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 The folks down at the HobNob Lounge were ecstatic. The Hob Nob was a local Honky Tonk where working folks in Dallas, Texas gathered to drink and dance. There was nothing fancy about the joint but it had a good jukebox and live bands on the weekends.
Lately, Jimmie Lee Vaughan, a local pipefitter, had been sneaking in his son, Jimmie. Little Jimmie was 13 years old and could already burn up that guitar. He could play anything, and the crowd loved to hear him take off on that song, “Hideaway.”
“Hideaway” was by Freddie King, it was everyone’s’ favorite fast dance,and the boss loved having Jimmie play because he got the folks dancing and the cash register ringing.
Jimmie Vaughan picked up his first guitar at the age of 12 and hasn’t really put down since. His dad had done his time with the Navy in World War II and moved to Dallas, where he worked in the asbestos industry. He and his wife, Martha Jean, raised two sons, Jimmie and Stevie.
“He was what they call a pipe coverer,” Jimmie says today. There was also music in the family, he adds. “My uncles on my mothers’ side, they played guitars. They liked Merle Travis. My dad had a couple of uncles that also played guitar.”
According to Jimmie, his dad didn’t settle down entirely after the war. “They were dancers. My old man was in more than one honky tonk, if you know what I mean.
“My first electric guitar my dad bought for fifty bucks! It was a three-quarter Gibson with no cutaways.”
Dallas was a musical Garden of Eden for the aspiring young prodigy. There was radio, not just Top 40, but hardcore Blues and R&B from the legendary WLAC in Tennessee.
WLAC played Black Rhythm-and-Blues every weeknight and Gospel on the weekends. Middle-aged white deejays hosted the shows, and everyone thought they were Black. Not only did they play the music, but they also provided a non-stop line of jump-and-jive chatter.
This portal to another universe corrupted the segregated musical status quo of radio stations in the old South, launching a nightly grenade of artists like Muddy Waters. John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, BB King and dozens of others. Jimmie Vaughan was hooked, listening faithfully every night to WLAC’s John R and The Hossman.
There was a local offering on station WRR in Dallas called Kats Karavan playing similar Blues. Along with this, numerous stations played hillbilly. And Jimmie just soaked it all in.
“Kats’ Karavan came on at nine o’clock at night,” he remembers. “It was local, but the guy would play Jimmy Reed and Lightnin’ Hopkins. I heard Blues and Country — and didn’t know what the difference was at first…they were so similar’.”
They were all knocking on the door, but it took a record by a White group from Texas to open the floodgate
“Wine, Wine, Wine” – The Nightcaps 1959 Vandan Records
“The first record I bought on my own was ‘Wine, Wine, Wine,” Jimmie says. “I learned how to play off that record, copying those guys’ leads. The lead player was named David Schwartz, and he was a talented player.”
A Texas garage band – and one of several groups to share the name through the years, The Nightcaps recorded the album for Vandan at the WRR studios in 1959. It was the only one they ever released, but it set off shockwaves for Jimmie Vaughan, Billy Gibbons and countless Lone Star State bands in the early ’60s after they heard the single and its’ follow-up, “Thunderbird,” on the radio.
The Nightcaps looked and sounded like a frat party band with a very hip song list. But their influence on Texas music was staggering – so much so that they were honored for their accomplishments by the Texas senate in 2009.
The Juke Joint
Jimmie put together his first working band while still in junior high school and remembers: “We were called the Swingin’ Pendulums. We’d seen an Edgar Allen Poe movie, and we thought that was cool.
 “One of the dads got us a gig. We played six night a week in the summer, and my dad would say; ‘Oh darn, honey, it’s my turn to take the kids to work tonight!’
“They’d hang out with us. It was a club with booths and a go-go girl. We played through the jukebox — an old Sebring. It had a plug in the back where you could plug in a mic. It was fun. It closed at midnight during the week and open till one on the weekends.”
