Interview: Jimmy LaFave sings of the "Red River Shore" on new album "Depending on the Distance"

A version of this story appears in Wednesday’s Life section of The Oklahoman.

Throughout his life and career, Jimmy LaFave has made his way on both sides of the Red River.

So it’s appropriate that one of the highlights of the singer-songwriter’s first album of new material in five years is a poignant cover of Bob Dylan’s epic ballad “Red River Shore,” even if the waterway dividing Oklahoma and Texas might not be the one Bob the Bard had in mind.

“The song ‘Red River Valley,’ the famous cowboy song, is actually about the Red River that runs through Minnesota. And since Dylan’s from Minnesota, I have a feeling he was thinking of his homeland. That’s just my opinion. Then again, you never know. He’s been to Texas and Oklahoma, too. But for me, definitely it brought up memories of the Oklahoma-Texas connection and the Red River that I’ve crossed so many times,” LaFave said in a recent phone interview from the Americana Music Festival & Conference in Nashville, Tenn.

“The lyrics are so cool to that song, too, if you really start listening to what he’s singing about, the nine minutes fly by pretty quick.”

Time also flies when you’re starting your own record label and preserving the legacy of Oklahoma music icon Woody Guthrie, the acclaimed red dirt musician has discovered. It took LaFave, 57, two years to record his new album, “Depending on the Distance,” released last week. It actually is his first collection of new material on his own Music Road Records, the Austin, Texas-based label he co-founded in 2008 with Dallas businessman Kelcy Warren.

“I’ve been so busy getting the label kind off the ground the last few years … and the label’s finally moving along on its own well enough now that I can kind of get back to make my own music on it,” said LaFave, who has been busily touring with his Guthrie tribute show “Walking Woody’s Road” during this year’s centennial celebration of the folk hero’s birth.

“You know, some people they end up working on albums for 10 years and I didn’t want to turn into one of those people,” he added. “It was 70 percent done for about a year or so, I just needed to really go in there and knock out the other 30 percent. So I finally just did it. I just said, ‘I’m not gonna do anything until I get this done.’ So I pretty much just went in nearly every night ‘til I finished it off.”

Red River connection

Born in Wills Point, Texas, about 30 miles east of Dallas, the future roots music champion had a rhythm going behind a Sears & Roebuck drum kit by the time he was in junior high. When he was a teenager, his family moved north of the Red River to Stillwater, where he finished high school and began to dig even deeper musical roots.

He tips his hat to his Sooner State upbringing with the boogie-woogie track “Red Dirt Night,” in which he names “about every town in Oklahoma I can think of that’ll fit into the rhythm of the song.”