Bob Feldman : Texas Still Ranks High in Poverty and Segregation by Race and Income, 1964-2012

Poverty in Texas has continued to grow in recent years. Image from WebGovernments.

The hidden history of Texas

Conclusion: 1996-2012/Final Section -- Texas still ranks high in poverty and segregation by race and economic status and low in health care and education.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / June 19, 2013

[This is the final section of the conclusion to Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Despite the surplus wealth accumulated by some ultra-rich folks in Texas between 1996 and 2011, the number of people living in poverty also continued to increase during these same years. The University of Texas' Texas Politics website indicates the extent to which the economic, educational, and health care needs of large numbers of people in Texas are still not being met by Texas society in the 21st-century:

In 2007 Texas ranked second among all the states in the percent of its populace that was poor... The poverty rate for Texas in that year was 16.5 percent. The only other state that had higher poverty rates was Mississippi (20.1 percent)... Texas...clearly has the highest poverty rate of any large industrial state... Its poor population in absolute numbers: 3.934 million people... California...is the only state with a larger number of poor people...than Texas...

Texas therefore has both a large number of poor people and a high percentage of its population living in poverty. In 2007, Texas ranked 9th in the poverty rate for the elderly; it ranked 49th in the percentage of its adult population with a high school diploma; and it ranked first, at 24.4 percent, in the percent of the populace with no health insurance...

Of the Anglo population, 8.4 percent is poor, while 23.8 percent of the African-American and 24.8 percent of the Hispanic populations are poor. In other words, the rate of poverty among the two minority groups is three times greater than among the Anglo population… If we take the entire poor population of Texas (some 3.9 million people)…23.8 percent of all poor Texans are Anglo, and 15.8 percent are African-American, but well over half (53 percent) are Hispanic...

...in the entire United States, the two absolutely poorest [counties]... were both along the Texas-Mexico border -- Cameron County and Hidalgo County... Cameron and Hidalgo were the only two counties in the United States with median household incomes under $25,000... Cameron and Hidalgo counties also had the highest poverty rates of any counties in the United States; each had a rate of about 41 percent...

El Paso had a poverty rate of 29 percent... Of the 10 poorest counties in the United States, Texas had El Paso (sixth) and Lubbock (tenth) in addition to Cameron and Hidalgo. Texas was the only state to have more than one of the poorest ten counties nation-wide...

And according to a recently-released report of Austin’s Center for Public Policy Priorities, titled "The State of Texas Children 2011," 24 percent of all children in Texas and 22.2 percent of all children in Austin were now living in poverty in 2009, while the poverty level for the total population in Texas increased to 17.1 percent in 2009 (even before the state’s official jobless rate reached 8 percent in December 2010) and 16 percent of all people living in Austin were now economically impoverished.

A May 5, 2011, issue brief of the Economic Policy Institute, titled “Distressed Texas,” also noted that “the African-American unemployment rate in Texas rose from 8.1 percent at the beginning of the Great Recession to a high of 14.8 percent in the second quarter of 2010,” and “in 2010, 13.6 percent of African-Americans and 9.6 percent of Hispanics were unemployed, compared with 6.0 percent of white non-Hispanic Texans.”

And, according to "Ongoing Joblessness in Texas," a May 16, 2013, report from the Economic Policy Institute, "In Texas, where the overall unemployment rate was 6.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 (compared with a national average of 7.8 percent), African American and Hispanic families continue to bear the brunt of that economic pain."

In a February 1, 2003, speech before the W.H. Passion Historical Society at Austin’s Southgate-Lewis House, former Austin SNCC activist Larry Jackson made the following observation about the extent of perceived white racism in 21st-century Austin, a town otherwise known as a progressive enclave:

Austin, Texas has been and still it is, I think, a place that is hung up in the late '40s. I think Austin is a very racist city. Matter of fact, even though I have received a lot of the goodness that Austin offers, and I have been blessed, I find Austin to be a real racist place. And I was born in Hearne, Texas, and I know racism when I see it. And it is here [in Austin] greater than it exists anywhere else in this state.

And there’s just a different kind of a slave mentality here than just other places. There’s also more opportunity here than in most other places. But people here are so hell-bent on seeing themselves a little bit better than the people in Elgin and Giddings because that’s their yardstick. So you don’t have to be a lot better; all you have to be is just alive.

Though there are towns in Texas where racism is certainly more blatant, Austin is a very segregated city and is experiencing substantial displacement of blacks and Hispanics due to gentrification. More overt racism may be found elsewhere in the state, especially in towns like Vidor and Jasper in East Texas that have struggled to overcome histories of KKK-dominated racial violence.

An April 25, 2013, article in Business Insider on the 21 most segregated cities in the U.S. included only Houston (at 20th) among Texas cities. But an August 2, 2012, feature in the same publication, citing a study by the Pew Research Center, called Houston "America's most economically segregated city," citing that "Houston leads the way among the nation's 10 largest metropolitan areas when it comes to affluent folks living among others who are affluent, and poor living with poor."

In Houston, according to the article, "the percentage of upper-income households in census tracts with a majority of upper-income households increased from 7 in 1980 to 24 in 2010. Likewise, low-income households in majority low-income tracts jumped from 25 to 37." Of the nation's 30 top metropolitan areas, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas topped the Pew study's  "Residential Income Segregation Index."

According to the Sentencing Project website’s most recent figures, for every 100,000 African-Americans who live in Texas, 3,162 are now imprisoned, while the rate of incarceration for white people in Texas is currently 667 per 100,000. And since 1995 the total number of people of all races locked up inside state and federal prisons in Texas has increased from 127,766 to 162,186 (including 11,620 female prisoners).

There are some positive signs on the horizon, with major demographic changes likely to transform the state's political complexion. With rapid growth in youth, African-American, and Hispanic populations, and increased clout for the state's urban areas, Texas is projected to change political colors in the next decade or two. As the Center for American Progress Action Fund put it, "changing demographics will have significant impact on [Texas's] social, economic, and political landscape."

But for now, as we enter the post-2012 period of Texas history (and a possible post-2017 “Perry Era” of right-wing political resurgence in U.S. history), the anti-democratic direction of recent Texas history has not been reversed and the people of the state continue to be economically exploited and politically dominated by the white corporate power structure and political establishment of Texas -- which has been the story for the last 190 years of the hidden history of Texas.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Civil Rights, SDS, and Student Activism in Austin, Texas, 1954-1973

Massive march against the War in Vietnam, Austin, Texas, May 8, 1970. Image from The Rag Blog.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 13: 1954-1973/2 -- Student Activism and the Anti-War Movement at the University of Texas

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2013

[This is the second section of Part 13 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Inspired by the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement protests of groups like the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE], the Southern Christian Leadership Council [SCLC], and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], and in response to the 1965 escalation of the Pentagon’s War in Viet Nam, an increasing number of students and non-students in Austin, Texas, became involved in New Left and countercultural groups like SDS and in underground press journalism during the 1960s.

