Singing the blues over Dallas' lack of recognition for Stevie Ray Vaughan

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Singing the blues over Dallas' lack of recognition for Stevie Ray Vaughan
August 27, 2010
Dallasnews.com

f this city had the good sense to do itself a favor, it would reclaim Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Dallas would be two decades late in memorializing the great blues icon, who died in a helicopter crash 20 years ago today. But it would finally be taking pride of paternity to an outsized, home-grown talent whose loss resonates as keenly as ever.

Yes, the faithful have a destination for their pilgrimages. It's a city-authorized memorial sculpture of Stevie Ray, dressed in trademark hat and serape, a workhorse Fender Strat at his side. Respectful fans from all over the world visit to leave flowers, notes, little tokens of appreciation for his astonishing gifts and enduring appeal.

But they don't come to Dallas. It's in Austin.

Well, Stevie Ray Vaughan was not the first music-crazed Dallas kid to load up his guitar and take off for Austin. But he remained a hometown kid (he dropped out of Kimball High School the year before my husband enrolled there), a defiantly proud native of what the snootier Dallas element still considers the wrong side of the river, Oak Cliff.

"He was proud of telling people he was from Oak Cliff," said local Vaughan biographer Craig Hopkins, whose hefty work on the musician's life and art will be reissued in two volumes next month. "Even after he went to Austin, he made no bones about it."

In fact, those who know even in broad outlines the salient facts of Stevie Ray's life know he successfully conquered a fierce addiction to cocaine and alcohol in 1986.

They know that at the peak of his fame, when he could pretty much have picked any spot on the globe to live, he moved home – to the 'Cliff – where he relied on the support of family and boyhood friends to stay sober.

"He knew he had to get away from the temptations in Austin," Hopkins said. Rich and famous as he was, Stevie Ray Vaughan came home to Dallas.

Even the tin-eared who might, incredibly, be oblivious to Stevie Ray's pioneering revival of Texas' unique flavor of the blues, and to his influence on a subsequent generation of musicians, might consider that this was a humble, decent, genuinely good guy.

"Even at his worst, he was a good person," Hopkins said, recounting that despite being in the sorriest depths of substance abuse, Stevie Ray would sit after shows on the steps of his tour bus, patiently signing autographs until the last fan went away happy.

So why hasn't Dallas done more to recognize a native whom most cities would race to claim?

"I just don't think [city leaders] realize how big he was," said Jeff Castro, an Oak Cliff resident who co-founded an annual tribute motorcycle ride and concert that commemorates Stevie Ray's birthday in early October.

The event supports a scholarship, established by Stevie Ray's late mother, at Greiner Middle School. To date, the event has funded scholarships for more than 170 students.

Castro said he once envisioned a memorial statue and fountain in Kiest Park, where Stevie Ray spent plenty of hanging-out hours as a kid.

But when he approached City Hall with the idea, he was rebuffed by official indifference and red-tape requirements for documentation and funding. Discouraged, he gave up.

Likewise, Hopkins said he has long hoped for some kind of official support for permanent housing for his enormous collection of Stevie Ray Vaughan artifacts and memorabilia. Apart from some vague discussion about possible establishment of a Deep Ellum music museum, nothing much has happened.

The issue came up more recently with the (inevitably politicized) debate over renaming Industrial Boulevard. A grass-roots effort to change the name to honor Stevie Ray seemed widely viewed as a joke, a one-off novelty proposal.

The lackluster "Riverfront" won out, with an appeasing gesture later made on South Central Expressway to the Cesar Chávez lobby.

I don't know about the rest of y'all, but I loved the idea of a prominently visible Stevie Ray Vaughan Boulevard. It wasn't a joke to me.

There is a civic nod at the Hampton DART station, where lyrics from the song "Tick Tock," recorded with his brother Jimmie Vaughan not long before Stevie Ray died, are incorporated into the artwork:

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, people/ Time's ticking away.