Making ‘Peace’ with dying
Oklahoma-Texas musician recorded final album while coping with aggressive terminal cancer
Oklahoma-Texas musician recorded final album while coping with aggressive terminal cancer.
Peering out of pink, heart-shaped sunglasses Jaimee Harris crooned of the sunshiny dreams in Jimmy LaFave’s song “Island.”
“Then I awoke and you were gone/I was on the island all alone/Just calling out your name/All in vain,” the Texas singersongwriter poignantly sang the day before the release of LaFave’s last album, “Peace Town,” on which he invited Harris and her roommate, Jane Ellen Bryant, to sing background vocals.
“Jimmy was not only such a great connector, but he was really good at pulling the next person up, always helping the next person,” Harris said after singing in LaFave’s memory during a legacy tribute at the recent Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah.
“At the end of his life, he could have asked anyone he wanted to sing on that record. Instead, here he is pulling up Jane, pulling up me. It was pretty magical ... and I’m so grateful for the opportunity.”
A pioneer of the influential red dirt music scene who came of age in Stillwater and went on to become an Austin, Texas, music icon, LaFave died May 21, 2017, from myxofibrosarcoma, a rare and aggressive type of cancer. He was 61.
“He first noticed a little bump on his chest, actually, I think when we were on our way to Folk Alliance, so February of 2016. Then by that June, the bump had grown. He had had the tumor removed that June, and that’s when we found out what it was ... and by that November, it had metastasized to his lungs. He had doctors here in Austin and also we’d gone to M.D. Anderson (Cancer Center in Houston). And the doctors there, in all their years of experience, they had only seen maybe a handful of times his situation where it was that aggressive. ... It's there one day, and then just barely over a year later he’s gone,” said Ashley Warren, who worked with LaFave on his career, label and tours and now administers the Jimmy LaFave Intellectual Property Trust.
“He did do radiation, but it was still growing during radiation. So, at some point you just say, ‘Well, do I want to go through chemo and be sick for the rest of my days or do I just want to go live life?’ He went and he lived his life: We got in the car and went on tour. He kept playing music.”
Final album
When LaFave set out to make his final recordings, he had a lofty goal in mind.
“His original goal was to go in and create 100 songs,” Warren said. “He had that first session in March and then he went for a couple of dates up north in Chicago. … And by the time he came back, there was a marked difference in his health. And that’s when we knew we were not going to get to 100 songs. He managed to — miraculously, really — make it to 20.”
Released last month on his Music Road Records, the double album “Peace Town” collects those final 20 recordings from the Oklahoma
Music Hall of Famer.
“He was dealing with pretty much one entire lung (that) was full of tumors, and he was able to find the strength and the breath and the voice to go into the studio and record. It really was a beautiful thing to watch and be a part of,” she said.
“It was a really big struggle physically, emotionally, spiritually . ... I think I would have thrown in the towel. But somehow or other, he found the strength, he found his voice.”
She credited LaFave’s family, friends, fans and fellow musicians with keeping him going, both in the recording studio and on his farewell tour.
“That last tour, 31 shows in Austin in April, then going up to Oklahoma ... I really don’t know how he did it other than he just knew this was his last ride,” she said. “I absolutely think he held on for the shows and for the recording.”
Unfinished songs
The “Peace Town” liner notes list the track “A Thousand by My Side” as featuring music by LaFave and lyrics by his Music Road Records co-founder Kelcy Warren. But it is actually an instrumental.
Since LaFave was unable to sing the new song in the end, Ashley Warren said viola player Will Taylor used the red dirt standout's scratch vocals to interpret "A Thousand by My Side" as a wordless homage.
“He really captured the essence, I think, of where Jimmy was going with the song," she said.
LaFave paid tribute to many of his most significant musical influences with “Peace Town,” including his covers of several Oklahoma music legends: Leon Russell's "Help Me Through the Day,” JJ Cale's "Don't Go to Strangers” and Bill and Sis Cunningham’s "My Oklahoma Home (It Blowed Away)."
“Peace Town” includes three songs LaFave composed to lyrics penned by his idol, Okemah-born folk icon Woody Guthrie: the title track, “Salvation Train” and “Sideline Woman.”
“‘Peace Town’ is such a beautiful, beautiful song. Every time I listen to it, I just think it’s ... so fitting for him to choose a song like that there at the end,” Warren said. “Sometimes I just think that whatever people think of Jimmy LaFave, all the good things about him, they would think a thousandfold or more if they saw him through the dying process. I just think it was an extension of who he is and how he lived his life; this time, it just happened to be at the end of his life.”
New meanings
During last month’s Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, which coincided with LaFave’s final album release and what would have been his 63rd birthday, several Oklahoma musicians played songs by the red dirt trailblazer in his honor. Nellie Clay and Jason Scott performed “Going Home,” the Red Dirt Rangers rocked “Red Dirt Roads,” and Monica Taylor crooned “The Price of Love,” which she and LaFave recorded together, with Jared Tyler as her duet partner in his absence.
Along with “Island,” Harris played “Living in Your Light,” another LaFave ballad that she said has taken on new significance.
“When Jimmy was sick ... all these songs had all these different meanings to me. Shortly after he died, ‘Living in Your Light,’ I just saw it in this whole new way: ‘I’m living in your light / Singing your song along the way / Oh my, oh my, what a joyful day,’” she said.
“Like other great songwriters — like Woody or Butch (Hancock) or Townes Van Zandt — (he would) sing these songs that I think we can enjoy and see meaning in them, but there’s just so many onion layers of meaning.”