Paying Tribute To An Unsung Blues Legend Who Mentored The Greatest

R.I.P. W.C. Clark, "Godfather of Austin Blues" and a very important person to Stevie Ray Vaughan

W.C. Clark, the “Godfather of the Austin Blues,” passed away early in the morning of March 2. This was first reported on Austin writer Michael Corcoran’s page, and it includes a thorough obituary, detailing Clark’s life and including his solo career. You can and should read that here.

Clark was a bandmate of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s in the Triple Threat Revue and an important mentor for the young guitarist, who was struggling to rein in his abundant talents, and as Stevie’s biographer, this tribute to W.C. focuses on that part of his life. All text below is adapted from Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan, copyright 2019, Alan Paul and Andy Aledort.

W.C. performed at our Austin book launch party concert at C-Boy’s.

Photo by Ken Hoge

In September, 1977, Stevie Ray Vaughan left the Cobras and formed the Triple Threat Revue, so named because it featured three front-people: Stevie Ray, blues belter Lou Ann Barton and the sweet-singing bassist W.C. Clark.  The drummer was Fredde “Pharoah” Walden and the keyboardist was Mike Kindred, an old Oak Cliff friend and former member of Krackerjack and Storm who had already written the great moody tune, “Cold Shot,” which quickly became a Triple Threat staple. 

KINDRED: I was playing in the Antone’s house band and pumping gas on South Lamar, when Stevie pulls up, walks over, looks at me, shakes his head and the talks began. He told me about Lou Ann and his plans for this band and I said, “We need Fredde Pharoah on drums.” Then I got into his car and we went to McMorris Ford, where W.C. Clark was one of the top mechanics, and starting laying our propaganda on him.

W.C. CLARK: Stevie was always on the black side of Austin because he was really interested in learning the black culture. He kept coming by my job and telling me that he had decided to put a band together and needed me to play bass. I wasn’t looking for a gig, because I was getting a steady paycheck and relaxing for a change, but he kept pestering me. 

LOU ANN BARTON: I knew that Stevie’s time in the Cobras was running out. We put together a dream band. They were all killers.

MIKE KINDRED: We all sang lead and would chorus behind Lou Ann with four male voices and it was just killer. We were a happening band!

JIMMIE VAUGHAN: They were a fabulous band. Fredde Pharaoh had done a lot of playing in my bands, with a killer shuffle and he could really swing. He played simple, aspiring to play like the guys on the early Albert Collins records, and he did. And W.C. Clark is a great singer, bassist and guitar player.

CLARK: I had seen Stevie around a lot, and I knew how unique he was: how clean a tone he had, how nasty and lowdown he could be, and how he could play licks exactly like Chuck Berry, Albert King and B.B. King. I knew he was for real, that he was a seeker, a warrior. And that’s why I not only agreed to join his band, but to play bass, which I had given up to focus on guitar. I really had no interest in playing bass again, but Stevie had such a fire and I was so impressed by how much he had already improved that I wanted to see where he could take it.

Stevie got down every inch of the way. There was no slack in him. His endurance and perseverance were unreal. Guys like B.B. and Albert and Freddie King and Albert Collins had that mean, soulful endurance, always trying to get every possible tone out of a single note, just digging deep into the guitar to satisfy something deep within their own souls. Stevie had that, and it changed me. Like a lot of black people at the time, I wasn’t getting down that hard on the guitar, instead focusing on my singing and the groove, but he opened my eyes.

Triple Threat Revue, from L: Mike Kindred, W.C. Clark, Lou Ann barton, Freddie Pharoah, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Photo by Ken Hoge

DOYLE BRAMHALL: When you’re up there that high musically, you’re always looking around the corner for something new to add. I think that with any great artist or athlete, you can see them move through different levels of growth and continue to improve. It never surprised me that Stevie would surprise me. You kind of expected it. It was like, “What are you gonna do next?” Then he would do it, and it would be like, “Let’s build on that.”. 

CLARK: Stevie had a destiny. I’ve seen other white boys play up close, including Eric Clapton himself, but they didn’t show me what I saw from Stevie. I saw that from him and him alone. Even my mama saw it. She saw us play and said, “That is a guitar playing little man, isn’t it?” and I said, “I am too, mom. Why don’t you give me a compliment like that?” Jimmie heard that, laughed and said, “Welcome to the boat, man.”

By mid-May 1978, both Clark and Kindred had left Triple Threat, and were replaced by bassist Jackie Newhouse and saxophonist Johnny Reno. No longer a triple threat, the band changed its name to Double Trouble, after the Otis Rush song. Clark still made at least one more significant musical assist to Stevie, helping him break in new drummer Chris Layton, who was a great musician and eager to help Double Trouble advance, but had little experience playing deep blues.

CHRIS LAYTON: Shortly after I joined the band, Stevie invited me to jam at Hole Sound, a small studio in a church basement. I walked in and was surprised to see W.C. Clark there with Stevie. I sat down at the drums and W.C. said, “Play a shuffle. I’m gonna talk over your shoulder, but just keep playing.” He started talking in my right ear: “Play really, really lightly.” He knew I was from Corpus Christi and began talking about the ocean: “Think about being down at the beach watching the waves come in and break on the sand.”

CLARK: I said, “You know the way the waves just roll in on the shore? That’s what you should be thinking of when you’re playing this groove.” Chris said it helped him to not push the beat.

LAYTON: He kept describing metaphorical imagery as I played along, and something changed in the way I thought about and played a shuffle. Stevie grinned and picked up his guitar and we jammed for a while. I truthfully hadn’t heard a lot of the great blues drummers.

CLARK Chris had been playing in a country band, and he hadn’t played very many blues shuffles and we were just getting that together. I helped him understand how to play what he wanted to play and make it right in the category of what we were doing because of the mathematics of it.

LAYTON: Talk about a great music lesson and the conversation had nothing to do with music. That experience gave me a different perspective on playing. A lot of learning to play an instrument involves approaching the instrument from a technical perspective; on the drums, there is an idea that if you practice rudiments enough, you will be a great drummer. But that’s not really true. Same thing on the guitar: you need to know your scales, chords, inversions, but ultimately you have to apply it all to making music. Playing music is not just the technical side of studying an instrument. This key had been put in and unlocked the door to a new perspective. 

My fourth book, Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, was published July 25, 2023, by St. Martin’s Press. It was the third consecutive one to debut in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List, following Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and  One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. My first book, Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about my experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band, was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions.  I am also a guitarist and singer with two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.