Those names surfaced when Dallas-born Vaughan began selecting songs for his new CD, Plays Blues, Ballads & Favorites, a jubilant, jukebox-flavored retooling of blues classics, instrumentals and originals. Little Milton provided the creative crux for the project, but Donny & Marie came to mind when Vaughan decided to record "I'm Leaving It Up to You" with Austin blues belter Lou Ann Barton.
"As a kid, I had Little Milton Sings Big Blues," says the 59-year-old longtime Austin resident by phone. "He just recorded a bunch of songs that were popular blues tunes at the time, some old, some current, a lot of classic things. I remember that album because maybe only one was actually his song. So it was just a record for people to enjoy. So I just tried that." "I'm Leaving It Up to You," which had already been covered several times, was an immediate choice.
"I like that song ... I like the original. It has been No. 1 three times that I know of, maybe four. Everybody has done that song, so why don't Lou Ann and I do it? We could do the bluesiest version of that. She said, 'We can't do that. They'll call us the Donny & Marie' of the blues." This is what Jimmie Vaughan's been diligently doing for more than 40 years. He revitalizes the blues. Vaughan won't dilute the blues for commercial gain. He's most adept at taking a pure art form and giving it a retro-cool spin. In his hands, it just sounds modern.
The Fabulous Thunderbirds, which he founded with Kim Wilson in the mid 1970s, certainly brought blues to the masses without ever watering down its sonic impact. Vaughan recorded eight albums with the Fab T-Birds, the now-classic early discs such as 1979's Girls Go Wild and 1981's Butt Rockin' as well as 1986's million-selling Tuff Enuff, which features the Top 10 hit title track.
"A little bit after Kim and I started the band, we were having a good time playing around Austin in clubs," he says. "We became the house band for Clifford Antone's place. We loved that music, and that's what we're going to do. I'm going to be a blues guitar player, and Kim was a blues harmonica player. We were always on the road, always flying somewhere, trying to make a gig and another gig. It became crazy, and I drank too much, burning the candle at both ends, and it caught up with me. After a few years of that I had to get off the bus."
Vaughan's post-Thunderbirds work includes 1990's Family Style, the Grammy-winning duet effort with his late brother, the respected, beloved blues singer-guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan. The subject of Stevie Ray is still painful for Vaughan. Next month marks the 20th anniversary of Stevie Ray's death from a helicopter crash. For Vaughan, the memory of his brother remains foremost on his mind.
"It's just a horrible tragedy that doesn't seem real to me still," he says. "I'll never get over it. I had to come around and realize that I'm here, and I have a life and I had a life before he got killed, and there's nothing I could do about it. So I decided to be happy." Happiness for Vaughan now centers on his family life. He's married with twin 6-year-old daughters. He also has two grown children. "I try my best to be around a lot more," he says. "If you want to be happy, you need a balance."
There's another source of constant elation – his guitar. For the kid who grew up in Oak Cliff, the six-string became a passion when he was 13. He was recovering at home from a broken collarbone, a football injury, when his father got him a guitar "to get me out of trouble."
"I was always the kind of kid that drew a lot of pictures, off in dreamland ... and I liked cars. I didn't want to do what people wanted me to do. When I found the guitar, it just felt natural. Within a couple of days, I could play a little bit. It was so much fun that I didn't want to stop," he says. "That's the way it still is. I play every single day. I still try to learn stuff, still finding music that I didn't know about. It was also a way out for me. If I play this guitar and I really get good on it, I can make records. I could have a way out."
Jimmie Vaughan loves retro clothes and vintage cars. He gladly tells us why.
The threads: "There was a time in the late '70s, early '80s when I actually decided I needed to look like I sounded. I like pleated pants. It's very '50s-influenced. I decided to dress that way because it's what I liked and it was different from what anybody else was doing at the time. It made it fun. When you're onstage and you look down and you like your shoes, you play better than if you didn't like your shoes."
The cars: "I've gotten into the hot-rodding and the custom cars, from the '50s and early '60s. I do body work, change the grille, lots of upgrading involved. Over the last 25 years, I've done several cars. We take five, six years to do a car. You find one and drag it home and start tearing it apart. We basically restore it. You go to swap meets and find original pieces. It's fun, and it's the same as the music, take the old and make it new."
