Where did it all come from?

So Austin has all of this music now. Where did it come from? How did it happen this way? Hmmmmmmm, well let's see.

Of course I think the music in Austin started way back in the 1800s with the cowboys on the range riding all day long moving those cattle. After a hard day's work in the saddle, they took it easy with a large meal at the end of the day. After the meal all of the cowboys sat around taking it easy and some of them sang or played something like a guitar or harmonica along with the singing. This is most probably where the country music came from.

The other music came from the blues which came from those suffering black people who worked hard as slaves and some even harder after the Civil War. But in much the same way as those cowboys the black people enjoyed the evening times when they could just relax, sing, and make their music. That was where the blues came from.

Austin became a town in the mid-1800s when Stephen F. Austin put roots down here. At first Austin was not the capital city but shortly after Texas joined the union Austin became the capital city. Sam Houston and all of them hung around Austin. To this day there is a beer garden next to the University of Texas called "Scholtz Beer Garden" and this was one the places where Sam and his buddies liked to drink. We could have sat down with them if we had been there 150 years ago and enjoyed the liquor or beer. Austin still has good beer too from those days. We have Shiner Bock beer here in Austin and there are still any number of fine little breweries that try to keep the faith.

But the music was here in those days and people just kept on playing and enjoying themselves. Austin was probably like many other locations in the United States that supported some sort of a music scene. Typically the local musicians played for dances or celebrations. Most of these earlier musicians had real jobs to survive and only played music for fun in their free time.

I suppose the first national attention for Austin came with Janis Joplin while she was a student at the University of Texas here. She was voted "ugliest man on campus" while enjoying her studies at the University of Texas. At nights she played at an Austin bar/restaurant/beer garden called Threadgill's named after Kenneth Threadgill. He started the place back in the 1930s and kept it going after the war. Janis later left Texas and went on to national fame and more fun in San Francisco. At that time San Fran was the place to be for the hippies. They congregated there in the 60s through the late 60s. From the early 70s though they began to move. One of the places they moved to was Austin Texas.

In the early 70s the current owner of Threadgill's, Eddie Wilson, started a wonderful place to hear live music in Austin called "Armadillo World Headquarters". One of the logoes featured an armadillo at the wheel of a car racing down the highway with a human being crawling across the road. His wife was screaming "Don't hit him.", while the husband had a cruel grin plastered across his face. The Armadillo, as we call it, was truly the big start that put Austin on the national scene and garnered all the attention.