black clover never let them make you crawl

Soul

Sometimes life leaves in it's wake a trail of circumstances that puzzle and astound me. Whomever coined the phrase "Everything happens for a reason." was probably on to something.

This story starts when I was younger. I can recall watching some guy from Austin Texas playing the guitar on my local television station. My father used to stay up really late at night watching this guy play guitar. He would come up on stage with dark cowboy boots, draped in a brilliant blue shirt with a candy apple red fender srat strapped to his midsection. There wasn't really anything remarkable or outstanding about this guy, until I heard his fingers touch the guitar fret board.
One of those late nights as me and my father sat on opposing sides of the couch, I remember watching this guy play for the very first time. I was in awe. Complete and utter awe. Not since Louis Armstrong many years before, had I seen an individual take a musical instrument to that level. Never. He took the guitar, and played it like it was meant to be played. Every note that he strummed had blood and memories written all over it.

His name was Stevie Ray Vaughan and he was killed in a helicopter crash on August 27th 1990, only two years after I had first seen him. He is one of the greatest sources of inspiration that I have happened upon in my lifetime, and the magnitude of that inspiration could never be captured nor expressed in words. His sheer brilliance and mastery of the guitar is impressive for sure, but there was something else that I saw in him. Something that touched the very inner workings within me. It was something that very few people have, and I could see it in his eyes, in his hands, in his callused fingers, and in his music. It's called soul.

Defined as "the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life", soul is the very first word that comes to mind when I hear Stevies music. Stevie didn't play the guitar, he played music. He was a direct channel of soul that flowed straight out. He followed his heart, his passion, and his love despite the circumstances that surrounded his life. If that isn't soul, I don't know what is. And Stevie's soul shone through in other aspects of his life as well. He shook off a cocaine and alcohol addiction that nearly killed him, only to return to the studio soon afterwards to record perhaps his greatest studio album In Step. Vaughan remained clean and sober for nearly four years before his untimely death, and he never ever looked back. That's soul my friends.

So getting back to my opening sentence, I was amazed when al received my Stevie Ray Vaughan discs on the anniversary of Stevie's birthday. Sometimes there are things in life that are best left unquestioned.

And finally, I thought I'd leave you with the greatest memory of Stevie that I ever had. I had just gotten my hands on an old Stevie Ray bootleg copy of a concert he did in Denver Colorado only 9 months before he died. I was standing in my room listening to a song called "Life Without You" when suddenly Stevie put his guitar down and started to talk. His words brought me to tears -

“I wanna stop right now and Thank God that I'm alive and well enough to be with ya`ll today. And that all's as well as it is with everybody here, and I am glad to be here with you today. You see, it does me good to stop and think about this stuff because, sometimes it's too easy to forget for a lot of us - you know. What we've been through, where we come from, where we're tryin' to get. Where we're tryin' to get is back home inside-you know? Back in touch with what really means something which is love and caring and what we've got between us. See, it took me a long time to find out pretty much everything else is a bunch of somethin' else.
Cause, for a long time all I could remember to do is run away from myself and everybody who cared - you know? And usually that meant run to the party and stay there for as long as possible. And then one day I nearly died and it kinda' dawned on me that this was not the right thing to do - you know? Cause you know it's time to come home every once and a while. What this is all about, is just, I'm askin' ya`ll to take care of yourselves so you can be there for the ones who love and need you the most, and they need you all the time! I know I do! Are you with me? All right! ”