There was substantial New Left activity in other Texas cities, including Houston where underground newspaper Space City! helped pull together an active movement community, but Austin -- which had always been a center for cultural and political iconoclasm -- would become one of the nation's New Left hot spots.

As Beverly Burr observed in her thesis, "History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-88)":

The Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] formed a chapter in the early spring of 1964. From 1964-7, the UT chapter of SDS began to build the local white, radical student movement. Alice Embree, one of the early participants in SDS at UT, said that when she went through registration at the beginning of the Spring 1964 semester, there was an SDS information table. She conjectured that 4 or 5 people started the group.

The early focus of the group was participating with black student activists in the sit-ins at downtown Austin restaurants... In mid-October 1965, SDS held a death march protesting U.S. policy toward Vietnam. This protest was apparently the first antiwar demonstration on the campus during the 1960s. About 70 students participated in the march and rally... SDS had attempted to get a parade permit to march on the streets during the rally but the permit had been refused by the City Council...

SDS held its first fall 1966 meeting in late October [1966]... At the same time, students organized an underground newspaper called The Rag... Most of the staffers were SDSers who created the paper not only to publicize issues of importance to the movement but also in reaction to the corporate controlled mainstream media... During the fall [of 1966] 10 SDS and Rag women... held a sit-in protesting the draft at the Selective Service in Austin. In January of 1967 several demonstrations were held against Secretary of State Dean Rusk while he was in town... Over 200 came to the second protest which succeeded in canceling Rusk’s dinner at the UT Alumni Center...

The first conflict between SDS and the University occurred later in the spring of 1967 during Flipped-Out Week... SDS had planned a week of activities including a speech by... Stokely Carmichael..., an anti-war march to the Capitol, and Gentle Thursday... The activities attracted several thousands... The week after Flipped-Out Week, SDS distributed flyers... to plan a Monday protest against Vice President Hubert Humphrey who would be speaking at the Capitol... On Monday, about 150 students protested at the Capitol against the war in Vietnam. Later that day, UT withdrew recognition of SDS as a campus organization...

UT initiated disciplinary proceedings against 6 students involved in the anti-war protest... against Hubert Humphrey... Simultaneously the UT administration... called for the arrest of George Vizard, a non-student. Vizard was arrested by Austin police... The police brutally arrested him in the Chuckwagon, a café and radical hangout in the Student Union... Over 250 outraged students and faculty members... founded the University Freedom Movement [UFM].

University Freedom Movement rally,
UT campus, 1967. Photo from The Rag.

But despite subsequently well-attended free speech rallies and extralegal campus protests by UFM supporters during the rest of April 1967, the six anti-war students who were being disciplined by the UT administration were all placed on probation for their political activity on May 1, 1967. Yet the anti-war countercultural movement in Austin continued to gain more local popular support, and in October 1969, around 10,000 people protested in Austin against the Republican Nixon Administration's failure to end the Pentagon’s War in Vietnam .

African-American student and non-student Movement activists also continued to organize anti-racist protests during the late 1960s in Austin. As the “History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin ” thesis also noted:

In 1966, the Negro Association for Progress [NAP] was formed... During the spring of 1967, NAP... members converged on the office of... athletic director and... football coach Darrell Royal to find out why UT was not accepting or recruiting black athletes... In October [1967]... NAP held an illegal demonstration for black student rights... In the spring of 1968 NAP was replaced by the Afro-Americans for Black Liberation [AABL]...

In May [1968]... the owner of a Conoco station... attacked a black musician... Larry Jackson of Austin SNCC and Grace Cleaver, chair of AABL, called on all persons opposed to racism to picket [and to boycott the station]... Jackson requested that SDS participate in the action and the group agreed. The students held several sit-ins at the gas station. City police arrested about 50 in the demonstrations... That fall AABL won 2 academic programs in Afro-American Studies...

And in a Feb. 1, 2003, speech before the W.H. Passion Historical Society at the Southgate-Lewis House in Austin, former Austin SNCC activist Larry Jackson also recalled how a SNCC chapter came to be formed in Austin during the late 1960s:

I was born in central East Texas, a little town called Hearn... And that’s the place I first began my activities in civil rights... I first got involved in a lot of civil rights activities when I was in high school in Hearne, Texas. And I was trying to integrate the pool... I left Hearne, Texas because I was involved with so much strife there...

And in Houston I became very active in school activities at Texas Southern... And what really got me here in Austin was I had previously worked on the Martin Luther King speech day in Houston... And at the music hall, outside of the TSU people and a few whites to hear Martin Luther King speak, there was not 200 people there. And this happened in 1967... And I ended up coming here on a speaking deal with Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. That’s how I got to Austin , Texas... And so he was speaking out there at the University of Texas. So I stayed on here because I was gonna form a SNCC chapter here in Austin...”

Austin was also a center for the fast-growing women's liberation movement and, according to Jo Freeman in Women: A Feminist Perspective, the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade, "was the project of a small feminist group in Austin, Texas and the lawyer [Sarah Weddington] who argued Roe before the Supreme Court was one of its participants."

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Thorne Dreyer : Tom Hayden on Drug War and Legacy of Port Huron

Tom Hayden speaks on "The Drug War, the Peace Movement, and the Legacy of Port Huron" at the 5604 Manor Community Center in Austin, Saturday, August 25, sponsored by The Rag Blog and Rag Radio. Video produced by Jeff Zavala of ZGraphix.

Tom Hayden in Austin:
The peace movement, the drug war,
and the Legacy of Port Huron

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2012

AUSTIN, Texas -- Progressive activist, New Left pioneer, and former California state senator Tom Hayden spoke on “The Drug War, the Peace Movement, and the Legacy of Port Huron” on Saturday, August 25, 2012, before an enthusiastic packed house at the 5604 Manor Community Center in Austin. He also appeared before a group of Austin activists at a South Austin Mexican restaurant the night before.

Both events were sponsored by the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit that publishes The Rag Blog, and by Rag Radio.

Tom Hayden addresses August 25 crowd at Austin's 5604 Manor Community Center. Inset below: Hayden raps with Austin activists at gathering the previous night. Photos by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.
Hayden was also in Austin as a correspondent for The Nation, covering Mexican poet Javier Sicilia’s Caravan for Peace, which aims at ending the U.S.-sponsored Drug War and which held a rally at the Texas State Capitol at noon that Saturday.

Tom Hayden was a moving force behind the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)and was the primary author of the Port Huron Statement, the defining document of the Sixties New Left which is celebrating its 50th Anniversary this year. Historian James Miller called the Port Huron Statement “one of the pivotal documents in post-war American history” and Hayden said on Rag Radio that, "It’s a little uncanny how the words of the Port Huron Statement echo today...”

Hayden, who spent 16 years in the California state legislature, where the Sacramento Bee called him the “conscience of the Senate," and is the author or editor of 19 books and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, has been putting much of his energy into his outspoken criticism of America’s “long war" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, because of the way it “robs our domestic potential.” He now directs the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Culver City, California, and edits the Peace Exchange Bulletin.

