Documentary Watch- Rise of a Texas Bluesman -Stevie Ray Vaughn 1954-1983

The 2014 documentary Rise of a Texas Bluesman does just that- tell the story of the early years of Stevie Ray Vaughan. The film is a fairly decent primer in Texas Blues with musicians like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lightnin Hopkins sampled. Young Stevie was overshadowed by his brother Jimmy, but a series of bands over the resulting years created a confident artist. The doc details all of this history, as SRV crosses paths with Doyle Bramhall, Lou Ann Barton and others. Throughout, Vaughn stays true to the Blues, while similar musicians had abandoned it for rock. A host of former band mates, biographers and others expertly tell the story. This does a good job of the grind of a musician. This is the late 70s so blues influenced rock like Cream, Paul Butterfield and ZZ Top is no longer in the spotlight. But SRV persists on, eventually going from featured guitarist to capable frontman, the review style band eventually getting to where he is leading Double Trouble. The teen guitarslinger from 1970 is in the late 70s/early 80s with a reputation as one of the greatest blues guitarists alive, but also a drug problem and accompanying record. He’s learning from the Blues masters who have a sympathetic and favorable location in Austin, but SRV is also not able to replicate his success out of Texas. This is surely where so many musician stories end, with ‘what if’s and ‘you should have heard’s but of course there’s Montreux. Montreux 82 if you didn’t know was where Jerry Wexler (who played a major role in the careers of Ray Charles, Aretha and Led Zeppelin, among many others) had seen Vaughn in Austin, and got the unsigned musician a gig at the famous Swiss festival. It’s not that the crowd loved him (they didn’t they booed him- they would rather not have watched an electric bluesman in the midst of an acoustic blues set) but David Bowie and Jackson Browne did. Bowie has Vaughn play lead guitar for Let’s Dance- as part of the mix of sounds that Bowie took to invade the pop charts. Surprisingly, Vaughn turns down the tour with Bowie, wanting to chart his own course. This doc ends with the success of Texas Flood and indeed a re-opening of the floodgates to let Blues music back into the rock mainstream. If you are interested in SRVs ‘career’ as most would define it (the CBS records), it’s not here. This also comes across as a fairly low budget documentary. I would suggest enjoyment of the doc would correspond with interest in the topic. It seems to be readily available on many streaming services and has plenty of five star reviews at those sites. It goes without saying that it’s a must see for a Stevie Ray Vaughn fan. There’s surely a ton of docs on Blues music, but if you are specifically interested in Texas blues, the 70s blues scene, Texas music in general and why Austin matters to music- you should enjoy this. Otherwise, with all the music options out there, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this first. But I think it does a good job of why Stevie Ray Vaughn is important and also the life of a hard working musician.