Stevie Ray Vaughan: the lost interview, found
“I remember the first time Jimmie and I played a talent show and we realized in the middle of a song we’d played dozens of times that we’d never ended it before. We knew we had a ways to go.”
Texas Music History
End of the Century: Liberty Lunch July 31, 1999
By Michael Corcoran 7/15/99 Austin American Statesman IT’S ONLY A BUILDING, and an ugly one at that, with bathrooms that would’ve been an issue at the Geneva Convention and a hippy dippy mural dominated by a pouring coconut. It’s just a building, yes, but for the last 20-plus years it’s been a structure where musicians […]
Gilbert Askey 1925- 2014
by Michael Corcoran Gilbert Askey left Austin for good at age 17 in 1942, but the former Motown arranger, who received an Oscar nomination for his work with Diana Ross on “Lady Sings the Blues” and had a part in “discovering” the Jackson 5, said Austin has never left him. I interviewed the trumpet man, […]
Muddy Waters at the Vulcan 1968
It’s one of the most notorious bookings in Austin music history, the weekend in 1968 that Muddy Waters and his band played the Vulcan Gas Company, with an albino blues guitarist from Beaumont named Johnny Winter opening the show. On the Friday night, the Waters band didn’t arrive until after the Winter trio finished. “They […]
Tweets from SXSW 1989
TWEETS FROM SXSW 1989 “The registration line was insane. That’s 20 minutes of my life I won’t get back.” “Do you know where Saturday’s day party is?” “Austin learned it’s lesson from the Armadillo. No way are they gonna tear down Liberty Lunch for an office building.” “I’m in such a hurry I’m gonna have […]
1907 article gives proof that Washington Phillips didn’t play the dolceola
By Michael Corcoran This is from the Teague (Texas) Chronicle from Nov. 8, 1907. Washington Phillips, whose songs have been covered but never bettered by Ry Cooder, Mavis Staples, Phish, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and more, was 27 at the time. He didn’t make his first recordings until he was 47. If Columbia Records didn’t send […]
What They Deserve
They came for the music, Kelly Willis from Washington, D.C., in 1987 and Bruce Robison from Bandera a couple years later. The “rockabilly filly” and the Hill Country songsmith started dating in 1991, married in 1996 and had four kids in a span of five years. With Willis signed to MCA in the ’90s and Robison […]
Stevie Ray Vaughan Oct. 3, 1954 – Aug. 27, 1990
The Austin music community woke up on Aug. 27, 1990. with a chunk of its soul gone. At close to 1 a.m., blues guitar great Stevie Ray Vaughan perished in a helicopter crash in East Troy, Wis., after a concert.
Arizona Dranes Project
Book signing and discussion Wednesday Sept. 26 at Waterloo Records. 5 p.m. Hear the report on NPR’s “All Things Considered” “Essential… A magnificent and important set” – Roots and Rhythm Here’s the full review “He Is My Story is essential reading for gospel fans, pre-war jazz and blues enthusiasts, church historians, and may well be the […]
Praising Arizona: the playing hands of a sanctified spitfire
(Originally published in 2007) by Michael Corcoran New evidence shows that Arizona Dranes, the blind Pentecostal piano player who inspired everyone from Mahalia Jackson to Jerry Lee Lewis, attended the Institute for Deaf, Dumb and Blind Colored Youths in Northwest Austin from 1896- 1912. Let that sink in for a sec: The first person to […]