Tom, who was a prime mover behind much of the social activism of the Sixties –- from civil rights to community organizing to opposition to the Vietnam War -- said that he has been involved in “one kind of social movement or another,” for 50 years. He told the Austin gathering that “change comes from the margins, is almost never noticed by the mainstream media until it’s upon us like a wave, and is never mentioned or noticed by politicians until it comes to their district.”

“It comes like a miracle -- un milagro as they describe this caravan against the drug war –- without notice, as if by God’s grace, and disappears before we know it, without our control.” But most of our social gains “come from this ‘mysterious force’” which “baffles journalists and even organizers.”

After his visit to Austin, Hayden wrote at The Nation about Sicilia's Caravan for Peace: "This is a far different peace movement than the ones American officials and media are used to seeing. For the first time in memory, a caravan of Mexicans have crossed the border north to demand that the U.S. government take responsibility for its major part in the mayhem" caused by the drug war.

Members of Javier Sicilia's Caravan for Peace -- who have lost loved ones to the War on Drugs -- demonstrate at the Texas Capitol, Saturday, August 25, 2012. Photo by Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog.
"The core of the movement," he wrote, after interviewing Sicilia in Austin, "is composed of Mexican victims of violence who are calling for the end of the militarized approach to drugs policy," adding that Mexicans and others in Latin America "have had enough of tougher law-and-order (mano dura) crackdowns, police buildups, impunity for the powerful, corrupt judiciaries, dictatorships and torture chambers..."

Sicilia, who was moved to action after his son was killed in drug war-related crossfire, told Hayden in Austin: "The only ones who benefit [from the Drug War] are the criminals, the corrupt bureaucracy, the bankers who launder money protected by the state, and those who invest in prisons, the army, the police, industries of violence and horror."

Sicilia told Hayden that the Drug War "has taken more lives, caused more misery, more destruction of democracy, far more than the consumption of drugs has done. It is the opening of the doors to hell."

Tom Hayden's August 25 talk at 5604 Manor will be broadcast on Allan Campbell's People United on KOOP 91-7-FM in Austin, Friday, September 14, 1-2 p.m. The show will be streamed live here.

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering Sixties underground journalist and a veteran of SDS and the New Left, edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. He can be contacted at editor@theragblog.com. Read more articles by and about Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog.]

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William Rogers : Austin Workers Rally to Recall Scott Walker

At the Recall Walker rally in Austin: Travis Donoho, left, organizer for Education Austin (American Federation of Teachers) and Steve Rossignol, Texas State Association of Electrical Workers. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.
As Scott Walker speaks in Austin:
Unions rally to support recall
efforts of Wisconsin workers

By William Rogers / The Rag Blog / January 16, 2012

See more photos, Below.

AUSTIN -- They carried “Recall Walker” signs, but they weren’t in Wisconsin. They were standing across the street from the Hilton Hotel in downtown Austin, Texas, where Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had come to address a gathering of conservative Texas lawmakers hosted by the Texas Public Policy Foundation on Thursday, January 12.

They were numerous -- as many as 150 -- and they were loud. They chanted “Recall Walker” and “Do you like the unions? YES! Do you like Scott Walker? NO!”

“We’re here today,” said Becky Moeller, Texas AFL-CIO president. “To support our brothers and sisters in Wisconsin in their effort to recall Gov. Walker.”

Moeller went on to say that what happened last year in Wisconsin when Gov. Walker led the charge to roll back collective bargaining rights for public sector workers is happening all across the US. Right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers and the organizations that they support like the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are working in unison with politicians like Gov. Walker to take back gains won by unions that have made possible a decent middle-class life for millions of workers in both the public and private sector.

It happened in Ohio where last year lawmakers passed at the governor’s request a law restricting collective bargaining for public workers. (The law was subsequently overturned in November by a popular vote in a referendum.) It’s happening now in Indiana where the governor and lawmakers are trying to make Indiana a right-to-work-for-less state.

They’re inside planning how to make it happen in Texas next year when the Legislature meets. That’s why, today, We are Wisconsin, Moeller said.

The reality is that for the last 30 years, the rich have been waging class war on working people, said Snehal Shengavi, a member of the Texas State Employees Union CWA Local 6186 and the labor magnet for Occupy Austin. They have eroded our standard of living, frozen and cut our wages, taken away our jobs, cut our health care benefits, and made our retirement less secure.

“The rich have gotten richer while the rest of us suffer,” Shengavi said. “It’s time to put them on notice that we know what class warfare is, and we’re going to take it to them. We’re putting class warfare on the agenda, and it’s going to be on our own terms. Occupy everything!”

While demonstrators on the outside expressed their ire, TPPF welcomed Texas lawmakers and Gov. Walker to a luncheon at its annual forum where they discussed TPPF’s legislative agenda for the session that begins next year. Foremost on the agenda is a proposal to eliminate public pensions in Texas.

Last summer a group of Houston millionaires led by hedge fund operator Bill King announced that they were kicking off a campaign to eliminate public pensions for Texas’ teachers, public safety employees, and other local and state government workers.

In October, TPPF announced a plan for implementing King’s proposal. The plan would require legislative action, but if it passed, newly hired public employees would be diverted away from the state’s two public pension funds the Employee Retirement System for state employees and the Teacher Retirement System for teachers and into 401(k) type savings plans.

Local government new hires would also be diverted from their traditional pension plans. People already working in the public sector would have their pensions frozen. With the severe cut in state contributions envisioned in this plan, it would be difficult to maintain benefits for retirees at their current levels.

In the past, TPPF has supported legislation to privatize public services and give tax breaks to corporations. It also supports maintaining Texas’ right-to-work for less laws.

A long list of unions were represented at the demonstration: American Postal Workers Union, National Letter Carriers Union, AFSCME, Teamsters, Texas State Employees Union, Machinist, IBEW, CWA, Stagehands (IATSE), Transport Communications Union, Texas Federation of Teachers, Education Austin, Texas State Teachers Association, Screen Actors Guild, Steelworkers, and IWW all had members there. Members of Occupy Austin were also on hand.

As demonstrators chanted “We are the 99 percent,” a group of construction workers wearing their hardhats walked across the park next to the sidewalk where demonstrators gathered, stopped at the back edge of the demonstration, unfurled their banner that read Iron Workers Local 462, and began chanting.

[William Rogers is a member of the Texas State Employees Union/CWA Local 6186. He blogs at Left Labor Reporter where this article also appears.]

Above, The Rag Blog's Alice Embree, Texas State Employees Union, with Steve Rossignol of the electrical workers. Photos by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.
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Paul Robbins : Switching on the Sunshine

Flipping the switch at solar farm near Austin, Texas. Rag Blog photo.
Let the sunshine in:
On being young and crazy in Austin

They say that victory has 1,000 parents, but defeat is an orphan.

