Stevie Ray Vaughan's Biography
Stevie Ray Vaughan - Biography
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b. 3 October 1954, Dallas, Texas, USA, d.
27 August 1990, East Troy, Wisconsin, USA.
This remarkable blues guitarist was influenced
by his older brother Jimmie (of the Fabulous
Thunderbirds ), whose record collection included
such key Vaughan motivators as Albert King,
Otis Rush and Lonnie Mack. He honed his style
on his brother's hand-me-down guitars in
various high school bands, before moving
to Austin in 1972. He joined the Nightcrawlers,
then Paul Ray And The Cobras, with whom he
recorded "Texas Clover" in 1974.
In 1977 he formed Triple Threat Revue with
vocalist Lou Ann Barton. She later fronted
Vaughan's most successful project, named
Double Trouble after an Otis Rush standard,
for a short period after its inception in
1979. The new band also featured drummer
Chris Layton and ex- Johnny Winter bass player
Tommy Shannon. Producer Jerry Wexler, an
early fan, added them to the bill of the
1982 Montreux Jazz Festival, where Vaughan
was spotted and hired by David Bowie for
his forthcoming Let's Dance (1983). Vaughan
turned down Bowie's subsequent world tour,
however, to rejoin his own band and record
Texas Flood with veteran producer John Hammond.
Couldn't Stand The Weather showed the influence
of Jimi Hendrix, and earned the band its
first platinum disc; in February 1985, they
picked up a Grammy for their contribution
to the Blues Explosion anthology. Soul To
Soul saw the addition of keyboards player
Reese Wynans; Vaughan, by this point a much
sought-after guitarist, could also be heard
on records by James Brown, Johnny Copeland,
and his mentor, Lonnie Mack. The period of
extensive substance abuse that produced the
lacklustre Live Alive led to Vaughan's admittance
to a Georgia detoxification centre. His recovery
was apparent on In Step, which won a second
Grammy. In 1990 the Vaughan brothers worked
together with Bob Dylan on their own Family
Style, and as guests on Eric Clapton's American
tour. Vaughan died in 1990, at East Troy,
Wisconsin, USA, when, anxious to return to
Chicago after Clapton's Milwaukee show, he
switched helicopter seats and boarded a vehicle
that crashed, in dense fog, into a ski hill.