Stevie Ray Vaughan thought the world needed to hear two “forgotten” soul artists
Like most of the great blues guitarists, if not all of them, Stevie Ray Vaughan was a student of history and a vocal appreciator of the musicians who’d inspired him, particularly the ones that his own fans might have been less aware of.
Yes, he regularly sang the praises of Buddy Guy, Albert King, and Albert Collins, but names like that were just the tip of the iceberg, with Vaughan particularly happy to jump at the opportunity to name-check some of the bluesmen from his home state of Texas, the guys he’d met along his own road to success in the 1970s and ‘80s.
“That Texas guitar sound is a good thing,” Vaughan said in a 1987 interview, “I’ve never known what that means other than in some ways it’s a little rougher and sometimes a little smooth, kind of mishmash. It’s a big place. As far as I know, there’s a kind of hard line; an attitude about it, more than anything. I guess that’s one thing about all the players I listened to. It was all, kind of, not necessarily ‘this is the only way to do it’, but ‘this is how it’s done’. There wasn’t any joking around about it.”
As Vaughan saw it, that “Texas sound” didn’t even have to limit itself to straight blues. Growing up, he was equally inspired by the soul and R&B records of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and one of the session guitarists on a lot of that era’s most iconic records, including hits by Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett, was a Dallas, Texas legend named Cornell Dupree.
In a 1985 interview, Vaughan called out Dupree specifically in a conversation about all-time great guitar players, saying, “Cornell Dupree, people seem to have forgotten a bit about him”.
Vaughan also mentioned one of Dupree’s regular collaborators, the Chicago soul singer Donny Hathaway, as another overlooked giant.
“Musicians like [Dupree] and Donny Hathaway,” he said, “they need to be mentioned [in] a lot of places. ‘Cause that’s soul music; soulville. But there’s a lot of people we can’t forget, and we haven’t got time, cuz I’ll go on all day.”
Dupree, who died in 2011, was the primary guitarist on two of Hathaway’s classic albums, 1971’s Donny Hathaway and 1973’s Extension of a Man. Sadly, Hathaway’s career was cut short by struggles with severe mental illness, which led to paranoid delusions (he was convinced that his producers were trying to steal his voice through a machine, which perhaps was a premonition of an AI reality), and he committed suicide in 1979 at just 33, leaving him as something of a cult figure among soul aficionados, and a tragic one at that.
Listen to a track like ‘Come Little Children’ or ‘The Slums’ from Extension of a Man, though, and you’ll quickly see what Stevie Ray admired about both Hathaway and Dupree. There are elements of Texas and Chicago blues lurking in there, but also soul, funk, R&B, jazz, AM ‘70s radio: it’s a bit of everything, or, to put it another way, “soulville“.