By Paul Robbins / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2012

AUSTIN -- On Friday, Jan. 6, Austin officially commissioned its new 30-megawatt solar plant. It is one of the largest solar installations in the U.S. Austin and the environmental community in particular should be proud of this accomplishment.

Located near the small town of Webberville at the eastern edge of Travis County, the "solar farm" consists of 127,780 photovoltaic panels mounted on tracking axes covering a site of 380 acres. It will provide electricity equal to that used in 5,500 average Austin homes. Ironically the site, owned by Austin Energy, the City's municipal public utility, was originally purchased in 1984 for a coal plant that was never built.

They say that victory has 1,000 parents, but defeat is an orphan. Many people will claim credit for this achievement. Many of them deserve it. However, the people left out of the celebration were the ones who had the original idea: the anti-nuclear activists of the 1970s.

Solar array at massive new solar farm in Webberville, Texas. Rag Blog photo.
We were mostly 20- and 30-somethings with the sun in our eyes, activists who wanted an alternative to a future of dangerous nuclear and coal plants. To the power structure of that generation, we were "crazy." We were sometimes ignored, other times ridiculed, occasionally even blacklisted or persecuted.

Our attempts to keep Austin out of the South Texas Nuclear Project -- ultimately unsuccessful when the City power structure stabbed student voters in the back -- were both epic struggles and advanced courses in political organizing.

And last Friday we won. Of about 200 people there, including all manner of press, I was the only member of the "original cast." It was a sunny winter day and people seemed festive. There were various props, including a yellow ribbon to cut and an official "light switch" to turn on, powering a (compact fluorescent) bulb.

The utility even had a special ride for attendees, who could don hardhats and safety harnesses to get an aerial view of the field from the bucket of a "cherry picker" electric line maintenance truck. We had to sign a release form.

Austin environmentalist and Rag Blog contributor Paul Robbins, shown with Shannon Halley, aide to Austin City Councilmember Kathy Tovo. Rag Blog photo.
I am including a few photos, like the one [above] of me in a hardhat next to Council aide Shannon Halley, who accompanied me in the bucket.

On the bus ride back, I thought about all the people I worked with in that era, the people who had the original vision, the people who went unrecognized. This was their victory too.

[Paul Robbins is an environmental activist and consumer advocate based in Austin, Texas. Read more articles by Paul Robbins on The Rag Blog.]

Links to news stories, with video:

http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/local/austin/380-acre-solar-farm-goes-online
http://www.kvue.com/news/local/Officials-flip-switch-at-Webberville-Solar-Project-136845053.html
http://austin.ynn.com/content/top_stories/282332/new-massive-solar-farm-to-feed-power-to-austin-homes

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MUSIC / Jan Reid : The 'Old Mad Joy' of the Gourds

Image of The Gourds from thegourds.com.
Old Mad Joy:
No Last Waltz for the Gourds

'Most bands grow out of rock and roll when they get to be our age,' Russell told me with a laugh. 'We've done everything kind of backward.'

By Jan Reid / The Rag Blog / January 14, 2011

In the 40-odd years since Austin became more than a backwater of American music, none of its talents have been more rousing and enduring than the band called the Gourds.

The Gourds came out this fall with a highly praised and historically resonant Vanguard release, Old Mad Joy. They have four fine singers and songwriters and an astonishing facility with an array of instruments that include acoustic and bass and electric guitar, mandolin, accordion, violin, piano and organ, and drums. They blend strains and echoes of gospel, rock, blues, country, bluegrass, Cajun, even barbershop harmony -- sometimes all of that blended in one song.

I first encountered them about 10 years ago, and I thought, good lord, it was like seeing and hearing The Band. That first exposure led me to an album called Shinebox, which was recorded in the Netherlands, and that started with a pitch- and humor-perfect country-western take on Snoop Doggy Dogg's hip-hop classic, "Gin and Juice." The band's leader -- to the extent they have one -- is a large good-natured man named Kevin Russell. The cover was an Internet sensation, and reached the notice of Mr. Dogg, as the late Molly Ivins tagged him. An associate on his radio program reached Russell and asked the Gourds to roll on over and rap.

Russell hesitated and said they would have to make some travel arrangements. “The guy said, ‘You’re where?’ Like everybody in the world lives in Los Angeles. I guess if you live out there it seems like they do.” Shinebox also contained eclectic covers of David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust," Townes Van Zandt's "Two Girls," and Billy Joe Shaver's "Omaha." But now the Gourds seldom play any covers, because their own writing is so prolific and so good.

Jimmy Smith, the Gourds’ bass player and another star singer, has curly black hair and sideburns that are going a little gray now. In style and voice Smith reminded me of the late singer and piano player Richard Manuel, of The Band. David Langford, a rancher and nature photographer whose son Keith is the Gourds’ drummer, told me that I had it wrong. “Listen to him again,” he said. “He is Rick Danko” -- the late singer and bass player of The Band, which in the sixties and seventies, especially with the parting Martin Scorcese movie The Last Waltz, far transcended its origins as Bob Dylan’s backup group.

Smith nodded politely as I mentioned the similarities and perceived influences. “We’d never heard of them until people like you started telling us that we sound like them,” he said with a smile, perhaps putting me on. It was a gentle way of saying I was old enough to be his father.

Russell asked me one time, “You want to know why we became an acoustic band?” He laughed and said, “We didn’t want to haul around amps.

“Why the Gourds?” I asked about the name.

“When we came to Austin we were the Picket Line Coyotes,” he replied. “There was some history associated with that, and we just decided it was time to change. Jimmy wanted us to be the Sun-Dried Diegos. I guess he wanted us to play happy hours at Central Market.

He had this little house we called the Steamy Bowl. A shack, really, but he lived there 10 years. Off the road, 200 bucks a month, nobody we could bother much. It was the classic band house. We played, we crashed, we slept on the floor. And he had this little sculpture in the front yard. Broken guitar, various junk. Between its legs was a butternut squash.” Russell shrugged.

“That seemed to be us. The Gourds.”

Russell’s dad worked for an oil company. They lived first in Beaumont, where an uncle used to play Willis Alan Ramsey’s legendary only record and long for the old days at Armadillo World Headquarters, and then his dad’s work moved them to suburban Houston, and then Shreveport.

“I was into Southern rock,” Russell said. “Anything Southern. Lynnyrd Skynnyrd was my favorite.” Then punk bands from Minneapolis and the West Coast caught his ear, and punk was somewhat the tenor of the Picket Line Coyotes. “We sort of got run out of Shreveport,” Russell said. “We were just playing music, and drawing crowds, but fraternity guys were getting drunk and tearing up joints. The owners blamed us. We were blackballed.”

The evolving band moved to Dallas, and then Austin. Smith was from the Dallas suburb Plano. Max Johnston, the third lead singer, had come down from Kentucky and played banjo and acoustic guitar and the violin, which he plays like a violin, not a fiddle. He has a fine song on the new album called TK.

