1995 Fender Stevie Ray Vaughan Signature Stratocaster

SRV died in 1990 in a helicopter crash.  Though I had purchased "Texas Flood" on vinyl back when it first came out (largely due to rave reviews in Guitar Player Magazine), I wasn't fully immersed into SRV until the late 80s.  By the early 90s, SRV and Robert Cray were my gateway into delving deeper into the blues, and I started really getting into guys like Duke Robillard, B.B. King, Albert Collins, T-Bone Walker, Johnny Winter, Poppa Chubby, and even vocalists like Kim Wilson and Taj Mahal.

The big gauge string / Tube Screamer / neck single coil tones were really popular back then, and because I once again didn't have a Strat, I ordered this guitar from Thoroughbred Music in 1995.  The neck was fat and the frets were huge, which were nice, but the guitar was a bit heavy.  A short while after I got this guitar, there had been this surge of SRV clones getting popular, guys like Kenny Wayne Shepard, Johnny Lang and Chris Duarte, and I thought if I really wanted to try to find my own sound with the blues, that it would be too hard to escape the SRV sound with not just a Strat, but with a signature model SRV!!

I ended up selling this guitar to a guy in Pearl City, who bought it for his son.  I remember going over to his house that night, and he wanted me to listen to his son play afterward.