Texans Recall The Life And Death Of Dallas' Stevie Ray Vaughan

DALLAS, TX —Although there's a statue of blues guitar-slinger Stevie Ray Vaughan at the edge of Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Vaughan remains beloved in his hometown of Dallas.

Today marks the anniversary of the August 27 helicopter crash in 1990 that killed Vaughan and several others after leaving a gig where he shared the bill with Eric Clapton. Foggy conditions were said to have caused the crash.

Dallas' Laurel Land Cemetery hosted Vaughan's funeral, and some 3,000 mourners followed his wooden casket adorned with flowers to his final resting place there.

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For many, like longtime Texas music journalist Joe Nick Patoski, SRV was as much a part of the Texas scene as summer heat. And he saw "Little Stevie" as he was first known, developing his own style late at night in clubs during the '70s.

Patoski describes Vaughan as "one of a kind, like no other. I'm glad I got to see him early on, working on his ideas before becoming a star and then a legend. Those shows that went on past 2 am closing, with Little Stevie playing his ass off in front of a crowd of maybe 50 - that's where he honed his chops."

For some time, Vaughan played in the shadow of two of his guitar heroes — Jimi Hendrix, and his own brother Jimmie, who was fronting the Fabulous Thunderbirds at the time. But by the mid-to-late 80s — and not coincidentally, when he became sober — his career blossomed.

I interviewed him only once that I can recall — for a piece on Texas musicians looking back on The Beatles "Sgt. Pepper's"album 20 years after its 1967 release. At the time, Vaughan mused that "the record made a change in me and my outlook, but it really made a change in the movement of music at the time. In fact, it caused a change in everyone I knew.

"I have good memories of 'Sgt. Pepper,'" Vaughan said, "even though I was really young at the time."

As steeped in the blues as his music was, there was nothing dark about his personality after he got sober, say most.

Houston radio personality Ed Mayberry says Vaughan was always gracious to a fault. "My favorite memory is taking my young daughter backstage to meet him. She was five or six. He knelt down on his knees to be eye-level with her, and to interact with her! That certainly melted this dad’s heart and solidified my high esteem for him."

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