Houston Folk Music Archive brings history to life

A new story map of Houston’s vanished folk music venues and a big-name homecoming concert underscore the importance of documenting the city’s musical foundations

Norie Guthrie, an archivist and special collections librarian at Rice’s Fondren Library, first began collecting materials for the Houston Folk Music Archive in early 2016. Legendary Houston folk band Wheatfield, which often played concerts at Rice during the 1970s, was the first act she reached out to and the first to visit the Woodson Research Center to donate a collection to the newly established archive.

Wheatfield, shown here in a promotional photo from 1974, will play a homecoming concert Nov. 2 in Fondren Library. (Wheatfield, “Promotional photograph,” Houston Folk Music Archive)

This fall, Wheatfield will return to the library in surround sound, playing a show inside Fondren’s South Reading Room Nov. 2 from 6 to 8 p.m., the continuation of a popular homecoming concert series in collaboration with the Friends of Fondren Library. But that isn’t the only news out of the Houston Folk Music Archive, which just wrapped up an active summer of collecting, curating and creating.

There is the Wikipedia project, in which summer intern Kristen Hickey, a Jones College junior, wrote online encyclopedia entries for Houston-based folk and Americana artists based on archival materials about their careers and personal lives. And there is the story map of Houston’s folk music venues, documenting these vanished venues and their individual legacies.

Guthrie said she drew inspiration from a project in which Brian Riedel, professor in the practice of humanities and associate director of Rice University’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, created a series of maps documenting Montrose’s gay history. Among the data points on Riedel’s maps were the locations of various gay clubs along with their timelines of operation. Guthrie thought of all the long-forgotten Houston folk music venues she’d encountered while archiving decades-old flyers, newspaper clippings and KTRU recordings.

“I thought it would be interesting for people to know when places were closed, when they were opened and their locations,” said Guthrie. She teamed up with the GIS/Data Center in Fondren and began plotting venues on a map of Houston using ArcGIS software. Soon, she had a visual timeline that spatially represented Houston’s folk music history between 1961 and 1990.

Guthrie’s story map of Houston folk music venues shows locations long-closed across the city.

The first iteration of the story map debuted last summer as part of a larger exhibition, but its cumbersome design needed tweaking. There were also plenty of places still missing from the map. To track them down, Guthrie combed through the recently digitized pages of old issues of the Houston Chronicle, which once published free advertisements for concerts, and solicited memories from the hundreds of active members in the Houston Folk Music Archive Facebook group she administers.

“They love doing things like that,” Guthrie said of the group’s members. The most active demographic, she said, is folk musicians and fans who are now in their 50s to 70s, an age range she called “the sweet spot” for soliciting archival donations and helping in finding future collections. “That’s when people are really thinking about what they’ve done in the past and are ready to let go,” she said.

From her Facebook group, Guthrie received a much longer list of recollected venues, which often led her even deeper as she tried to find their addresses, years of operation or any other information she could add to the story map. “I would find an article about The Jester — which is kind of like Houston’s first folk club — and it mentions The Peanut, and then The Levee.”

As she went further back in history, Guthrie realized her finds were now preceding the institutional memory of Houston’s folk music community. In creating the story map, she discovered clubs no one remembered — not even the most active fans who still haunt Anderson Fair, Houston’s longest surviving folk music venue, for which Guthrie still runs the social media accounts.

“I was like, ‘Ooh, I gotta figure out what these are,’ because a lot of my people don’t know about anything back in that time period,” said Guthrie. “That generation is gone — or at least starting to disappear.”

Townes Van Zandt is among the artists listed on a concert poster from 1975. (Sweetheart of Texas Concert Hall and Saloon, “The Sweetheart of Texas Concert Hall and Saloon Poster,” Houston Folk Music Archive)

What many Houstonians don’t remember, in fact, is that Houston was once a hotbed of the national folk music scene. The Bayou City birthed folk musicians steeped in the blues, from early pioneers such as Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark to later legends Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen.

Next month, the 19th annual Americanafest in Nashville, Tenn., will recognize Houston’s contributions to both folk and Americana music (the genre into which folk music is now folded). Keen will kick off this year’s festival with a conversation and three-hour performance, while Guthrie is moderating a panel about the Houston folk scene and how its venues and artists influenced future generations. Her completed story map will feature prominently.

Alongside descriptions of each folk music venue on the story map, you’ll find associated oral histories, original recordings of songs and concerts, old photos and flyers and links to even more material within the archive itself.

In one sense, the act of creating this visual representation of Houston’s folk music foundation is enough for Guthrie. It is the culmination of a project that’s led her to become a passionate fan of the people she’s met along the way. Folk musicians are a close-knit community, she said, one that’s eager to have its contributions recognized. “I’ve had a lot of fun working with all these people and celebrating them,” said Guthrie.

But in another sense, it’s not enough — the work of collecting can never be done, after all. And there’s another endeavor she’d like to see undertaken in the future.

“My dream is for someone to use those materials and write a history of the scene,” said Guthrie. “When that happens, I will be a very happy person because everything will have been brought together.”

In the meantime, there’s the Wheatfield concert to prepare for, and the continuing collecting. Next week, singer-songwriter Eric Taylor, who has worked extensively with such musicians as Lovett and Nanci Griffith, will be visiting the Woodson to contribute his own memories to Guthrie’s archive. She is giddy.

“I’ve been trying to score that oral history for a long time,” she said.

To see the story map of Houston’s folk music venues, visit http://ricegis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=9bd32ff712c445e188c62c446b01911c.

For information on tickets to the Wheatfield homecoming concert, