Austin City Limits: The Camera That Named a Scene

Willie Nelson had been effectively blacklisted from Nashville by the early nineteen seventies. He wrote uncommercial songs. He refused to wear a suit. He had moved to Austin in nineteen seventy-one and found a scene that did not care about Nashville's dress code.

In October of nineteen seventy-four, a public television station called KLRU, operating out of the University of Texas campus in Austin, taped a live music performance in one of its studios. The first artist to perform was Willie Nelson. The program that resulted was called Austin City Limits, and it aired on the Public Broadcasting Service.

Austin City Limits ran for more than forty-five years, making it the longest-running concert series in American television history. Over those decades it documented the outlaw country movement, the progressive country movement that distinguished Austin from Nashville in the nineteen seventies, Texas blues, rock, Tejano, and eventually alt-country, folk, and virtually every other genre that passed through Austin's club circuit. Townes Van Zandt performed there. Lyle Lovett. Asleep at the Wheel. Emmylou Harris. Stevie Ray Vaughan. Lucinda Williams. The archive is something close to a complete record of what American roots music did in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

The Live Music Capital of the World designation that Austin trademarked and has defended against competing claims ever since grew directly from that one camera in that one studio on the University of Texas campus. It named something that was already happening and, by naming it, helped it survive the pressures that eventually came for almost everything else the original scene produced.