The Fabulous Thunderbirds on "Live at the Belly Up": Great Blues Band, but Could Use a Better Singer

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Friday, October 3 I took advantage of my husband Charles’s relatively late work call (1 to 10 p.m.) to watch the latest installment of Live at the Belly Up on KPBS featuring a blues band called The Fabulous Thunderbirds. They’ve existed since 1974 and came as close as they ever got to the brass ring of stardom in 1986 with a song called “Tuff Enuff” [sic] that was featured in a movie called Gung Ho. Their Wikipedia page tells a rather sad tale of record contracts signed and then canceled as the band’s personnel changed over the years. The original lineup included Jimmie Vaughan, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s older brother, on guitar, but last night’s lineup was a simple four-piece: vocal, guitar, electric bass, drums. I’ve often judged Live at the Belly Up episodes by the number of songs the band crowds into their one-hour (less intro, outro and the inevitable interstitial interview segments) time slot. That would have been deceptive with The Fabulous Thunderbirds because for the first half of the show they played six concise, tightly arranged songs – “Wrap It Up,” “Don’t Make No Sense” (which they played in a zydeco rhythm that was a nice contrast to the straight-ahead blues of the rest of their program), “Early in the Morning,” “I’m a Good Man,” “Tear It Up,” and a cover of Slim Harpo’s “Baby, Scratch My Back.” Then they segued from “Scratch My Back” into an extended instrumental jam that lasted 10 minutes and totally defeated the Live at the Belly Up chyron writers. After that the band brought up two guest artists, guitarists Lena Chavez and Joey Delgado, for “Wait On Time” and “Give Me All Your Lovin’,” before closing with “Tuff Enuff.”

The Fabulous Thunderbirds are a great blues band, though I got tired of the foghorn vocals of their leader (and the only member who’s been with the band throughout), Kim Wilson. Indeed, when he was bringing out two guests, one of them a woman, I was hoping one of them would sing because I would have liked the respite from Wilson’s strong but monochromatic voice. He’s the sort of singer for whom the term “blues shouter” was coined, and one of the virtues of that 10-minute instrumental jam was that instead of having to endure more of Wilson’s voice, we got to hear him play harmonica, at which he’s great. The piece interpolated a bit of “You Are My Sunshine,” but otherwise it was your typical blues jam. I also quite liked Lena Chavez; she’s a heavy-set Latina and her playing is quite lyrical and a welcome rest from the fireworks of the other two guitarists, including the Thunderbirds’ regular member as well as Joey Delgado. (I haven’t been able to find the names of the other members of the current Fabulous Thunderbirds online; their Wikipedia page lists a lineup that doesn’t match the one that played on Live at the Belly Up.) I suspect I’d have liked The Fabulous Thunderbirds better if I hadn’t just interviewed neo-blues musician Al Basile for Fanfare magazine and heard his most recent CD, Blues in Hand. It helps that Basile has a more flexible voice that Wilson (even though it’s no great shakes in terms of sheer beauty; he cites Louis Armstrong as his model both instrumetally and vocally) and also that instead of harmonica or guitar, Basile plays cornet – and plays it quite lyrically in the manner of a turn-of-the-last-century band player. It also helps that Basile is a much more inventive songwriter who’s able to deploy the standard blues clichés in fresh and original ways, whereas Kim Wilson just churns out common blues lines and strings them into songs.

I don’t want to make The Fabulous Thunderbirds sound worse than they are; I quite enjoyed their music for what it was, and I loved Wilson’s account of how he wrote “Tuff Enuff” on a plane making the half-hour flight from Dallas to Austin, Texas (did I mention that he’s Texan?). He scribbled out the lyrics on an air sickness bag, which reminded me of Art Blakey’s account during a 1954 live performance of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia” that “I was there when Dizzy wrote that song – in Texas, on the bottom of a garbage can.” It’s just that I couldn’t help but wonder what they would have sounded like with a more flexible, more emotionally varied singer.