The elegance of a blues guitar star
Jimmie Vaughan (Oak Cliff, Texas, 1951), one of the most outstanding guitarists in the history of American blues, will receive the IV Bilbao Blues Festival Award, taking over from harmonica player and singer Kim Wilson, his partner for 20 years in the legendary band The Fabulous Thunderbirds, winner of the last edition. Vaughan has four Grammy Awards and eight nominations throughout his successful career.
The Texan musician fell in love with the blues in the early 1960s listening to black radio stations in Dallas. Encouraged by his father, he began playing guitar at an early age, mentoring and teaching his younger brother Stevie Ray, who was considered one of the greatest guitar legends and died prematurely in a plane crash in 1990 at the age of 35.
Between the ages of 15 and 16 played in bands such as ‘The Swinging Pendulums’ and ‘The Chessman’. By 1969 he was performing on the Austin stage with the band The Storm and at the same time consolidating his prestige as a guitarist.
In the mid-70s, he formed The Fabulous Thunderbirds with Wilson, a band that modernised and refreshed the blues of the time and with which he recorded seven albums until 1990, when he started the ‘Family Style’ project together with the revered Stevie Ray, who passed away shortly afterwards.
Jimmie resumed his solo career three years later. To date, he has released five albums: ‘Strange Pleasure’ (1994), ‘Out there’ (1998), ‘Do you Get the Blues?’ (2001), ‘Plays Blues, Ballads & Favourites’ (2010) and ‘Baby please come home’ (2019). The latter earned him a Grammy nomination and a Blues Foundation award for Best Male Artist. In 2021 he released ‘The Jimmie Vaughan Story’, a special limited-edition box set and book looking back over his entire career.