Red-bearded Claude Bernard joined the band blowing on a hooter and bought his first accordion for 35 bucks at a flea market; he’s also the keyboard player. The original drummer was the immigrant Welshman Charlie Llewellin, now Texas Monthly’s new media director and the band’s favorite photographer. Keith Langford, the drummer they settled on, is Russell’s brother-in-law. He’d been playing heavy metal in San Antonio.

Russell had a day job in Austin’s popular independent Book People. He thought an appearance by the band might lighten up employees who wanted to air their grievances at work. The Gourds were initially an in-crowd discovery of people who frequented the bookstore. “Lots of women dancing together,” said Bernard. “Wild dancers. They whipped up the crowd in a way we couldn’t possibly manage.”

They played for crowds of 20 at the Chicago House, then moved up to the Hole in the Wall, across the street from the University of Texas campus and KLRU studios but still far removed from Austin City Limits. “Alt-country” was a rubric of the nineties that began as a fanzine of Uncle Tupelo. The Gourds were uncomfortable about being branded alternative anything and lumped into a yuppie stampede to bib overalls and old swimming holes, but they were Austin’s foremost beneficiary of alt-country.

The Gourds in Austin, Texas, February 12, 2007. Photo by Steve Hopson / Wikimedia Commons.
The North Carolina independent Sugar Hill picked up the Gourds, but they paid their bills from their income on the road. The South by Southwest festival swirled around the Gourds in Austin, but Russell told me that if I’d come to Jovita’s I wouldn’t encounter anybody with plastic cards hanging around their necks. Smoke billowed back then, beers were handed back from a long line at the bar, and now and then a waitress would maneuver through the mass of bodies, holding a tray of enchiladas aloft.

The players were handing back and forth instruments that seemed to never need tuning, though the venue had problems; a clogged air conditioning duct poured a stream of water at their feet. “I think it’s gone beyond towels,” said Russell, blinking and thrown off stride. Smith walked over, spread his arms, and raised his face to the shower. The album they were pushing then was Cow Fish Fowl or Pig.

The title of the record was drawn from Smith's fanciful song about a vendor calling on William S. Burroughs, Henry Ford, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Muhammad Ali. Performing it, Langford was bearing down on his harmonica, Bernard hugging and swaying with his accordion, a chorus of voices singing genial nonsense, bop bop, bah dooh dah, bop bop. “My name is Jorge and I twist and I juke/ I roll into town on a wagon of fruit.”

The Gourds crowd presented a stunning array of young women. A blond whose face would fill up a movie screen looked at her boyfriend, raised her elbow with a grin of delight, and I watched them go swirling and stomping their heels in the ageless bacchanal.

The Gourds have come a long way since then. The banjo and harmonica have mostly receded from the mix, and they're plugged in now -- more often than his mandolin, Russell plays lead electric guitar in a style that echoes Lynnyrd Skynnyrd, the Allman Brothers, and other Southern rock bands that influenced him as a kid. "Most bands grow out of rock and roll when they get to be our age," Russell told me with a laugh. "We've done everything kind of backward."

One of the most impressive things about the Gourds is their longevity. They have persevered for 16 years, getting better all the time, and they’ve done it in a once laid-back city where the cost of living has skyrocketed. Smith’s Steam Bowl shack and the $200 rent is a fading memory. They have mortgages now, and Smith told me, "Between us we have five daughters and seven sons.”

They rehearse now in an un-airconditioned former nursing home in South Austin; the room they utilize, once the kitchen, has no windows, much musicians' equipment, and a homey pleasant clutter -- one wall sports a bumper sticker that reads, "My honors student has a career in the service industry." They get started by 11 a.m. and work no later than 1:30, and then they scatter to pick up their kids after school.

They’ve got devoted followings all over the country now, and they've escaped the European touring routine that sustains but also traps so many Texas bands. They've got no roadies -- for roadies expect a living wage and tend to be temperamental wannabe musicians. The Gourds don't have the star routine down in which all the instruments are in tune, the sound system is thoroughly checked, and they walk out and hit the chords of the first big hit. Their music is too intricate for that, and they dress like what they are -- onetime hippies who are in their forties now.

Gourds image from Facebook
They've been at this together since 1995 because they love and respect what they have going. And now they're no longer scuffling. After years of deserving it, the Gourds have hit the big time.

David Langford, the drummer's father, told me, "Keith grew up listening to our records of The Band, and that's how he plays the drums." Jimmy Smith flaps his elbows like The Band’s Rick Danko when he performs, but he's a better bass player. Danko played bass with a pick, as does Paul McCarthy.

Smith has the thick muscular hands of a blues guitarist, fingers up on the frets, working the thick strings with a callused thumb below, and with Keith Langford's drumming that's one of the reasons their sound is so tight. Smith's voice is an untethered tenor, and he does sound a lot like Danko. The legacy of The Band and the Gourds’ inheritance is now inescapable.

Through the efforts of their manager Joe Priesnitz, who once represented Stevie Ray Vaughn, they signed a Vanguard contract overseen by executive Bill Bentley, an Austin expat who saw Willie Nelson first captivate an Austin crowd of hippies and anti-war militants assembled for the campaign of George McGovern in 1972, and for a while worked as a publicist for the multicultural rocker Doug Sahm.

Bentley engaged as the Gourds’ producer Larry Campbell, a gifted studio musician who has recorded with Willie, Sheryl Crow, Little Feat, K.D. Lang, Cyndi Lauper, and Levon Helm; he was a member of Bob Dylan's road band from 1997 to 2004. Early last spring, when there was still snow and ice on the ground in upstate New York, the Gourds arrived for a dose of Campbell's breathless style in Helm's storied Barn Studio in Woodstock.

"It really is a barn, but a real nice barn," Russell told me. "Levon lives in an upper story of it." Did the legendary drummer and singer of The Band take part in the sessions? "No, he wandered through every so often in his house shoes. He was very friendly, and wanted to take particular care of Keith. 'Do you need anything? Some water, a soda pop?' Seems to be some kind of voodoo with drummers.'"

Of course that's reasonable. In the late summer rehearsal I observed in Austin, Langford was the one who came out of that fire in the kitchen soaked in sweat.

As in past records, the smooth baritone Max Johnston contributes one of the best cuts on Old Mad Joy, the melodic rocker “Haunted.” But Jimmy Smith and Russell again claim most of the lead singing and writing credits. Smith slurs his lines more than Russell, and as a result his singing is not as accessible as his longtime partner's. And that’s a shame; in wordplay and jitterbug of thought that’s as offbeat as Kerouac, his writing is remarkable.

His great song on this record is “Marginalized.” It’s a paean to a painful subject in our culture, fully in view amid Austin’s stream of BMW convertibles and Escalade SUVs. The hero of this song is the one standing out in the heat beside a stoplight with a message of his life’s misfortune scrawled on a cardboard sign, counting his fortune by the bills and coins dropped in a tin can, pushing all he owns in a cart heisted from a grocery store.

