Where the blues came roaring back
The opening notes descend like a purposeful and ominous torrential downpour. Not only a blues song, Texas Flood, the title track from Stevie Ray Vaughan’s 1983 Double Trouble debut, This is a weather pattern. A slow, electric storm constructed on heartbreak, moisture, and the kind of guitar tone that feels closer to skin than to sound. Originally penned and recorded by Larry Davis in 1958, the song attained its fullest expression via Vaughan, whose playing on this recording transformed a local complaint into something mythical.
Vaughan was not trying to change the blues entirely. With brutality, he was bringing it back. Stevie Ray marched into the studio with a Stratocaster, a beat-up amp, and a mission as hair metal groups dominated the charts and synths screamed throughout dance floors. Texas Flood was mostly live, almost raw and recorded in only three days at Jackson Browne’s studio in Los Angeles. Though never sloppy, the performance is free. He bends notes like they’re on the verge of breaking, then pulls them back from the edge with impossible control.
Though there is a lot of technical flash here, the song’s great strength comes from not that. It is the room. Vaughan lets the notes sob, bleed, and occasionally yell out. Holding back just enough to let the lead soar, Chris Layton and Tommy Shannon, his Double Trouble rhythm section. There is no speed, no gloss. Just emotion, tension, release. The words are almost accidental. Repeated like a mantra, a few sentences on rain and grief run through fingers and strings as the true tale develops.
Texas Flood was a shock for the system when it dropped. Nobody anticipated a blues album to be so powerful in the neon-lit surroundings of early 1980s pop. Vaughan played like he had grown up at the crossroads but looked like he belonged in a roadhouse. The song, as its album’s name suggests, reintroduces the blues to a new generation not by updating it but by making it inescapable. He didn’t dress it up. He increased it.
Still a warning and a release decades thereafter, Texas Flood. It’s the sound of a person guitar in hand staring down the storm’s eye. Stevie Ray Vaughan did more than just reintroduce the blues. He reminded us it had never truly departed anywhere. It just needed someone courageous enough to play it as though their survival depended on it.
