Threadgill's — Austin, Texas

Threadgill's at 6416 North Lamar Boulevard in Austin began as a Gulf service station in the 1930s, when Kenneth Threadgill obtained one of Travis County's first beer licences after Prohibition and turned it into an informal music venue. By the 1960s it had become the spiritual home of Austin's folk and country scene — the place where a young Janis Joplin performed on Wednesday nights for beer money, where Jerry Jeff Walker held court, and where the seeds of what would become the Austin outlaw country movement were planted long before Willie Nelson's Armadillo World Headquarters opened in 1971.

Threadgill's was more than a venue — it was an atmosphere and an argument. Kenneth Threadgill, a devoted Jimmie Rodgers fan who yodelled with unselfconscious joy, embodied a Texas musical tradition that predated the Nashville machinery and had no particular interest in it. The music that happened in his building was rooted in that tradition: honest, unpretentious, and communal. When Jerry Jeff Walker arrived in Austin from New York in the late 1960s, Threadgill's was one of the first places he found his people.

Threadgill's closed permanently in July 2020, a casualty of the pandemic and broader economic pressures on live music venues. The building on North Lamar still stands. For a generation of Austin musicians and music fans, it represented everything that made Austin's scene different from what was happening in Nashville or Los Angeles — a commitment to the song over the spectacle, and to the community over the career.