In many ways, W.C. Clark is an important historical character in Austin blues. He represents the blues as they were "back in the day" when the east Austin blues scene was vital and anybody who really cared about the blues found their way there, just as W.C. Clark did, to be part of that creativity and absorb the blues.
He's known as the Godfather of Austin Blues because he has mentored virtually every blues-oriented musician who's come to fame in Austin. He was in Storm with Jimmie Vaughan, Southern Feeling with Angela Strehli, and Triple Threat with Stevie Vaughan and Lou Ann Barton. He formed his own W.C. Clark Blues Revue.
His album Heart of Gold, a mix of Memphis-style soul and barroom blues, came out in 1994 and lifted him to national recognition.
His 2004 release, Deep in the Heart, includes work from Derek O'Brien, Ruth Foster and Marcia Ball as well as a number of other well-known Austin musicians.
W.C. Clark is an Austin native who played the blues as a young man and gave it up. Not enough money in it to make a living. He switched to earning his living as a mechanic. Then in 1976, Stevie Ray Vaughan approached him to become the bass player in a band called Triple Threat. W.C. hasn't needed "a day job" since. Clark formed his own group and has made several albums, including Lover's Plea and Texas Soul. Texas Soul, on the Black Top label, won a W.C. Handy Award in the Best Soul-Blues Album category in 1997. His 2002 release was From Austin with Soul.
Clark is a regular during the summer months at Blues on the Green, a free weekly blues show on the commons at the Arboretum, where literally thousands of Austinites savor his sound. His concerts all around the country are very successful and he's a headliner at blues festivals.
His mother was a singer with her sisters, and his grandmother sang, "while she cooked, worked, washed." He says, "Music was kinda like a habit getting raised up in a gospel neighborhood." He says he had, "no lessons other than the lessons I taught myself from whatever I was listening to, whatever I liked. I don't read music, but I can sight read music cards that I taught myself."
Clark's own website is worth a visit.
The Austin Chronicle featured him in a very interesting cover story in August 1998. Buy his music at amazon.com.
