Born in a small town east of Dallas, Jimmy LaFave cut his musical teeth in the college town of Stillwater, Oklahoma (where Garth Brooks paid to watch him perform). LaFave made the troubadour's migration to Austin in 1986 and released a series of albums that evoked a Woody Guthrie-esque romance with straight highways and distant horizons (consider two of his album titles: Highway Trance and Buffalo Return To the Plains) with the hardscrabble life of a beer joint rocker. Possessed of a lovely tenor voice that can float like a butterfly when applied to a ballad or coarsen to a roadhouse rasp when the bass and drums kick in, as in "Austin After Midnight," LaFave is a lifer, building his musical monument one evocative song at a time.