Jimmie Vaughan talks the joy of the blues

Jimmie Vaughan is a retroist who's giving technology the benefit of the doubt. He's at a picnic table on a grassy secluded spot near Bee Cave Road, in bucolic West Austin, on an unseasonably cool September morning. He sets down his cup of decaffeinated tea and pulls out his iPhone. The main screen is a black and white photograph of him and his brother, Stevie Ray Vaughan, who died in a helicopter crash 20 years ago. He taps the screen. Up pops his very own app.

A guitar neck appears. Out from the phone's speakers comes the jump jivin' instrumental "Comin' & Goin' "— each note illuminating on the fret board as it's played. It's the only original song by Vaughan, 59, on the summer release "Jimmie Vaughan Plays Blues, Ballads & Favorites," his first solo album in a nine-year span occupied mostly by raising 6-year-old twin daughters with his second wife, Robin.

The new album is a marvelous collection of mostly '50s cover songs done up in a vintage Gulf Coast style typified by ornamental horns. Vaughan calls it "real Texas." It's the blues as swing, the blues as jazz, the blues as its opposite, joy.

"You can do several things with it," Vaughan says of the TouchChords learn-how-to-play-guitar app by Curious Brain, which came in third place in the Best Artist-based App category at this year's Billboard Music App Awards. Vaughan might know what those things are — he clearly sees the app as a newfangled way to sell his music, in an increasingly fragmented, digital-driven market — but accessing all of those things is a different matter.

"Let's see if I can..." he begins. "I don't know what I just did." A couple more taps of the screen. "It probably wouldn't be good if it came out that I didn't really know how to work it very good."

The opposite is true. The allure of Vaughan is that he's steadfastly old school. It's as if he stepped out of "American Graffiti." His hair is slicked back. On his face are Ray-Ban Wayfarers, a pair probably dating back to before they became trendy the last time. He's wearing pointy leather demi-boots fashionable in the '60s and a National Hot Rod Association letter jacket. And he's driving a '32 Ford Five Window Coupe — one part of a classic car collection that he houses in Smithville, where he will headline the second annual Smithville Music Festival next Saturday.

Vaughan's throwback style permeates "Jimmie Vaughan Plays," achieving what Vaughan calls "that real jukebox sound."

"The album implies that old school, horn-riffy, bluesy, bouncy, sultry feel-good vibe," says Austin trumpeter Ephraim Owens, one-third of the album's horns section, in an e-mail from Europe.

Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace come to mind, alternately dancing to "The Pleasure's All Mine," an Ike Turner-produced R&B ditty with Vaughan's precise, impressionistic guitar playing, and "Just a Little Bit," a funky affair between a Hammond B3 organ and honking brass.

At the heart of the album is life's most precious ingredient. "The theme of the record is," Vaughan begins, in that rare moment that doesn't seem rehearsed from decades of interviews, "what it's like to be a person in and out of love. On Earth. The condition of us."

Those permutations of love are conveyed with the able assistance of Lou Ann Barton. She and Vaughan have collaborated since the '70s, when they were putting Antone's on the map. Their familiarity with each other makes for a compelling man/woman dynamic in "Come Love," a sex-stained, harmonica-driven entreaty, and "I'm Leavin' It Up to You," a couple's last-ditch effort to make it work.

Vaughan's voice is the biggest surprise on the album. It's more than serviceable; it's a thing of beauty. It exhibits a wide range, from gruff and powerful to delicate and heartfelt. And it wasn't until age 40 that Vaughan even started singing. Stevie Ray had to prompt him to do it on their duo album, "Family Style." "I'm glad I did it," Vaughan says, "because it's a more complete feeling of expression."

Consider it a thank-you from Stevie Ray to Jimmie for teaching him the foundation for playing guitar. "Stevie Vaughan would not have become Stevie Ray without Jimmie showing him the way and teaching by example," says Joe Nick Patoski, co-author with Bill Crawford of the Stevie Ray Vaughan book "Caught in the Crossfire." "But to give the younger brother credit, it was Stevie who got Jimmie to sing. Neither would be who they are today without the other."