SotD: Pride and Joy

It’s been mostly gentle and sophisticated around here recently. Let’s turn to Texas and fix that; Pride and Joy, by Stevie Ray Vaughan, is about the simplest blues holler you can imagine, with a happy message and some smokin’ hot guitar.

Wow, Stevie Ray has been dead for 28 years. The last time I saw him feels like yesterday; it was just weeks before his death. Stevie Ray had managed to achieve sobriety after a lot of years of hard partying; like many sober addicts, he’d gotten to the point where the alternative was a coffin. Anyhow, that night when I saw him, he made a touching little speech about being sober, and how you had to take of yourself to be there for the people you love. A pity he got on that helicopter.

I loved almost every moment of every one of his recordings, because of the lovely guitar sound, the rockin’ blues stripped of everything but the bare essentials, and then the essentials turned up to eleven.

Also, he was just a cool guy, with a cool accent and a cool image; and great fun on stage, never holding anything back.

Pride and Joy is on Texas Flood, maybe my fave SRV album. The title track and Tin Pan Alley are my personal highlights, but I felt like something uptempo and a little rude today. Old-fashioned sentiments to be sure, but perhaps not entirely out of place: “You mess with her, you’ll see a man get mean.”

This is part of the Song of the Day series (background).

Links · Spotify playlist. This tune on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify. Live video from the El Mocombo!

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