Duets

The blues-rock guitar hero's studio vaults were nearly empty when he died in an August 27, 1990, helicopter crash. This set unearths a 1978 Austin session track of "You Can Have My Husband" with Vaughan as second fiddle to his then girlfriend, singer Lou Ann Barton, but it's undistinguished compared to the previously unreleased live performances that compose this disc's heart. Vaughan contributes teeth-baring pentatonic solos to Lonnie Mack's "Oreo Cookie Blues" at Atlanta's Fox Theatre in 1986 and brings his bullish tone to the late blues piano stomper Katie Webster's "On the Run" at the 1988 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Bonnie Raitt's distinctively keening slide adds elegance to a "Texas Flood" from Bumbershoot 1985 in Seattle, and when Stevie's older sibling Jimmie Vaughan stops by Saturday Night Live to play rhythm on a 1985 "Change It," li'l bro' squeezes out screaming fireworks. But the best cut's a breathtaking '88 Jazz Fest slugfest with Texas Telecaster blaster Albert Collins that's jammed with howling, shaken notes and machine-gun riffing. Both are in top form. The rest is culled from Vaughan's guest appearances on others' releases or previous retrospectives and include matches with blues godfathers B.B. King and Albert King, as well as Johnny Copeland and A.C. Reed, Jeff Beck, Austin barrelhouser Marcia Ball, surf guitar king Dick Dale, and David Bowie, whose "Let's Dance" introduced Vaughan to the mainstream in 1983. --Ted Drozdowski