Welcome to the DFH Freaky Friday weekly music series
Because Team DFH operates more or less like a herd of cats, we’re here at roughly 9PM Eastern, every week. So take off your shoes, plop down on that beanbag chair over there, let your hair down, maybe light up a fattie, and get some groovy on.
"Piecemobile": Kim Ritter, Houston artist & quilter, 2008
Tomorrow is the 25th Annual Art Car Parade and it'll even be livestreamed Saturday May 12 from 1PM - 3PM Central time! If you go to that link ahead of time, or probably even after-time, you can see some photo's and previous year's videos too. Man, I can't believe it's been 25 years already but hey, the good news is... it's still free!! And ... it's still folk, it's always freaky and it's definitely fun!
In 1987, the Houston International Festival, the City's official celebration of the arts, asked the Orange Show to organize a parade to build on the success of the New Music Parade. The Orange Show agreed to produce an event dedicated to art cars. Roadside Attractions: The Art Car Parade was born in April, 1988 with a 40 car parade seen by an estimated 2,000. By the following year, the parade size doubled and the crowd swelled to tens of thousands.
From its inception, the Art Car Parade has always been a 'people's' art event in tone and approach. Of course there's plenty of "fine" arts artists involved, but the sponsoring non-profit foundation,
The Orange Show, is all about folk art. The event has grown incredibly and has acquired let's just call it more legitimacy, but it fundamentally remains
the people's art. The variety of participants ranges from, well, wow, you name it... cars, vans, trucks, motorcycles, bikes, whirlygigs and of course
skaters (we were there at the beginning)!
And, what fun is a people's parade without the people's music?! Well, this is Texas, so you know we gonna partah and we gotta have us some blues... Lemme show y'all how we do it down here.
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Ooh whee, and I bet y'all thought I was a total Joni Mitchell/Jackson Browne kinda girl, huh. Heh. Yeah well, when I moved here from Florida some {cough} decades ago ... there was a little culture shock, sure, but it was the 80's, I was young, and I adjusted. Evolved if you will. (example: "Y'all" is the plural form of "you".). I gradually acquired more affection for the eclectic mix, in terms of both art and music, that I discovered here. Well, people too.
Now... I have always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with both country music and also more electric rock stuff (loud!). But I like all kinds of music, not all of it all that easy to categorize. As much as I pride myself on being a bit weird, turns out I'm not all that unique, at least when it comes to some things. This excellent academic (Sociology) article by Alan Turley I came across gives some great history and insight into the evolution of the now-famous Austin Music Scene, the "Live Music Capital of the World".
The ethnic communities of Austin in 1960 had been kept separated from each other by the racial laws and prejudices that have plagued many Southern cities in the United States. ... So, although a reasonably open Southern city, Austin still possessed many of the prejudicial attitudes of the South.
Culturally, the white, black, and Hispanic communities produced and consumed music/culture separately due to this segregationist attitude by the city's elites, i.e. whites listened to country music at honky tonks and classical music at recital halls, blacks listened to R&B music in nightclubs and traditional blues in juke joints, and Hispanics listened to Tejano music at dancehalls and neighborhood parties. Whites segregated themselves in the Central and Western part of the city in the affluent neighborhoods (later to spread North along a suburban highway). ...{snip}...
The community that bridged the ethnic communities, and their requisite communities of musicians, was the student community at the University of Texas. Mainly white, middle class, young people make up the student body, which doesn't readily evoke images of breaking color-barriers, but some of these students were experimenting with counter-cultures in the late 1950's and 1960's. These students, musicians, and music lovers would form the cultural bridge across the ethnic community of musicians. ...{snip}.... The students were learning these musical forms from people that had been listening and performing bluegrass and country songs for decades. Students were also teachers, as some of the members of the Folksinging Club had musical training and musical literacy.
From there, Austin's live club scene went through a few stages. I'll try to skip over the "Cosmic Cowboy" phenomena, leaving that to your imagination. ;-)
The first "Austin Sound" that benefited from all of this color-barrier crossing by the university's musicians was a new kind of country music in the late 1960's to 1970's called progressive country, or "Cosmic Cowboy" music; it was country music blended with elements of rock, folk, and blues into a new country format. Why wasn't rock music the first to benefit from all of the color-barrier crossing? The rock music community had suffered some set backs, after the loss of key musicians [Janis Joplin for one ~LL] to the more established and dominant rock music scene of San Francisco, during this time period
There was an organic, unintended 'perfect storm' that came together through the 70's & 80's in Austin due to the live music club scene and the absence of a more hyped up business-driven recording label or studio 'scene'. This environment, according to Turley, coupled with the university student and faculty influences, loaned itself to a culture of cooperation, improvisation and hybridy-fusion that morphed into a 'sound' of its own.
