Lou Ann Barton at Fitzgerald's, 1986
RO: So what happened?
LAB: He called me a couple months later and I moved to Austin and we started the Fabulous Thunderbirds.
RO: But you never recorded with them.
LAB: Yeah, I didn't stay in very long. The problem was we had two singers, Kim Wilson and me. But it was really tough in the beginning and there was so little money that they had a better chance of making a living without me. We were a real good band, but it just wasn't going anywhere.
We'd never even been out of Texas. So I said to hell with this, and I went to Stevie [Ray Vaughan] and said let's start a band. I knew he was tired of playing in the Cobras. So we got with W.C. Clark and started Triple Threat Revue.
RO: That timeline is hard to keep straight. You were also in one of the early incarnations of Roomful of Blues.
LAB: Yeah, I moved to Providence, R.I., and worked with them. I wasn't there all that long, six or eight months. Then Jerry Wexler offered me a deal. And I married [Thunderbirds bassist] Keith Ferguson. Which of course did not work out. I thought he'd changed, but men don't change.
RO: Do women change?
LAB [laughs]: Well, I probably haven't. Much.
