Family Style ends quietly. After nine songs, the final track is an instrumental called “Brothers,” written by Jimmie Vaughan and Stevie Ray Vaughan together. There is no big chorus. There are two guitars, two players who grew up in the same house in Dallas, trading phrases in a slow blues, each line picking up where the other one left off.
It is the closing song on the only studio album the two brothers ever made together. By the time anyone outside the studio heard it, Stevie Ray Vaughan was gone.
The Record Stevie Always Wanted to Make
Jimmie Vaughan was born in 1951, Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1954. Jimmie was the older brother, the one who picked up the guitar first, and Stevie looked up to him his whole life. Even after Stevie became one of the most celebrated guitar players in the world, he often said he wanted to make an album with Jimmie.
In 1990, it finally happened. Jimmie had recently left the Fabulous Thunderbirds, the band that had made him famous. Stevie had been sober for several years and had just won a Grammy for In Step, the album that grew out of his recovery. The brothers set Stevie’s band, Double Trouble, and the Thunderbirds aside and worked with producer Nile Rodgers, recording at Ardent Studios in Memphis, the Dallas Sound Lab in Dallas, and Skyline Studios in New York.
The album they made was looser and more soulful than most fans expected. Critics noticed something else, too: the brothers did not stay in their usual lanes. At times Stevie played with a lighter, twangier touch, while Jimmie leaned toward the heavier sound of Albert King, a hero they shared.
A Family Story Told in Songs
You can follow the brothers through the track list. The album opens with “Hard to Be,” written by Stevie with Doyle Bramhall, an old friend from their Texas music days who also played drums on the record. “D/FW,” named for the Dallas and Fort Worth area where they grew up, is Jimmie’s instrumental. “Tick Tock,” which Jimmie co-wrote with Nile Rodgers and Jerry Lynn Williams, features Stevie singing lead and became the album’s best-known single.
“Telephone Song,” another Stevie and Doyle Bramhall composition, has an easy R&B swing, with Stevie singing and his guitar answering back like a second voice in the conversation. And then comes “Brothers,” the one song on the album that belongs to both of them equally, from the writing credit to the solos.
No fiction is needed to tell this family’s story. It is right there in who wrote what, who sang what, and the song they chose to close the record.
One Seat Left
By late August 1990, Family Style was finished and scheduled for release in about a month. Stevie Ray Vaughan was wrapping up a summer tour opening for Eric Clapton. On August 26, at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre near East Troy, Wisconsin, Clapton called his guests back out for a final encore of “Sweet Home Chicago”: Stevie, Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, and Jimmie Vaughan. Jimmie remembered that night simply: “Stevie was unreal.”
The plan was for Stevie to ride back to Chicago with Jimmie and Jimmie’s wife, Connie. Then he heard there was room on one of the helicopters taking Clapton’s party out. When he learned only one seat was left, he asked Jimmie and Connie if they would mind if he took it.
The helicopter lifted off in thick fog around 12:40 in the morning on August 27 and crashed into a nearby ski hill. Everyone aboard was killed. Later that day, Jimmie Vaughan and Eric Clapton were asked to identify the bodies.
Released Without Him
Family Style was released on September 25, 1990. It climbed to No. 7 on the Billboard 200 and was certified platinum. In February 1991, the Vaughan Brothers won two Grammy Awards: Best Contemporary Blues Recording for the album and Best Rock Instrumental Performance for “D/FW.”
Inside the album, after all the credits, the brothers left one last line for the woman who raised them:
Thanks Mama V. for letting us play.
Stevie Ray Vaughan never got to tour this record or hear how fans received it. But for one album, he and his big brother finally played side by side, and they made sure the last word on it was “Brothers.”
Do you remember where you were when you first heard Family Style, or the news about Stevie Ray Vaughan?