This Week in Texas Music History Clifford Antone opens Antone’s Home of the Blues
***This Week in Texas Music History is brought to you by Brane Audio***
By Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University.
On July 15, 1975, fifty years ago, Clifford Antone opened Antone’s Home of the Blues on Austin’s Sixth Street. Clifton Chenier was the first to take the stage, and it wasn’t a coincidence that the zydeco pioneer kicked things off. Clifford Antone himself hailed from Port Arthur, and the Golden Triangle’s gumbo of blues, country, and swamp pop set him on his musical journey. Blues gripped him most completely, though, and it’s a testament to the club that, while Antone and his friends set out to preserve the reputation of older artists, they also opened a new chapter in the history of American blues. In the first weeks, Sunnyland Slim and Big Walter Horton played, starting a buzz among the old Chicago guard that there was a young Texan who appreciated their work and paid fairly.
Touring blues veterans made Antone’s a second home while also mentoring young Austin locals in the house bands around Paul Ray and the Cobras and the Fabulous Thunderbirds: Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan, Denny Freeman and Derek O’Brien, Lou Ann Barton and Angela Strehli, and many more. The club moved around in these early years: from Sixth Street to North Austin, then to the UT area in its classic incarnation on Guadalupe, with a record store across the street.
Antone’s was a nexus of the 1980s blues revival, from the Vaughan brothers’ guitar heroics to classic stands from Maceo Parker and Albert Collins. Antone’s returned downtown in the 90s to a location that highlighted even newer generations: Gary Clark, Jr., Eve Monsees, the Peterson Brothers, Bob Schneider. While the city unexpectedly lost Clifford Antone in 2006, the venue had long ago proven his vision for a Texas blues community not reliant on any one person. Antone’s moved around some more, from downtown to south of the river and its current home, back downtown again. From one incarnation to the next, few clubs have as much of a claim on being the soul of Austin music as the venerable Antone’s Home of the Blues.
Sources:
Gary Hartman and Ryan A. Kashanipour in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
Joe Nick Patoski and Bill Crawford. Stevie Ray Vaughan: Caught in the Crossfire. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993.
