I am crazy excited to dive into our month of music this month, music in May.
And today we have Jimmy Bond.
So Jimmy is somebody who I have been listening to for years and years and years and years and awed by Jimmy, started playing guitar when he was a kid.
And now, more than five decades later, he kind of just never stopped.
Growing up in Dallas in the fifties and sixties, Jimmy and his little brother Stevie, who, well, talk about more, they used to spend their time listening to music and figuring out how to play it on guitar, but it was actually a football accident that led him to pick up the guitar in the first place, and we'll talk about that.
By the time Jimmy was about 15 years old, he'd already been playing and getting paid to play in a band six nights a week and decided to kind of strikeout on his own.
Eventually landed in Austin, where he ended up playing with legends like BB King, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, and nearly every other blues legend, and eventually earned his own place as a legendary blues player.
And along the way, his brother Stevie Rayvon ended up joining him in Austin.
They'd occasionally play together, but Stevie quickly carved out his own iconic status in the world of blues.
And very tragically, Stevie also lost his life in a helicopter crash after a show, leaving Jimmy in what he calls his dark years and trying to figure out how to carry on with music and life.
So we dive into Jimmy's incredible journey, the night, the days and years surrounding Stevie's death, how he emerged, and finally figured out even what to tell his mom about that loss, and stepped back into a life of music and blues and grace.
And as with all of our very special music episodes this month, at the end, Jimmy plays a little bit of blues for us.
So this one was also really special for me because Jimmy didn't actually have his guitar with him in the studio, but he did me the great honor of picking up and playing the acoustic guitar that I had built with my own hands almost a year to the day earlier.
So excited to share this conversation and some music with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
I was a terrible football player, and this friend of mine told me, he said, you have to play football if you want to get a girlfriend at the junior high.
And I was like, oh, no, what am I going to do?
I'm thinking, you know, I can't really play football.
You know, I played a little baseball down the street.
Some people had a diamond and, you know, and would play football at school and stuff, but didn't really.