Chris Layton was born on November 16, 1955. As the drummer in Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Double Trouble, he played on “Pride and Joy” and the rest of the band’s 1983 debut, Texas Flood. Its sessions captured musicians who had already worked those songs into their nightly sets.
Layton’s urge to play began with Chubby Checker’s “The Twist.” In a 2019 interview with American Blues Scene, he remembered hearing the song on the radio and wanting to start drumming before he understood what that would involve. His father introduced him to big-band records, and Layton acquired his first drum kit at 13. School band and hours spent listening to records gave him ways to turn that excitement into playing. He moved from Corpus Christi to Austin in 1975 and joined Greezy Wheels. Working with a band that wrote its own songs, toured and paid him every week made music a practical occupation. He joined Double Trouble in 1978, and Tommy Shannon became its bassist in 1981. Their rapport took work: Layton recalled that friendship came readily, while “the musical chemistry developed as we went along.”
That development mattered when they entered Jackson Browne’s Los Angeles studio in 1982. Browne had offered them recording time, but Layton remembered the trip as an opportunity to make tapes, with no settled plan for a debut album. The band set up together in an open space surrounded by equipment cases. They ran through their material roughly three times and selected performances from those passes. As Layton told Classic Rock, “We played the music the way the band played every night and we recorded it.” The finished record also carried a studio detail that put Layton’s instrument in a different space. Mixer Lincoln Clapp told the magazine that he played the recorded drums back into a room with a high ceiling, captured that room sound and added it to the mix. The foundation remained the trio playing together; the room gave the drum recording another layer. Those tapes became Texas Flood.
Vaughan’s death in 1990 interrupted much more than Layton’s working schedule. He told American Blues Scene that he initially didn’t want to play, until a friend insisted he come into the studio for a recording session. Making music again helped him move forward.
Layton and Shannon then joined guitarists and singers Charlie Sexton and Doyle Bramhall II in Arc Angels. The musicians shared a connection to the Austin Rehearsal Center, where Layton had a room for practicing drums. What began as a chance to play together developed into a band: Sexton and Bramhall set aside solo work to write for the group, whose self-titled debut arrived in 1992. Layton’s partnership with Shannon had found another setting.
That partnership also pushed him toward songwriting. Shannon began playing guitar again and encouraged Layton to learn the instrument so they could write together. Layton took lessons, and the idea grew into Double Trouble’s Been a Long Time, released in 2001. Recalling the project in the second part of his 2019 American Blues Scene interview, Layton described inviting friends and musicians they admired to help turn their songs into a record. Sexton returned as one of its producers. The opening song, “Cry Sky,” carries writing credits for Layton, Shannon and Stephen Doster. Beyond his drum, percussion and piano parts, Been a Long Time gave him a place in Double Trouble’s catalog as a songwriter.
