Former location of the Houston's Old Quarter live venue

The Old Quarter was a tiny bar at the corner of Congress Street and Austin Street in downtown Houston, opened in 1965 by Rex "Wrecks" Bell and Cecil Slayton. The room measured just 18 by 38 feet, but what happened inside it was enormous. Lightnin' Hopkins, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, and Townes Van Zandt all played its cramped stage, and it became the spiritual home of the Texas singer-songwriter movement — a place where original music was taken seriously long before Nashville or Austin caught on.

In July 1973, Townes Van Zandt played five sweltering nights at the Old Quarter and had the shows recorded on a portable four-track by producer Earl Willis. The resulting double album — Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas — is widely considered one of the greatest live recordings in American music: raw, intimate, and heartbreaking. Van Zandt sounds like a man performing in someone's living room, which is not far from the truth.

The Old Quarter closed in 1979. Rex Bell eventually relocated the spirit of the venue to Galveston, where he opened the Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe, which still operates today. The Houston corner where it all happened is gone — absorbed into the changing urban fabric of downtown — leaving only the album as proof of what once took place there.