by Avery Armstrong with the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University
This Week in Texas Music History, we look back at a singer-songwriter haven honoring labor history heroes.
On November 13, 1981, Lubbock icons the Flatlanders played the very last night of the notoriously tawdry Alamo Lounge in a downtown Austin hotel. The very next night, the same trio of Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock played the very first night of a new, intimate singer-songwriter room, the venue emmajoe’s just north of the UT campus. The double-booking made sense, as the proprietors of the Alamo and emmajoe’s were one and the same, partners Bobby Jane Nelson and Martin Wigginton.
While emmajoe’s was a spiritual continuation of the Alamo Lounge in many ways, this new folk venue explicitly showcased Nelson’s political commitments and deep experience in the local social movements of the 60s and 70s. With the Austin Law Commune, Nelson spearheaded critical lawsuits around gender discrimination and civil rights. They named emmajoe’s in honor of early 20th-century anarchist Emma Goldman and labor activist Joe Hill, and emmajoe’s celebrated only two holidays a year: Labor Day and International Women’s Day.
emmajoe’s was intimate and homey with a capacity of just 100 people, and the physical space was a collaborative effort of the scene it nurtured. Butch Hancock reportedly built the bar by hand using doors from the old Alamo Hotel, and resident songwriters such as Lucinda Williams, Townes Van Zandt, Blaze Foley, and Nanci Griffith helped to dictate the venue’s stage placement and sound design, to say nothing of its character.
Though the physical club only lasted two years, it sustained a singer-songwriter legacy in Austin that echoes in another listening room of similar vintage just down the street, the storied Cactus Café on the UT Austin campus.
Nanci Griffith, “Tonight I Think I’m Gonna Go Downtown”
Sources:
Michael Corcoran. Austin Music Is a Scene Not a Sound. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2024.
James Rambin. “In Loving Memory: Downtown Austin’s ‘Rather Tawdry’ Alamo Hotel.” Towers. October 6, 2018. https://austin.towers.net/in-loving-memory-downtown-austins-rather-tawdry-alamo-hotel/
