Is It Blues? Or Is It SRV?

First of all, let me say that I’m a huge Stevie Ray Vaughan fan. The man was simply a brilliant player and had a style all his own.

I find it really interesting that people tend to either love Stevie’s stuff or hate it. I don’t find many that are indifferent to it. I guess that’s a sign of great art, or in this case great music.

There’s a lot of debate about whether Stevie’s music qualifies as “blues”. Personally, I think the definition of “blues” has been so blurred over the years that you can jam almost anything into the box labeled “blues”, so the debate becomes more about whether it fits someone’s personal definition.

Stevie covered a lot of blues classics. So, did he somehow make them not blues by doing so? I don’t think so. I think he took them and put his own personal stamp on them. There’s plenty of the originals still there, but the renditions are unmistakeably SRV.

Yeah, he did a lot of stuff that’s more rock (“Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”) and some rockabilly (“The House Is Rockin’”) and other stuff that’s harder to classify (“Lenny”), but his blues stuff seems to me to fit the description. All that said, I don’t think it really matters.

Listen to anybody’s covers of blues tunes. Unless they’re trying to copy them note for note, they’re going to be different. Everybody hears the tunes a little differently and they come out sounding like Little Walter, or Big Walter, or James Cotton, or whoever is playing the song. That’s as it should be.

Frankly, it cracks me up to hear somebody try to play “Juke” exactly like the Little Walter single on Chess. Little Walter never played “Juke” the same way twice (check out the several dozen alternate takes that exist), so why should anybody else?

After Stevie’s death, brother Jimmy Vaughan said “He never played a song the same way once, let alone twice!” IMO, that’s what it’s about.

The great musicians take a song and make it their own. Sometimes that’s what turns a pretty good song into a classic. For example, who remembers “The Thrill Is Gone” before BB King’s version? Or, in Stevie’s case, “The Sky Is Crying”? Yeah, the original was a good tune and I like listening to it, but Stevie just kicked that tune in the ass.

Is it blues? I think it is, but even more, I don’t think it’s worth arguing about. It’s great music, no matter what you call it.

Roots, Rock ‘n Blues