Today, Oct. 3, is Stevie Ray Vaughan’s birthday. Among our neighborhood’s many notable natives, Vaughn’s name always floats to the top.

Vaughan died in the summer of 1990, when I was a sophomore in high school. My dad called me from the newsroom that day to tell me my favorite guitar player had died in a helicopter crash. I wasn’t allowed to attend the massive memorial service for SRV downtown that week, but I read one of the biographies that came out following his death.

Sign up for our newsletter!

* indicates required

I thought I knew some things about SRV. But today, I read the man’s Wikipedia page and learned some new stuff.

One is that Vaughan played on the 1983 David Bowie hit “Let’s Dance.”

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4d7Wp9kKjA[/youtube]

 

Bowie asked Vaughan to tour with him, and Vaughan turned him down, which sounds crazy. He turned down David by god Bowie? But that’s the year Double Trouble put out “Texas Flood,” with all of those iconic songs.

The other trivia tidbit Wikipedia taught me is that in high school, Vaughan played in a band with character actor Stephen Tobolowsky, also an Oak Cliff native.

Vaughan went to Kimball High School and came up through our neighborhood’s garage rock scene in the ’60s. The flip side of that was the folk-rock movement, which also had a foothold here thanks to Adamson High School alums Michael Martin Murphey, Ray Wylie Hubbard and B.W. Stevenson. Check out their big hits after the jump.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVoDQhVg8e8&feature=related[/youtube] [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdBvTvxHy7E[/youtube] [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTRHIVScAXE[/youtube]