Texas blues musicians were crafting a sound of blues music in the 1970's that would replace progressive country as the "Austin Sound." Both musical styles had musicians that came from other cities to Austin for the music scene, drawn to it because of the key or dominant function Austin performed in Texas' region for live, popular music performance. To illustrate this function, Dallas is a much larger urban area with a thriving advertising jingle market and San Antonio is a large urban area just 75 miles South of Austin with an extensive Tejano scene, but both of these cities have lost musicians and bands in the rock and popular music genres to Austin, where live music performance is valued and accessible. ...{snip} ... Jimmie Vaughan's band The Fabulous Thunderbirds gained some radio and video success from their hit "Tuff Enuff," which has been on many movie soundtracks since its release.
But it was the burning guitar sound of brother Stevie Ray Vaughan that put the Austin blues sound on the map, and drew attention to the city's music scene in the mid-1970's. After selling records and making a name for himself playing guitar on David Bowie's most successful album Let's Dance, Stevie Ray Vaughan released a total of five albums before his death on August 27, 1990. The shock of his death was felt throughout the city and the music scene, culminating in a spontaneous gathering of grieving fans in a downtown Austin park on the night of his death. Austin music, and Stevie Ray Vaughan as the persona of that music, had become part of the lives of these fans to the point of feeling grief for the loss of this musician. Since that time other musicians have died, but none has had the effect on Austin's residents as the death of Stevie Ray Vaughan. This is clear evidence that the music scene has had an impact on the city and its residents; one of the few statues in Austin stands to remember Stevie Ray Vaughan and his music.
Tonight's Freaky Friday collection is
not strictly Austin or even Texas artists, but rather just an assembly of music video's that just kind of ring that bell for me..... so let's get some 'Texas blues sound' goin' on to get in a mood for some Art Car gawkin'.
Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters: Double Trouble
...
Charlie Musslewhite: Movin' and Groovin'
...
Stray Cats: Race With the Devil
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Joe Ely: The Road Goes On Forever
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Marcia Ball: Hot Tamale Baby
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Last and most certainly not least...
Stevie Ray Vaughan: Voodoo Child
....
Further reading & some cool links
Art Car 2012: Art Car, it's not just a parade anymore: Your guide to a 10-day orgy of rocking, wacky wheels, this is a big deal around here, folks!
Art Car: The Movie follows Art Educator Rebecca Bass and her high school class as they prepare an entry for the 2010 Houston Art Car Parade.
The wild beginnings of the Art Car Parade: A roller skating photographer documents it all oh now we're talkin' my -era- language!
VIDEO (3:23 duration): description:: "More than making an art car, students at Jefferson Davis High School in Houston, Texas, learn how to work together, problem solve and what it means to be dedicated. Themed after the legendary band Earth, Wind & Fire, the art car resorts to robotics for its many moving parts that nod to the musical group. In this Art & About adventure, Joel Luks speaks with the students, art car maven Rebecca Bass and robotics teacher Paloma Garner as the kids prepare for the 25th Annual Art Car Parade, set for May 12."
The Orange Show, Roadside America a good summary about the Orange Show, a unique folk-space which was created by a dedicated man in the 50's based on his personal philosophy that oranges were "the perfect food."
"Music and the City : Musician as Laborer and Artist in the Urban Environment of Austin, Texas" by Alan C. Turley in The International Journal of Urban Labour and Leisure
Austin's Armadillo World Headquarters some history about this significant 70's venue, such as "The name Armadillo World Headquarters evoked both a cosmic consciousness and the image of a peaceable native critter, the armadillo, often seen on Texas highways as the victim of high-speed technology." and other interesting trivia.
Musical Bio of Stevie Ray Vaughan from eNotes
... oh why not? one more...
Stevie Ray Vaughan & The Fabulous Thunderbirds: What I Say
There's gobs more. Bring some tunes, whatever you got! Feel free to comment with just a song-link and your thoughts, or try for the embed, for however long that works for us. Either way, we're just chillin' here, so c'mon and join in.
Here's HOW: To add vids in comments: Click on "share"; then the "embed" button; change the size of the video graphic too, so when it posts, it is smaller. Use 300pixels in the custom parameters (last one on the right) under the embed code. {h/t joanneleon}