Jimmie would spend all his spare time practicing his guitar.
A cousin of theirs recalls: “It really was a family affair, those Vaughan brothers were obsessed. All they ever did was play those guitars.”
But it didn’t take long before Jimmie was moving on.
“The next band I got in after the Pendulums was a band called The Chessmen,” Jimmie notes. “They had a couple of 45s and did well at the colleges at a lot of fraternity parties.
“When I was 15, I was making $350 a week. I was making more than my dad, and he was a hard worker.”
He was now at the age when many young musicians began to look beyond the bandstand for careers, but not Jimmie. Neither he nor younger brother Stevie – who also began to take a serious interest in music around the same time — never had any aspirations beyond music.
Sure, there was one other area of interest for Jimmie, and that was cars. He was fascinated by the car culture around in Dallas, where hotrods and drag racing went together with Rock-and-Roll.
Although he wasn’t old enough to drive, young Mr. Vaughan wasn’t too young to be fascinated by the hot rods themselves.
1/25 scale
AMT model kits were a car lover’s dream. They allowed you to build your car in one of three ways: the stock version, the racing version and the customized hotrod version. Today, the value of these kits go for hundreds of dollars to collectors, but back then they were affordable to the sons of pipefitters and blue-collar workers.
“Oh man,” Jimmie remembers, “I had card table with all my parts laid out. I loved those kits.” And his love of real rods would only grow in later years, beginning with his first car, a ’51 Chevy Fleetline, and a growing stable.
“Where we lived, there was a stretch of road where the hotrodders used to race. There was also a drive-in and a park.”
Back to the Bandstand
With little brother Stevie now begging him to let him play, too, Jimmie’s gig with The Chessmen took him outside of town. It also landed him on shows with groups like The Moving Sidewalks featuring a young and clean-shaven Billy Gibbons. They opened for Jimi Hendrix one night, and Jimi borrowed Jimmies’ wah-wah pedal.
There were other local influences he still remembers fondly.
“There was a guy named Johnny Peebles, he had a car and he was about three years older than me. He also had the first Stratocaster I ever saw. There was also a Country Music show on local TV called Cowtown Jamboree that came on Saturday night. They would have everybody from Bob Wills to Jerry Lee Lewis.”
All was well enough, but Vaughan needed more. After a short visit to San Francisco, he was ready to go, and Austin beckoned.
Austin
When Jimmie got to the state capitol, the music scene was much smaller than it would become, but there were already several old-school black chitlin’ circuit clubs, and a small but devoted group of mostly white musicians and music fans devoted to the Blues.
 For Jimmie it all really began at the One Knite Club. Jimmie and his band, Storm, began a Monday-night residency there that would last for a couple of years. Some of the other players that either joined or sat in were Doyle Bramhall, Lewis Cowdrey, Paul Ray and Angela Streheli. And other bands were forming, including The Nightcrawlers — soon to feature recent high school graduate Stevie Ray — and the scene started taking shape.
Antone’s
If there was one event that would change the entire trajectory of the Austin Blues scene, it would have to be the opening of the legendary club, Antone’s.
Fearing that the Blues were in danger of being forgotten in the Disco era of the ’70s, Clifford Antone opened his namesake club on Sixth Street on July 15, 1975. The first act to perform was Clifton Chenier, followed by Sunnyland Slim and Big Walter Horton.
Right from the start, the club became Ground Zero for old school acts like Muddy Waters, Otis Rush and James Cotton and the launching pad for the next generation of players. Jimmie Vaughan and harmonica player extraordinaire Kim Wilson formed a new group, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and they became the unofficial house band.
There was also the Rome Inn, where the T-Birds held down Monday nights. And the scene started to explode.
Mike Buck, one of the T-Birds’ first drummers, notes: “You gotta remember that we came along during the era of Foreigner, Cheap Trick and all these loud guitar bands. We came on stage lookin’ sharp and musically making every note count.”
