs. From then on it was LaFave the emerging singer/songwriter/guitarist audiences were to enjoy, and the sound of snares and cymbals were to be forever more found coming from behind, rather than in front of, Jimmy LaFave.
Stillwater turned out to be a musical hotbed for Jimmy. Home to Oklahoma State University, the air was alive and with the energy and ideals of youth. And music was everywhere. "There's such a rich musical tradition there, starting with Woody Guthrie and touching everyone from J. J. Cale to Chet Baker, from Leon Russell to 
Kevin Welch."
The open spaces of Oklahoma which forged that tradition found LaFave and his friends scanning the airwaves and record stores for new tunes by the likes of Butch Hancock and Townes Van Zandt. And they soon began following these beacons from the seminal Austin music scene back to their source. "It was an eight hour drive to Austin, so when we wanted to get out of town and hear some music, that's where we'd go."
With his music reaching a new maturity every few months, Jimmy was meeting with ever-increasing popularity throughout Oklahoma. When it was time for him to discover how far his musical destiny was to lead him, he trusted his intuition and followed those beacons one more time back to their source in Austin, this time to stay.
When folks in his new home wanted to know what to call his distictive, yet familiar, sound, the response they were likely to hear was "red-dirt music." If you're not sure what this means, a few minutes's drive in any direction from Stillwater will find you surrounded by the answer. "Somehow that Okie tag stuck, and that suits me fine. Everyone I know is real proud of being Okies... there's a real cast of characters up there, the last of that pioneer spirit trying to grab that last piece of the American dream -- that spirit really exists out there."
Jimmy's pioneer spirit frequently found it's expression in wanderlust, nurtured by the years he spent driving a truck for his father. "I pretty much worked blue-collar jobs and I think it had a lot to do with my music over the years. I listened to a lot of AM radio driving around. It keeps you in touch with what's going on in America plus you've gotta lot of time to think, to see how different people live."
"When you're out there on the road, you see rain storms in New Mexico, sand hills in Nebraska, etc. It gave me places to put my daydreams. Now when I write a line I know what I'm talking about about. I can feel the where of the moment. It's always real."
And that reality anchors every flex of LaFave's pretty potent musical muscle, keeping our footing firm as the raw emotions that come from his voice and the simple truths in his lyrics deliver their wallop.
One listen to the promise made on "The Open Road," when LaFave closes his eyes and offers, "Cause we were born to wander / We were not born to lose / I must follow distant thunder / Or I'll get the blues..." and it's obvious the rhythms that move him forward have little to do with whether the drummer's rushing on any given night. And it's in that rhythm of the road that LaFave finds his comfort -- it's comfort he's willing to share.
In a world of high tech, prefab and color coded everything, grit, grime, sweat, blood, faith and tears may not be the flashiest, but they get the job done in a way that reaches deep inside. For Jimmy LaFave, anything else really wouldn't be worth doing at all.
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