But elevated by Russell’s mandolin and the backup harmonies, the sorrowful song manages to soar. “Well, I’m taking it home on my tectonic plate/ crashed in a pyramid and claimed squatters’ rights/ shared a coop with a fellow wouldn’t shut up about a girl named Isis/ had to blend with the tourists when they came in the a.m…”

Earlier this year, Russell released an album called Shinyribs that was an instant favorite in Austin, singing only his songs and bringing just Keith Langford from the Gourds in a studio band that included one of the cosmic cowboy survivors, Ray Wylie Hubbard (the writer of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.”)

Russell said it didn’t mean he was splitting off from the Gourds. “With a band like this you have to make a lot of compromises. Everybody’s got material they’d like to get out there. I’ve got boxes full of songs that I’ve never done anything with. Shinyribs is a break that allows it to be just me, with a terrific other band besides.”

Russell’s rock and roll high point on Old Mad Joy concerns that dreaded gig of road musicians, a dive in nowhere with a vile crowd that brings out the complaint: “My heart is black but in my sack/ I got a sammich and half a pack/ of vitriol and self-abuse/ who can I call to accuse and abuse/ for bringing me to … Peppermint City!” He said there is no such place, but then they’ve played them by the dozens. He laughed when I told him I’d never before heard a rock song with the word “vitriol.”

He also offers “Two Sparrows,” a song about Jesus that he wrote years ago. “His innocence held such clarity, Gethsemane still on his breath/ barefoot and burdened unjustly but love never leaving his breast/ from this began my wandering, my punishment for the crime/ of standing still among an angry mob, all of them friends of mine.”

Vanguard is pushing a rocker called “I Want It So Bad” as the single, but the best of it is Russell’s “Eyes of a Child.” “It’s true I am wicked, it’s true I am mean/ I must have lost my way chasing a dream/ It’s true I’ve done things that I’m ashamed of/ But I still need tenderness and the warmth of love/ I’ve come clean and I’m redeemed/ since I have seen through the eyes of a child.”

All of this may not sound entirely joyous. But turn it up. It’s some of the best music since "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down."

A few refrains in this piece previously appeared in the 30th anniversary edition of Jan Reid’s The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock.

[Jan Reid is an author and music historian and a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly, and his writing has also appeared in Esquire, GQ, Slate, and The New York Times. His books include Texas Tornado: The Life and Times of Doug Sahm, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock (considered the definitive tale of Austin music in the 1970's), the novel Comanche Sundown, and books about Tom DeLay and Karl Rove. His, memoir The Bullet Meant for Me, was the story of his mental, psychological, and emotional recovery from a brutal 1998 robbery and shooting in Mexico City -- and his sustaining friendship with the two-time world champion boxer Jesus Chavez. Reid is now writing a biography of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards.]

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's October 12, 2010, Rag Radio interview with Jan Reid.

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Susan Van Haitsma : 'Viva la Vida' in Austin

CodePink at Viva la Vida. Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.
Viva la Vida...
and remember the dead

By Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog / October 28, 2011

See gallery of photos by Susan Van Haitsma, Below.

AUSTIN -- One of Austin’s most colorful events of the year is the Dia de los Muertos festival organized by the good folks at Austin’s Mexic-Arte Museum. For 28 years, the museum has hosted events to mark this indigenous occasion.

The Viva la Vida festival was held on Saturday, October 22, and included a beautiful and very lively procession from Saltillo Plaza in East Austin to the downtown museum at 5th and Congress. All ages were invited to paint and costume ourselves in skeleton regalia or in whatever ways we wished to commemorate our departed friends and ancestors while celebrating life in the moment.

Music, dance, art, food -- the gifts of life -- were shared between the living and the dead, lifting the thin veil, helping us to remember.

For the past few years, several of us CodePink Austin folks have participated in the procession and have created altars for the museum’s community altars exhibit. This year, because October marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the U.S. assault and occupation of Afghanistan, we dedicated our altar to the women and children in Afghanistan who have died as a consequence of the war.

For the procession, we also costumed ourselves with a peace/anti-war theme. As the procession made its way down Sixth Street toward the museum, crowds lined the route. Jim and Heidi Turpin, walking together as a dead U.S. soldier and dead Afghan woman, were an especially poignant sight, drawing much applause, a few frowns, and many photographs.

Mexic-Arte’s community altars exhibit, along with a concurrent show about the history of Dia de los Muertos, runs through November 13 at 419 Congress Avenue, Austin, Texas.

[Susan Van Haitsma is active in Austin with Sustainable Options for Youth and CodePink. She also blogs at makingpeace. Find more articles by Susan Van Haitsma on The Rag Blog.]














Viva la vida in Austin, Saturday, Oct. 22, 2011. Photos by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.
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Ken Martin : 'The Austin Bulldog': Growling at the Powers That Be

Logo from The Austin Bulldog. Graphic by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
Journalism making a difference:
The Austin Bulldog's investigative
reporting shakes up City Hall

By Ken Martin / The Rag Blog / May 12, 2011

AUSTIN -- Even if you’ve never heard of The Austin Bulldog, if you live in Central Texas you have no doubt read about or seen television reports based on the work done by this small local 501(c)(3) nonprofit for investigative reporting.

The Austin Bulldog broke a major story on January 25, 2011, about the organized system of private meetings among the Austin mayor and council members that for years have taken place right before every council meeting. County Attorney David Escamilla announced the same day he would launch an inquiry into whether this longstanding practice of deliberating in private constituted a violation of the Texas Open Meetings Act.

That story started a media feeding frenzy. The Austin American-Statesman and most local television stations quickly jumped in to follow the story and spread it to a wider audience.

The mayor and council members immediately quit participating in these private deliberative sessions and for the first time in many years began holding public work sessions in properly posted open meetings.

That’s reporting that gets results.

The Austin Bulldog followed up by publishing the edited transcripts and unedited audio recordings of exclusive interviews with council members that were conducted before breaking the story. These interviews gave each council member the opportunity to explain when these private meetings started and why they never questioned whether they were appropriate or legal.

Most people in our area have heard of the embarrassing e-mails sent by the mayor and some council members, in which these elected officials insulted citizens and members of their own city staff. These documents came to light only because of The Austin Bulldog’s open records requests, triggering profuse apologies from the offending officeholders. A heaping helping of humble pie has been served up and choked down.

But it took more than an open records request to get all these e-mails. The City of Austin flatly refused, in writing, to provide any e-mails about city business that were sent or received on the council members’ private e-mail accounts.

The Austin Bulldog did not take no for an answer and filed a lawsuit against the mayor, council members, and City of Austin, and filed a related civil complaint with the county attorney. The end result was that those e-mails were made public -- not willingly, not voluntarily as some of the press releases issued by the mayor and council members claimed, but because of the lawsuit.