That included “The Look” Jimmie’s perfectly coiffed DA and Kim’s trademark turban and two-tone alligator shoes. They could have been the house band at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club.
The T-Birds were also fans of the music they played. Much of their early material came from their vast personal record collections. Their best-known early effort was a note-for-note cover of “She’s Tough,” including the cool laugh originally laid down by Alabama native Jerry “Boogie” McCain for Rex Records.
One of the first big breaks came from Muddy Waters himself. He heard the band and raved about them. Muddy called a club in Boston that he played on a regular basis and helped line up their first road dates. All it took was one visit and the other East Coast musicians began swapping cassette tapes of this incredible band from Texas.
That band from Austin
The late ’70s were a fertile period for Blues, Rockabilly and Americana bands. There was a circuit that became known as Boston to Austin, a latter day Chitlin’ Circuit for East Coast bands like Roomful of Blues from Rhode Island and Washington D.C.’s Nighthawks. Along with the clubs in urban areas like The Double Door in Charlotte, N.C., Desperados and the Cellar Door D.C. and No Fish Today in Baltimore, there were a string of clubs in college markets that served as weeknight stops between the big cities.
Nighthawks leader Mark Wenner, remembers what happened when the T- Birds first hit New England:
“I heard a tape of them on an Austin radio show and almost drove off the road. There were like four tapes of them floating around playing at the Speakeasy in Boston, and they were strictly Blues. They were having this incredible influence on the Boston Blues scene, which was strong.
“No one had the kind of style, the cool that the Thunderbirds had. There were double-breasted suits and wingtips here and there, but nothing like those guys. They set the whole place on its ear, showing everybody how to dress, how to act, how to be cooler than cool if you were going to be a white bluesman.
“Jimmie was just the coolest thing to come down the pike with the duck tail hair, the clothes and the guitar strap over one shoulder.”
Richard Green and his group, the Charlottesville Allstars hosted the Thunderbirds when they came to his little college town.
“Jimmie’s’ sound was so different that anything any of us had heard, and that included a lot of Blues,” Richard recalls. “His sound was so unique, he even used reverb!
 “It was just the guitar and the amp — such a powerful sound. It was so raw and just so simple. The guy would not play a lot of notes and he wasn’t overdriving the amp. Almost no distortion or sustain, but just very, very in your face.
“This was around 1978, and guitars didn’t sound like that back then. Everyone was going in the opposite direction. They wanted things overdriven and distorted.
“I remember when I first met him at Jimmy Thackery’s’ in D.C. There he was with his hair all slicked back, reeking of cologne and a silk like jacket. He had his ’54 Stratocaster with his initials JLV on it in Sears mailbox letters.
“When you went to see them in the little clubs around D.C., every guitar player in town would be absolutely riveted watching Jimmie play. I never heard anyone play a shuffle like that. It’s one of the simple, building blocks of the Blues, he played it so ballsy and aggressive, I never hear anyone do it quite like that.”
Jimmie would go on to record six albums with the band before moving on in 1990.
He formed the Tilt-A-Whirl Band, which over the years has gone through many versions both in size and personnel. “I’ve had big bands with horn sections and small trios,” Vaughan notes. “I love Hammond B3 and the B3 bass sound. I’ve always loved that Jimmy Smith, Brother Jack McDuff sound.”
Over the next few years, he would record one album with his brother and seven with his Tilt-A-Whirl Band.
On Aug. 27, 1990, Stevie Ray Vaughan would die in a helicopter crash after a show in Alpine Valley, Wis. Jimmie was devastated. He ceased playing in public for the better part of two years.
It was Eric Clapton who would convince Jimmie to return to performing, since then, he’s never stopped. And this summer, he’ll be opening for Bonnie Raitt on a national tour. A new album is also in the works.
