Good Texan

Right here on THE ZOO, we are rolling a cut that only Dallas could have written and only two brothers from Oak Cliff could have played. Good Texan, from the Vaughan Brothers album Family Style. Jimmie Vaughan on the vocal, Stevie Ray Vaughan riding shotgun on guitar, Nile Rodgers in the producer's chair, and a whole lot of Texas swagger packed into four minutes and twenty-two seconds. If you grew up anywhere between the Trinity River and the Red River, this one does not need an introduction. It already knows your name.

Family Style landed on Epic on September 25, 1990. It was the only studio album the Vaughan brothers ever made together, and it turned out to be Stevie Ray's last studio work. Sessions ran through 1990 at Ardent Studios in Memphis, the Dallas Sound Lab, and Skyline Studios in New York. Nile Rodgers, the same man who had called Stevie in for the Let's Dance sessions years earlier, produced the record and co-wrote Good Texan with Jimmie. The liner notes close with a line that still hits: Thanks Mama V. for letting us play. Martha Vaughan raised both boys in Oak Cliff, and the whole album plays like a thank-you note written in guitar.

Good Texan is track four, lead vocal by Jimmie, credited to Jimmie Vaughan and Nile Rodgers. It was issued as a single in early 1991, after Telephone Song, and climbed to number 18 on the Billboard rock chart. The album itself peaked at number 7 on the Billboard 200 and took the Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Recording. The instrumental D/FW, Jimmie's salute to the airport and the hometown, won Best Rock Instrumental Performance the same year. Critics argued about whether Rodgers had pulled the brothers too far from straight blues. The players did not argue. They just played.

The song is a wink, not a sermon. Jimmie sings about being a good Texan the way a man from Dallas would, dry, a little crooked, and proud of the joke. The official video leans all the way into the caricature: steaks, a Cadillac with longhorn horns on the hood, cowboy hat, bare chest, bull riding, and an appetite that never quits. Jimmie's guitar answers with those piercing, swinging licks that jump out of the track, while Stevie answers back in the spots where the younger brother always answered back. The rhythm section keeps it loose. Al Berry on bass, Larry Aberman and Doyle Bramhall on drums, Nile Rodgers adding guitar. It is not Double Trouble, and it is not the Fabulous Thunderbirds. It is the living room in Oak Cliff, only louder.

Jimmie Lawrence Vaughan was born March 20, 1951, in Dallas. Stevie Ray Vaughan followed on October 3, 1954. Their father, Big Jim, would tell the boys to grab the guitars and play for company. Somebody in the room would always say the same thing: maybe someday you two can make a record together. Jimmie got there first. He soaked up Freddie King, Guitar Slim, and the Dallas R&B circuit, played in early bands including the Swinging Pendulums and Storm, then moved to Austin around 1970 and co-founded the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Through the late seventies and the eighties the T-Birds became the tightest blues band in Texas, with Jimmie's Telecaster tone as spare and mean as a good short story. Tuff Enuff broke them nationally. Jimmie never chased flash. He chased feel.

Stevie stayed closer to the flame. He came up in Dallas clubs, moved to Austin, and built Double Trouble with Tommy Shannon and Chris Layton. Texas Flood in 1983 rewrote the rules for blues on rock radio. Couldn't Stand the Weather, Soul to Soul, and Live Alive followed. The Bowie sessions put his name on pop radio. Then the hard years, the recovery, and In Step in 1989, a record that sounded like a man who had walked through the fire and come out playing cleaner than ever. All along he told interviewers he wanted an album with his big brother. Jimmie was the model. Stevie said it plain.

The brothers had shared stages, including the 1985 Soul to Soul video for Change It, but a full studio record kept slipping. By 1990 the calendar finally opened. They spent about three months on Family Style. Jimmie has said their father used to line them up in the living room, and that the album was the promise finally kept. He has also said he cannot pick a favorite track, because the whole project felt serious while they were in it. They wrote together, traded leads, and let Rodgers open the sound up. Hard to Be and Long Way from Home carry Stevie's vocal. White Boots and Good Texan carry Jimmie's. D/FW and Hillbillies from Outerspace are instrumentals. Tick Tock, Brothers, Telephone Song, and Baboom/Mama Said fill out a record that swings from funk to steel-guitar glide to straight Texas rock. The last words in the package still belong to Mama V.

Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash on August 27, 1990, after a show at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin. Family Style came out nearly a month later. The single cycle ran into 1991, with Good Texan as the second release, backed in some territories by Baboom/Mama Said. The video kept the joke going, casting friends including Charlie Sexton and Doyle Bramhall Jr. in the band, and letting Jimmie play the straight-faced Texan while the props did the shouting. On the record the joke is in the lyric and the groove is in the hands. Jimmie's vocal stays cool. The guitars do not.

After the album, Jimmie stepped away from the Thunderbirds and built a solo career that has never chased the spotlight. Strange Pleasure, Out There, Plays Blues, Ballads & Favorites, and a long run of records with the Tilt-a-Whirl Band kept the same economy he had in 1979. He has sat in with everyone who matters in American guitar music and still treats a slow blues like a sacred thing. Stevie's catalog kept growing after he was gone: The Sky Is Crying, boxed sets, live albums, and a statue on Auditorium Shores in Austin that still draws players who want to stand where the tone was born. Oak Cliff got its own markers. The brothers never needed a bigger hometown than Dallas.

Good Texan belongs on this station because it is album rock with dirt under the fingernails. It is not a museum piece and it is not a costume. It is two Dallas brothers, a New York producer who understood Texas guitar, and a song that laughs at the myth while playing it straight. Crank it. The Vaughan Brothers, Family Style, Good Texan. Mama V let them play. We are still listening.

Jimmie Vaughan keeps the road open at jimmievaughan.com, on Facebook, and on Instagram. Stevie Ray Vaughan's official home is srvofficial.com, with the official page on Instagram and on Facebook. For the deep archive, the fan-built SRV Archive lives at srvarchive.com.