More than that, the City Council on April 7 adopted a resolution saying that e-mails about city business, created or received on their private e-mail accounts, will be promptly forwarded to city servers and be made available upon request under the Texas Public Information Act.

The resolution characterizes this reform as being voluntary. That’s just another effort to paper over the fact that this action never would have been taken had The Austin Bulldog not filed its lawsuit.

The Austin Bulldog’s lawsuit and reporting also exposed the fact that the mayor and council members’ records management systems are in shambles -- in large part because their staff members have not taken the training courses that are readily available.

For example, the city permits each official or employee to delete e-mails -- without review by anyone to ensure that the deletion does not violate records retention laws. That’s important, because these elected officials are custodians of the records created by their offices and if these records are not properly maintained they will never be available to citizens or media who are entitled to see them in accordance with the Texas Public Information Act.

The city’s response to The Austin Bulldog’s lawsuit was to immediately hold two training sessions that were well attended by these staff members.

To date the City of Austin is now committed to pay three outside attorneys a total of $399,000 to address the city’s problems in complying with the Texas Open Meetings Act, Texas Public Information Act, and Local Government Records Act. The total includes $110,000 solely for The Austin Bulldog’s lawsuit, which seeks nothing more than to force the city to comply with the law.

Attorney Bill Aleshire of Riggs Aleshire and Ray PC represents The Austin Bulldog in this lawsuit, as well as the civil complaint filed with the county attorney, and does so without compensation. Our objective is not to prolong the lawsuit but to make the City of Austin a shining example of open government.

Growling at the powers that be: Austin City Council, 2011.

Big results on a small budget

I launched the Bulldog on April Fool’s Day 2010. I announced at the time that we don’t take ourselves too seriously, but we take our journalism very seriously. And we certainly do.

I’m in my 30th year as a journalist in Austin’s three-county metro area, and I have won a couple of national awards for investigative reporting for projects that resulted in felony convictions. But for the ongoing job of investigative reporting in the public interest, launching The Austin Bulldog is the best work I’ve ever done.

I think we’ve proven beyond a doubt that a small nonprofit for investigative reporting can make a big difference in exposing corruption, incompetence, and systems of decision-making that violate every principal of open and honest government.

The Austin Bulldog last year exposed a corrupt city council member and city attorney in Georgetown. The Austin Bulldog exposed a corrupt government in Williamson County. And The Austin Bulldog has exposed actions that may be violations of the Texas Open Meetings Act and Texas Public Information Act by the Austin City Council.

Some of this news has been hard for the community to accept. We like to think of Austin as a liberal oasis -- and it is. We like to think of our city government as a model of democracy -- but sadly it is not.

The mayor and some council members have said publicly that they are cooperating with the county attorney’s investigation. They have claimed they were voluntarily providing public records. These statements are not entirely true.

Despite the fact that we have four Attorney General opinions that say e-mails about city business sent or received on personal e-mail accounts are public records, the city flatly refused to provide them in response to my open records request, and did not do so until after they were sued by The Austin Bulldog.

The Austin Bulldog has led the pack on these stories since breaking the open meetings story on January 25. The Austin Bulldog has been widely recognized by other media for this work -- by the Austin American-Statesman, YNN-TV, KUT-FM radio, and others.

I launched The Austin Bulldog with a $25,000 grant from the Knight Foundation and have kept it going with contributions from community supporters.

On April 1, 2011 The Austin Bulldog was awarded a $25,000 challenge grant jointly funded by the Kirk Mitchell Public Interest Investigative Reporting Fund and the Kirk Mitchell Environmental Law Fund.

Your tax-deductible contribution to support and sustain the important investigative reporting being done by The Austin Bulldog will be matched dollar for dollar by this challenge grant. I hope you will help us reach this important goal by adding your name to the growing list of community supporters by contributing now.

[Ken Martin is the founder, editor, and publisher of The Austin Bulldog. You may e-mail him at ken@theaustinbulldog.org.]

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Joe Nick Patoski : Austin's Historic SoCo Is Just Plain Different

The historically 'untramodern' Austin Motel on South Congress. Image from Hoketronics.
'It's Just Different Here':
The bustling life of Austin's SoCo

By Joe Nick Patoski / The Rag Blog / March 16, 2011

Noted Texas journalist, author, and rock historian Joe Nick Patoski will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 18, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CST), on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin. To stream Rag Radio live on the internet, go here. To listen to this interview after it is broadcast -- and to other shows on the Rag Radio archives -- go here.

AUSTIN -- To experience Austin, Texas, you could take a walk up Congress Avenue, starting at the Ann W. Richards Bridge that spans Lady Bird Lake, the dammed-up part of the Colorado River that runs through the heart of this city.

Heading north, you'd pass the city's leading banks, tallest condos, finest law firms, and most influential lobbying firms, as well as an art museum, a jazz club, and fine-dining restaurants. In about 15 minutes, you'd reach the Renaissance Revival Texas State Capitol, the best-known landmark in the Lone Star State, with a dome that stands 15 feet higher than the one in Washington, D.C.

But to immerse yourself in this city's quirky personality, turn around and go the other way. Head south from the bridge, past the bat statue, and up the hill along South Congress Avenue to the intersection with Academy Drive.

The landmark to look for is the Austin Motel, a spiffed-up classic of the American West. A message at the bottom of the red neon sign out front reads, "So close yet so far out," and the other side says, "No additives, no preservatives, corporate free since 1938."

That pretty much sums up the funk and cool that is South Congress and announces that you're not in normal Austin anymore: This is the Other Austin, the Austin whose peculiarities separate it from everywhere else in Texas.

Creative enterprises here have attracted the kind of bustling street life that makes urban planners drool. Only no one planned, envisioned, or designed this. A series of serendipitous accidents involving some uniquely Austin characters is responsible. In other words, no planning has been the most effective planning of all.

Locals refer to the idiosyncratic retail and entertainment district either as South Congress or SoCo. (Abe Zimmerman dubbed a cluster of restored shops here the SoCo Center in 1999, trying to make use of an old sign that was missing a few letters.) But no matter what it's called or how you pronounce it, you've got to admit South Congress is a testament to the power of creative restoration and reinvention.

Take the Hotel San José, one block up from the Austin Motel. A lavishly tiled "ultramodern motor court" when it opened in 1936, the Spanish Colonial Revival structure gradually fell into disrepair, functioning as a brothel for legislators for a period, then a Bible school, then a flophouse.

In 1995, Liz Lambert, an attorney with West Texas roots who'd worked for the New York district attorney before she became homesick, bought the hotel for $500,000. She thought she would redo the 24 rooms one by one -- until Lake/Flato Architects convinced her otherwise. The motor court was instead reimagined as an understated, almost minimalist space -- ultramodern once again -- with a zen-like courtyard, a pool area, and the inviting open-air Jo's Hot Coffee café across the parking lot.

