Plenty of electric blues players can bluster and roar through a performance, but a slow tune, even over a set of straight 12-bar changes, is the style’s ultimate challenge. Tapping into the music’s deepest pools of expression, where delicately squeezed, shaken, and slid notes become stand-ins for a range of human emotions, it takes an outstanding guitarist to sculpt a soulful slow blues. T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Ronnie Earl, and Stevie Ray Vaughan all have made staggering contributions, but the best recorded slow blues of the past 25 years may be Vaughan’s 1984 rendition of “Tin Pan Alley” on his second album, Couldn’t Stand the Weather. “Tin Pan Alley” was a staple of Vaughan’s concerts long before he put it on tape. The song was written by R&B tunesmith and performer Bob Geddins, who came from Texas but ultimately settled in the San Francisco Bay Area to become the dean of Oakland’s blues scene. _{http://www.gibson.com/news-lifestyle/features/en-us/stevie-ray-vaughan-tin-pan.aspx} SRV may well have been taking a backhanded slap at the music industry as a whole with this song. Tin Pan Alley was a real place, and later became a phrase for the music industry. By singing "...was the roughest place I ever known", he may have been expressing his experiences as a musician. The origins of the name "Tin Pan Alley" are unclear. One account claims that it was a derogatory reference to the sound of many pianos (comparing them to the banging of tin pans). Others claim it arose from songwriters modifying their pianos to produce a more percussive sound. After many years, the term came to refer to the U.S. music industry in general. Some views on the origin of the name: Tin Pan Alley is the name given to the collection of New York City music publishers and songwriters who dominated the popular music of the United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The name originally referred to a specific place: West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan, and a plaque exists on the sidewalk on 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth commemorates it. The start of Tin Pan Alley is usually dated to about 1885, when a number of music publishers set up shop in the same district of Manhattan. The end of Tin Pan Alley is less clear cut. Some date it to the start of the Great Depression in the 1930s when the phonograph, radio, and motion pictures supplanted sheet music as the driving force of American popular music, while others consider that Tin Pan Alley continued into the 1950s when earlier styles of American popular music were upstaged by the rise of rock & roll, which was centered on the Brill Building. The phrase tin pan referred to the sound of pianos furiously pounded by the so-called song pluggers, who demonstrated tunes to publishers. Tin Pan Alley comprised the commercial music of songwriters of ballads, dance music, and vaudeville, and its name eventually became synonymous with American popular music in general. When these genres first became prominent, the most profitable commercial product of Tin Pan Alley was sheet music for home consumption, and songwriters, lyricists, and popular performers laboured to produce music to meet the demand. Tin Pan Alley Pop refers to the traditional American popular music of the early 20th century, a time when a song's popularity was determined not by the number of records it sold, but by the number of copies of sheet music. Tin Pan Alley was a real place, located in Manhattan on West 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue; a large number of music publishers had their offices there, and the din from so many composers writing songs on their pianos inspired writer Monroe Rosenfeld to liken the neighborhood ambience to the sound of striking on tin pans.