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Born in 1953 in Dallas, Texas, Jimmie Vaughan began playing the guitar when he was 13, and within a few years was the lead guitarist for the Chessmen, a popular local band known for covering tunes by Jimi Hendrix and Cream. Vaughan was still in his teens when the band opened for Hendrix in Dallas. Heavily influenced by the blues, Vaughan went on to found such bands as the Texas Storm and The Fabulous Thunderbirds. He withdrew from professional music following the unexpected death of his younger brother, Stevie Ray Vaughan, in 1990, and only reemerged when his friend Eric Clapton invited him to perform in a series of concerts at London's Royal Albert Hall in 1993. A year later, he released his first solo album, STRANGE PLEASURE. His most recent release, 2001's DO YOU GET THE BLUES?, won the Grammy® for best traditional blues album.
GREAT PERFORMANCES: You and your band wound up backing a lot of the blues greats at the Crossroads Festival, and I understand Eric Clapton chose you because he knew you had the versatility to do that. Have you known him a long time?
Jimmie Vaughan: Yeah, I met him in the 1980s when I first started touring with the Fabulous Thunderbirds. We were on tour in the Midwest and all of a sudden he asked us to join his tour. He already knew all our records! I've done a few tours with him since, played the Royal Albert Hall with him when he did a big show there; I've gotten to play with him quite a bit. We've always had that love of the blues thing in common, and he's definitely a hero of mine. We know a lot of the same things about the guitar. When it came around to choosing a band for the festival, I was in Texas, so it kind of made sense to get me and my band: Bill Willis, Billy Pitman, and George Rains.
GP: Was he one of your heroes when you were growing up?
JV: Absolutely! This friend of mine named William Williams had an uncle who lived in England and sent him the John Mayall and the Blues Breakers album, Clapton's first recordings after he left the Yardbirds. This was back in the days when you couldn't find English records in the stores real easily, especially in Dallas. William listened to this record and got so excited, he called me up and played the whole thing to me over the phone. I was already into blues, but I didn't know much about it. Hearing something like that made me grow up in a hurry.
GP: It's interesting that Clapton picked Texas as the place to have this massive celebration of the guitar, and the blues guitar in particular. Texas has quite a history with the blues, doesn't it?
JV: Oh, yeah. Texas has just as much to do with blues as anyplace. I'd even say it's equal to Mississippi as far as its importance to the history of blues goes. I mean, if you just start with the electric guitar -- and blues in Texas goes back way before that, to Blind Lemon Jefferson and all those guys -- the first guy to play blues on the electric guitar was T-Bone Walker. That just sort of starts everything. Without T-Bone, there's no B.B. King, and there certainly wouldn't have been me or Eric Clapton! T-Bone learned his music here, and then he went to Los Angeles, which is where he became famous. Then there was Lightnin' Hopkins, from Houston. And those are just the guys who were popular in the 1940s. His protégé was Pee Wee Crayton, who also was very important in Los Angeles in the 1950s, but who was also from Texas, and he wound up influencing a lot of guys. By the time I started playing in the mid-1960s, there was Freddie King, another Texan who had to leave the state to become famous. You had to know how to play those Freddie King instrumentals like "Hideaway" if you wanted to work! Just the guitar, period: you think of it as being from Texas. Or at least I do.
GP: What was it like backstage at the Crossroads Festival? Were all those guitarists checking out each other's instruments and talking shop?
JV: It was more like a reunion of old friends, a family reunion. I mean, there was Buddy Guy and Hubert Sumlin and B.B. King and Robert Cray -- all people I've played with, both back in the days when the Fabulous Thunderbirds were the house band at Antone's club in Austin or on the road. Some of us hadn't seen each other in a long time and we had catching up to do.
GP: What attracted you to the guitar, as opposed to any other instrument, as a teenager?
JV: Well, originally I wanted to play drums, and I borrowed some from a neighbor. I wasn't very good, though. I got tackled playing football at school and broke a collarbone, so I had to stay home to recuperate, and, of course, you can't play drums with a broken collarbone. And there was a guitar lying around, so I picked it up and spent my time playing it. It was actually kind of inevitable, I guess: in Dallas when I was a kid there was so much music everywhere, on the radio, on television. And a couple of my uncles played guitar, the style you hear on Webb Pierce and Ernest Tubb records. That was country, but back then, I didn't know the difference between blues and what they were doing.
GP: Well, that's possibly because, as far as American music is concerned, blues is sort of a universal language: country guitarists can play it, jazz guitarists can play it. Why do you think that is?
JV: I think it's because it's at the roots of the whole thing, all of American music. It's because it both came out of church music and was the flip side of church music -- that's pretty universal right there. But I think it's also very attractive to people because it's honest. You sing about feelings and things that normal people know about.
GP: So why is it, do you think, that so many British players have picked up on it?
JV: I would have to say that it was because the music was so cool. When they heard it, it was irresistible, and it was such an antiestablishment thing to do: it was so un-British! It also sounded so good they couldn't help it -- which is the same thing as happened to me.
GP: Who would you have chosen, out of the whole history of the blues, living or dead, if you were programming a festival like this?
JV: Oh, there are so many. ... We would have had to have Gatemouth Brown and T-Bone Walker in a guitar battle. Man, I'd love to have seen that! Maybe Lowman Pauling and the "5" Royales for another take on the blues tradition. But if I could only choose one, it'd be Guitar Slim. He was the wildest. All the things people hear about Jimi Hendrix, Guitar Slim did first. He'd dye his hair and suit and shoes to match his guitar, he'd play through the PA system so he could play super loud, he'd have a long guitar cord so he could walk around the audience and out into the street, he'd play the guitar behind his back and while he was rolling around on the floor. Plus, of course, he was real, real good.
GP: And what young players do you see around the scene today who you think would be on a Crossroads Festival in five years?
JV: I can think of two right here in Austin. There's a guy named Gary Clark, Jr., whose dad used to sneak him into Antone's. He was influenced by all the music he heard there, but he's got something of his own, too. He's one of those guys who sings like he plays, and he can really sing. He's going to be somebody people will hear a lot about, and he's about 20 years old now. There's another guy named Nick Curran who plays around here a lot. He's another one who can really sing. Both these guys know a lot about authentic blues, and I find them very encouraging. There are just some people who like music and don't care what's popular. Those are the guys you have to watch for.
GP: And what about the future of the guitar itself? There were a lot of different guitars on display that weekend.
JV: Oh, I think there'll be wild and strange guitars in the future, but as far as I'm concerned, guitars only come in two flavors: Gibson and Fender! But really, that's a personal thing.
An interview by writer Ed Ward for GREAT PERFORMANCES Online conducted in November 2004.
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