The Jimmie Vaughan Story – The Last Music Company 2021
www.lastmusic.co.uk
Buy the Box Set at Amazon
CLICK HERE
Released in 2021, The Jimmie Vaughan Story is the ultimate career retrospective and insanely cool memorabilia collection of a truly deserving artist. Five CDs begin with the Thunderbirds and then weave in and out over the next 40 years. All the T-Bird classics are here along with later selections with a host of guest artists and some of Jimmies’ later trio work with the incredible Mike Flanigan and other A-list organists.
There’s a vinyl copy of his LP “Do you get the Blues?” and two smaller vinyl releases. A full-length book crammed with pictures and text, even a glossy color insert of Rodders Journal, featuring Jimmie’s legendary custom cars.
A few of the music highlights worth noting:
CD 1 Track 2: – “She’s Tough” – The song that spawned an army of local copy bands all attempting to recreate the sound of Jimmie’s guitar and Kim’s’ sinister chuckle, with varying results. Here is the T-Birds’ version with wailing harp and that in-your-face guitar that Richard Green refers to.
CD 2 Track 9: – “Harbor Lights” – The old lounge classic gets a gorgeous steel guitar treatment from Jimmie.
Track 20: – “D/FW” A humorous tribute to the madhouse airport the Vaughan flew in and out of hundreds of times over the years.
CD 3 Track 3: – “Six Strings Down” – Gospel meets Albert King meets Tex Ritter. A blues twist on the old Country classic “Hillbilly Heaven.” Jimmies’ poignant musical goodbye to brother Stevie with an all-star cast assisting.
I listen to the guitar solo, and I hear what Mike Buck was talking about. The notes aren’t just thrown out in a pile. Every note counts, and every space does too.
Track 15: – “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” with Delbert McClinton
 Jimmie channels Lightnin’ Hopkins, and the result — along with Delbert’s voice is magical. Once again, the guitar as human voice.
CD 5 Track 1: – “I Like It Like That”
Along with everything else, the choice of “covers’” in this collection is superb. Here is the perfect example. The original is by The 5 Royales, a group that Steve Cropper credits with making him want to play the guitar.
The Jimmie Vaughan Story is a stunning collection. There’s all the music, plus just a bunch of cool stuff in a giant, Texas -size gift box featuring a frameable autographed cover shot of Jimmie combing that immaculate pompadour. The nicest box set package I’ve ever seen, a well-deserved tribute to Mr. Vaughan.
Playing it Forward
The past couple of years have presented some health challenges, but Jimmie and his wife Robin are doing okay at present. I asked him what he saw as his greatest accomplishments:
“Well, it’s been nice to win Grammys and get gold records. There was my little brother Stevie, he was fabulous, and we all still miss him 35 years later.
“I’ve played every day since then and even before. I just enjoy playing the guitar, it’s been everything in my life. It led me around and brought beautiful opportunities. I’ve been to Japan and Europe and all over the States.
“I got sober in 1990, grateful for that, too. These days, I’m looking forward to making a new record and going out on tour. I couldn’t be any happier or more grateful.”
Along with the recent sell-out crowds and rave reviews from the critics, Jimmie and Stevie are held in the highest esteem by their fans and musical peers.
One of Jimmie’s old bandmates says: “There are two kinds of people in this world: those who are hip to the Vaughan brothers and those who aren’t.”
Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top explains: “Actually, The Blues is kind of a code that you must be able to play it correctly. The Vaughan brothers were able to crack that code.”
For Jimmie, that code might have cracked when he first heard The Nightcaps. “Wine, Wine, Wine” was more than just a song. It flipped a musical switch.
Thankfully, over 50 years, and a few thousand gigs later, that switch is still stuck in the “on” position.
Writer Rev. Billy C. Wirtz is a performing artist, teacher and radio personality and recovering addict. He is a former Special ED Teacher and Pro wrestling manager. The Rev is the author of two books and numerous articles on music and culture. He lives in Florida with his wife and a houseful of animals.
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