Blues, ballads and favorites
“Family Style,” the only collaborative album by Stevie and Jimmie Vaughan, is a terrific and oft-overlooked recording. But it’s also very bittersweet to hear it because there should have been many more Vaughan Brothers projects.
Unfortunately, Stevie died only a month before “Family Style” was to be released in 1990. Hard to believe it’s been almost 24 years!
I bring up “Family Style” — with iconic tunes like “Long-Way-Home,” “Telephone Song” and “Tick Tock”— because it so wonderfully captures the stylistic yin and yang of the siblings’ respective guitar styles. Together? Wow— blues magnificence.
Jimmie’s own-traveling and recording schedule has slowed down in recent years, but he’s out on the road with his Tilt-a-Whirl band— featuring Miss Lou Ann Barton — and plays Friday at the Knickerbocker Cafe in Westerly. It’s billed as the “Blues, Ballads and Favorites” tour, and fans can expect all sorts of sonic history, presumably including from Vaughan’s days in the Fabulous Thunderbirds, a band with no shortage of ties to Rhode Island and the Knick. And, Jimmie? Hit us with “Long-Way-Home”!
Opening is former Norwich resident Jim Oblon, out in support of his first major label album, “Sunset.”
Jimmie Vaughan,
8 p.m. Friday, Knickerbocker Cafe, 35 Railroad Ave., Westerly; $40 advance, $45 Friday; (401) 315-5070.