Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble
Texas Flood
It's relatively difficult to overstate the impact that this album had on the Blues--while the album certainly suffers in comparison to, well, just about any of the 20th Century's earlier Blues greats, Stevie Ray Vaughan has to be credited with not only re-inventing a genre that hadn't had anything commercially successful in twenty years, but he did it straight out of the box. It's not like Vaughan was the sort of "secret everybody knew about"--the man was laboring in hiding, playing the sort of non-trendmaking spots usually reserved for Led Zeppelin cover bands. Until the release of Texas Flood, you didn't know who the guy was--unless you knew what a county fair was, or you preferred to drink in bars that treated all non-Pabst beers like an order of Japanese Sake. The album was released not on the strength of a clamoring fanbase, but on the strength of Vaughan's supreme talent and technical mastery in a genre that was, and remains, dominated by dead men like Robert Johnson and Howling Wolf. Vaughan amped up the rock aspect of the Blues sound, he ditched (whether it was the right choice or not) the more histrionic folk aspects that Dylan had infected it with, and he was hideously successful. Although Vaughan passed too early, in a field where too many pretenders were left standing, his short studio recordings exist to document one of the rarest, and impossible to replicate, successful musical excursions of the 1980's. -Tucker Stone, 2007
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