The hotel and coffee shop were immediate hits and have become the major alt community gathering spot on the avenue, so compelling that singer Raul Malo wrote and recorded an ode to the hotel.

The Continental Club, a legendary blues venue on South Congress. Image from bologna+squash.
The Continental Club, across the street from the San José, is one of the longest-thriving and most popular music clubs in an admittedly music-obsessed town.

The modernist Continental opened as a private cocktail lounge in 1957 and later featured touring burlesque dancers Candy Barr and Bubbles Cash. In the 1970s, it was revived as a rock and blues club. Then Steve Wertheimer quit his job as a comptroller for a real estate firm to restore the club's Eisenhower-era splendor, and he reopened the venue as a roots rock and alt country showcase.

"I'm a preservationist by nature," Wertheimer says, about his restoration efforts. "I'm stuck in that period of the '50s, from the clothing and the music to the cars and the architecture. Those glass blocks at the entrance had been covered up. They needed to be brought back."

One block south and across the avenue from the Continental, in a century-old building that formerly housed Central Feed and Seed, is Güero's Taco Bar, which owners Rob and Cathy Lippincott opened in 1995 after moving their restaurant from its original location a couple of miles away. Six months after opening, President Bill Clinton stopped in for dinner ("He cleaned his plate"), business shot up 40 percent, and it's been busy ever since.

South Congress is just as distinctive for what isn't there: national clone restaurants, large chain retailers, and retail clusters amid a sea of asphalt. No master plan was sketched out to make it happen. No tax breaks were requested for improvements (in marked contrast to The Domain, a planned mall and residential development on Austin's northwestern fringe that is the beneficiary of tens of millions of dollars in tax abatements from the city). South Congress merchants just want to be left alone.

Austin was always different from the rest of Texas. It was established in 1839, not because of the area's strategic location but rather for its aesthetic beauty. The second president of the Republic of Texas, Mirabeau Lamar, killed a buffalo near the present capitol building and noted that the area's hills, waterways, and pleasing surroundings would make a fine place to locate Texas' government.

South Congress Avenue was South Austin's main street from the very beginning and, with the advent of the automobile, the main highway south to San Antonio. Increased traffic inspired the construction of one- and two-story storefronts in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by motels and cafés. But after the Interregional Highway, now Interstate 35, opened in the early 1960s, the road-oriented businesses declined and much of South Congress emptied out.

That was the state of the avenue in 1988, when Kent Cole and Diana Prechter fixed a beat-up wood-frame building that had operated as Flossie's bar and the Austex Lounge, and reopened it as Magnolia Cafe South, a second location for their homegrown eatery famous for gingerbread pancakes and comfort food.

Why South Congress? Mainly because the rent was cheap, they say. "The only pedestrians on the sidewalks were hookers and drug dealers," Cole remembers. "Normal people did not walk South Congress."

It was so dicey the first year and a half that Prechter kept her day job while Cole started looking for other employment. A last-ditch decision to expand operations to 24 hours changed everything. The café tapped into the city's sizable late-night crowd, and the staff stepped up their game so that Cole and Prechter could make enough money to begin buying nearby properties, some of them historic.

"In Austin, parking is everything," he says -- a constant danger to the historic fabric of older neighborhoods. "So we would buy adjacent businesses and rent them to tenants who were sympathetic with Magnolia Cafe South, allowing our customers to use the spaces in front of their storefronts."

Memories of drug dealers and prostitutes began to fade in the 1990s. Austin, a relatively small city for most of its history, suddenly enjoyed a tremendous economic boom that attracted new residents and drove an increased demand for older housing stock in the Travis Heights and Bouldin Creek neighborhoods. That in turn spurred massive renovation along South Congress and throughout old South Austin.

SoCo street scene. Image from The Texas Twang.
A $4 million bond issue passed by the city council in 1998 for sidewalk, bicycle, and pedestrian enhancements improved the avenue's curb appeal. But when city planners followed with a long-term plan for South Congress that included light rail on the avenue, the merchants allied with the neighborhoods to stop the project.

Six months to a year of construction would be fatal to the many small businesses whose profits were marginal, merchants argued. "That's an awful long time to take a high-traffic street and close it," says Gail ­Armstrong, owner of Off the Wall antiques. "No one here could survive that. And if we did survive, most of us couldn't afford the spike in real estate prices that comes with rail."

"It's a complicated area," admits George Adams, assistant director in the planning and development review department for the City of Austin.

Its development has been more organic, or market-driven, which complicates any attempt to do things. You start out with certain attitudes:"What's wrong with these people? Don't they know we're trying to help them?" Over time, we've come to understand the benefit of doing things incrementally, how to make changes and accommodate the needs of the small businesses and of the residents. South Congress has taught us a lot.

Preservationists agree. Dealey Herndon, who is overseeing restoration of the Governor's Mansion, sees the avenue as part of Austin's historic fabric:

The vibrant evolution of South Congress is a great example of bringing older neighborhood business areas to life by celebrating the eclectic character of the architecture, the simpler life of a city in an earlier era, and the creativity of new one-of-a-kind businesses. Every business is unique, every building has a personality, and all of this comes together to create a part of Austin that is universally appealing.

Today the avenue remains extraordinarily popular and largely "corporate free." When a Starbucks opened on South Congress as part of a new apartment complex built closer to downtown, merchants held their collective breath. Two years ago they exhaled when the franchise shut down.

Zoning restrictions that limit commercial businesses to no more than a half-block off South Congress, the small footprints of existing buildings, the high bar the city sets for teardowns, and the lack of parking are some of the reasons why the chains and big-box stores haven't gained much of a foothold. A bigger factor is the transition of pioneers like the Lippincotts, Cole and Prechter, and Wertheimer from renters to owner-operators and landlords.

Wertheimer misses the days when his hot-rod buddies had the avenue all to themselves, when there was a liquor store on his block, and Just Guns occupied the space where American Apparel, one of very few national chain stores on the avenue, stands now. "We don't own it like we used to," he laments.

But as an investor in the San José, Perla's Seafood and Oyster Bar, and Home Slice Pizza, and as a property owner who has increased his holdings over the years, he realizes he can influence future growth in his own small way, as he did three years ago when he bought and restored the Avenue Barber Shop, one of the oldest businesses on South Congress. "It's one of those things I didn't want to go away," he says. "That's where I get my hair cut. It still smells like it's 1933 in there."

Whatever happens, Wertheimer and his neighbors hope some degree of funk and cool continues oozing through. If places like the barber shop and people like Wertheimer go away, it won't be South Congress anymore. And without South Congress, Austin wouldn't be quite as different from everywhere else.

[Joe Nick Patoski has been writing about Texas and Texans for 35 years. He is the author of three biographies of Texas musicians (Willie Nelson, Selena, and Stevie Ray Vaughan) and books about the state's mountains, coast, and Big Bend National Park. This article first appeared in the July/August 2010 issue of Preservation: The Magazine of the National Trust for Preservation.]

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