Stevie Ray Vaughan
photo: bbadventure · cc by-sa 4.0 ↗Stevie Ray Vaughan was a Dallas-born guitarist whose ferocious, tone-drenched Stratocaster playing helped return electric blues to the mainstream in the 1980s, fronting his band Double Trouble on albums like 'Texas Flood.' Steeped in the Texas blues tradition and openly indebted to Jimi Hendrix, he married raw power with a singing, deeply expressive lead voice on the instrument. His career was cut short by a 1990 helicopter crash, but his influence on the guitarists who followed was immense.
Vaughan idolized Jimi Hendrix and folded Hendrix's material and vocabulary directly into his own sets, covering him and channeling his mix of muscular rhythm playing and wailing, feedback-kissed lead.
listen forPut Hendrix's own 'Voodoo Child (Slight Return)' beside Vaughan's cover of it — same wah-soaked, swaggering riff, but hear how Vaughan leans even harder into the Texas-shuffle grit.
Vaughan came up steeped in the electric Chicago blues of Muddy Waters, and that foundation — a hard-driving shuffle built on a swaggering, strutting guitar-and-vocal groove — anchors his up-tempo material.
listen forPlay Waters's stop-time strut 'Hoochie Coochie Man' and then Vaughan's 'Cold Shot' — both ride a swaggering, start-stop blues groove where the guitar answers every vocal line with a terse, cocksure lick.
Vaughan grew up inside the Texas blues lineage that T-Bone Walker helped found, and Walker's pioneering electric approach — a smooth, horn-like single-note lead over a jazzy shuffle — echoes through Vaughan's slower, more sophisticated blues.
listen forSet Walker's genre-defining slow blues 'Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad)' against Vaughan's 'Texas Flood' — both stretch a languid, horn-like guitar line over a slow 12-bar, wringing feeling out of every bent note.