Stevie Ray Vaughan

In 1984, The Blues Foundation named him the best instrumentalist of the year, and in 1987, the magazine Performance recognized him as the blues musician of the year. He won six Grammy Awards and ten Austin Music Awards. He was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2000 and into the Music Hall of Fame in 2014. The magazine Rolling Stone ranked him at number 12 on the list of the greatest guitarists of all time. In 2015, Vaughan and his band Double Trouble were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Vaughan's family history dates back to his great-grandfather, Robert Hodgen LaRue, who had a daughter named Laura Belle, Vaughan's paternal grandmother.

Laura Belle married Thomas Lee Vaughan and they settled in Rockwall County, Texas, where they worked as sharecroppers. On September 6, 1921, their son Jimmie Lee Vaughan was born. Stevie's father, Jim Vaughan, known as Big Jim, left school at sixteen and joined the United States Navy during World War II. After his service, he married Martha Cook on January 13, 1950. Stephen Ray Vaughan was born on October 3, 1954, in Dallas, being three and a half years younger than his brother Jimmie, born in 1951. Big Jim worked as an asbestos worker, a physically demanding job. The family moved frequently, living in states such as Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, before settling in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas.

Vaughan, a shy and insecure child, was deeply affected by his childhood, marked by his father's alcohol abuse, who often terrorized his family and friends with his bad temper. Vaughan remembered being a victim of his father's violence. Big Jim died on August 27, 1986, four years before the death of Stevie Ray. In the early 1960s, Stevie Ray's admiration for his brother Jimmie led him to experiment with various instruments, such as the saxophone and drums. In 1961, for his seventh birthday, he received a toy guitar. Learning by ear, he dedicated himself to practicing diligently, playing songs by the Nightcaps such as "Wine, Wine, Wine" and "Thunderbird." During that time, he listened to blues artists such as Albert King, Otis Rush, and Muddy Waters, as well as rock guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix and Lonnie Mack.

In 1963, he got his first electric guitar, a Gibson ES-125T.