Final Album by Late Folk-Rock Legend Jimmy LaFave, Peace Town, to be Released on 7/13

(Austin, TX, Press Release) After being diagnosed with a very rare fast-growing cancer called myxofibrosarcoma in June 2016, Austin-based singer and songwriter Jimmy LaFave resolved to continue to perform and record as long as he was able. The results of two stints at Austin's Cedar Creek Recording Studios just a few months before his death on May 21, 2017 will be issued as a two-CD, 20-track set titled Peace Town on his Music Road Records label on July 13, the day after what would have been LaFave's 63rd birthday.
 
A founding father of the now-thriving Oklahoma Red Dirt music movement and, after moving to Austin in 1986, a leading light of that city's world-renowned singer-songwriter scene, LaFave was a triple threat musical quantity as a performer and recording artist: "[O]ne of rock's best singers - certainly its finest ballad singer - with a voice that can swoop, dart, glide or knock you on your butt," notes the Associated Press; in the estimate of his peer Ray Wylie Hubbard, "His songwriting's just stellar, and it carries a lot of depth and weight;" and as the Philadelphia Inquirer raves, he's "a masterful interpreter" of songs by others. All three qualities shine on Peace Town.

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Another of his heretofore-unknown artistic skills was as an art photographer, documenting roadside signs and unique classic structures as he traveled the two-lane highways of the nation on tour. LaFave's vivid photographs of a vanishing America debuted in an exhibit at Austin's Stephen L. Clark Gallery, "Searching for Peace Town," during South By Southwest in March. A selection of the prints will now be displayed in the lobby of the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, OK from April 24 to May 28. A number of the images are also included in the Peace Town CD package.
 
The tracks that comprise Peace Town were not recorded by LaFave as a planned final or farewell album. "When Jimmy first started this project his goal was to get to 100 songs," explains Ashley Warren, the trustee who administers the Jimmy LaFave Intellectual Property Trust, which he formed to preserve his artistic legacy to benefit his son Jackson. "This is not what he intended to be his last album. These were songs he was leaving us for future albums and projects." But among performing to fulfill commitments and still support himself and his band, dealing with doctors, his disease and undergoing treatment, overseeing the Music Road Records label he co-owned, and settling his personal, business and artistic affairs, plus the rapid spread of his cancer, these 20 last recordings were all he was able to complete.
 
Yet the set reflects his artistry as well as the emotional elements over the last months of his life in which his medical condition brought issues of mortality, legacy, life and love to the forefront. As such, it stands proudly as one of his best works within a critically-lauded career in which, as All Music notes, he "brought a passionate rock & roll energy to his original folk songs, whether he was playing solo or with a band." And made his mark as an interpreter who could take the songs of others and virtually make them his own.
 
Alongside time-tested reinterpretations of two of his own previously released compositions are three numbers LaFave composed to lyrics by his icon, Woody Guthrie, and his interpretations of material by his influences ranging from Chuck Berry to Pete Townshend of The Who to more of what All Music describes as his "fantastic work on Bob Dylan's songs" on three tracks. The set also includes nods to noted songwriters from Oklahoma - the state where LaFave came of age and started his career - like Leon Russell and J.J. Cale as well as selections from lesser-known but equally gifted writers whose talents he admired.
 
All told, Peace Town celebrates what All Music says was "the way he blended country, blues, folk, and early rock & roll, his work ethic, and his low-key rapport with fans were all factors that worked in his favor." And gave everything he recorded, as All Music also observed, "a stamp that is indelible. It's tattooed on the inside, on the heart where it belongs."

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