Austin Sound

Eve and the Exiles are back with their sophomore release Blow Your Mind, a fantastic party record full of 1960s inspired garage rock and a shot of blues. Cut on 2-inch analog tape at the Sweatbox Studios in Austin, Blow Your Mind features a 14 track program packed with precisely the kind of music that has made this outfit an Austin institution in their six years together.

You don’t have to be in the Lone Star State to hear some good Texas blues. In his 1990 book Time Passages, George Lipsitz talks about Delta blues musicians and their trek on the Illinois Central north to burgeoning blues scenes in St. Louis, Memphis, and Chicago. Those living in the Southeast traveled to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and the Big Apple. But Texas guitar slingers like Johnny “Guitar” Watson, T-Bone Walker and Lowell Fulson cut out West, where they were instrumental in carving a space for the blues in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Contemporary players like Rod Piazza, William Clarke, Mark Hummel, and countless others owe their musical careers to the work those Texas pioneers did in California. Texas native Tomcat Courtney, who transplanted to San Diego in the early 1970s, is part of that tradition, and his first national release, Downsville Blues, on the Phoenix, Arizona-based Blue Witch Records label is a fine display of down-home West Coast blues shot through with Texas style.

Houston blues legend Calvin Owens, a trumpet player, conductor, and arranger best known for his tenure as B.B. King’s bandleader in the 1950s, 70s, and 80s, and for his successful solo career thereafter, died on Thursday from his home in Houston. He was 78 years old.

Owens is widely considered to be one of the blues’ finest trumpeters. Born in Houston, Texas in 1929, Owens was raised in the city’s Fifth Ward, where he took lessons from Charles “Papa Charlie” Lewis. The young boy who would later be called “Maestro” by his fellow musicians went on to become the leader of his high school band and a regular on the Houston area blues scene, at a time when horn players were often the featured soloists in Texas blues bands.

The evening before Valentine’s day, legendary blues artist David “Honeyboy” Edwards brought his Delta-steeped country blues guitar to the stage of the Cactus Cafe. Arriving on the heels of his recent Grammy win for best traditional blues album for Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live in Dallas (released on Blue Shoe Project, also featuring Pinetop Perkins, Henry James Townsend, and Pinetop Perkins), the 93-year old patriarch from Mississippi was in fine form throughout his two hour set of real deal blues.

Nothing is more exciting for a fan of the blues than to see young musicians embrace the genre with open arms. Austin in particular has always been blessed with a music scene that is one of the country’s prime breeding grounds for generations of top-notch blues talent. There’s the legendary Chitlin’ Circuit out on the East side, where clubs like the newly resurrected Victory Grill became a hot spot for national touring acts and other Texas bluesmen and women. Eddie Stout of Dialtone Records has showcased the next generation of Austin blues players on 2007’s Texas Northside Kings (#DT0017). And how many upcoming stars did Clifford Antone, one of the city’s most-loved blues patriarchs, adopt along the way, providing a space to woodshed and learn firsthand from the masters themselves? Stevie Ray Vaughan, Guy Forsyth, Sue Foley, Candye Kane, Derek O’Brien, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and most recently, Gary Clark, Jr. and Eve Monsees—the list is long and impressive. But then there was Black Joe Lewis and The Honey Bears.

Guitarist-vocalist-
songwriter Seth Walker, raised in rural Altamahaw-Ossipee, North Carolina and an Austin resident since 1995, comes from a long line of talented musicians and began training on classical violin and cello at the age of four. On Seth Walker, his fifth album originally released on Jerry Hall’s Pacific Blues label and now recently reissued on Hyena Records, Walker treats listeners to a “different point of blue.” This record is a delightful tour of the blues that encompasses soul, swing, R&B, and a handful of jaw-dropping slow ballads.

Few artists have shaped Texas blues more than Jimmie Vaughan and Jimmy Reed, so it’s appropriate that Vaughan would help pay homage to the great Reed with the first complete tribute album dedicated to his work, On the Jimmy Reed Highway released last week on Ruf Records. As a founding member, along with Kim Wilson, of the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Vaughan was integral in developing Austin’s blues scene in the Seventies and Eighties, the T-Birds becoming a mainstay at Antone’s from the club’s beginning. Our resident blues guru Roger Gatchet spoke with Vaughan about how he found the blues, Austin in the early days of Antone’s, and the tribute album to Jimmy Reed.

Described by more than one blues fan, musician, and critic as one of the most influential blues artists of all time, the venerable Jimmy Reed stands among the genre’s greats as just that: an understated but remarkable talent whose penchant for performing straight-ahead, no-frills boogie blues thrilled audiences (both black and white) until his death in the summer of 1976. His classic compositions with long-time guitarist Eddie Taylor, which include “Big Boss Man,” “Bright Lights Big City,” and “Honest I Do,” are some of the most-covered songs in the blues playbook, and he remains one of the only black blues artists to score hits on both the “R&B” and pop charts.

Blues and soul man Darrell Nulisch has finally come back home with Goin’ Back to Dallas, his fourth release for Severn Records and one of his finest albums to date. Born and raised in Dallas, Nulisch grew up listening to the blues of Jimmy McCracklin, Jimmie Vaughan, and Texas legend Freddie King. His professional career opened up in 1978, when he started as one of the founding members of the classic Lone Star outfit Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets (a band that once included bass player Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butthead). He went on to tour with Mike Morgan and the Crawl and Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters. I was fortunate to catch him live in California in the late 1990s when he was touring with the great James Cotton, the legendary Chicago blues harmonica player who now calls Austin home. Nulisch’s soulful vocal work was the perfect match for Cotton’s roaring, freight train-like harp, and the two recorded together for Cotton’s impressive 2000 Telarc release Fire Down Under the Hill. Nulisch is a fine harp player himself, as he shows on his new album.

In 1933, at the behest of the Library of Congress, Texas-raised folklorist John Lomax and his son Alan set out on a ten-year odyssey through America’s back roads. Armed with a bulky portable recording device, the father and son duo toured the country collecting what have now become legendary recordings by rural blues and folk artists, including the very first sessions ever waxed with legendary bluesman McKinley Morganfield, better known around the world as Muddy Waters.