📍Oak Cliff, Dallas, TX, USA
1954 – 1972“I was born in Dallas in October 1954 and grew up in Oak Cliff, a working-class neighbourhood across the Trinity River from downtown, in a modest three-bedroom house on Glenfield Avenue that my parents, Jim and Martha, bought in the late 1950s. My father worked in asbestos, and his jobs often moved us around Texas and the South, but Oak Cliff was home. My parents loved music and took my older brother, Jimmie, and me to see Fats Domino, Jimmy Reed and Bob Wills. Jimmie was my hero. He was playing guitar before me, and I wanted to do everything he did. I wanted to play the drums at first, but I got a toy guitar when I was about seven, and Jimmie gave me my first lessons. He really was the reason I started to play; I watched him and saw what could be done. I listened to Jimmie's records of Albert King, Freddie King, B.B. King and Jimi Hendrix, and practised for hours. By fourteen I was playing in clubs around Dallas in bands like Blackbird and the Shantones, and I went to Justin F. Kimball High School, though music meant far more to me than school. In 1972, a year before I would have graduated, I dropped out and moved to Austin, following Jimmie, and joined the city's blues scene. With my band, Double Trouble, I played at Antone's and all over Texas, and in 1983 David Bowie asked me to play on Let's Dance, and our album Texas Flood brought the blues back to the charts. Oak Cliff remembers me with the Stevie Ray Vaughan Trail in Kiest Park, near where I grew up.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today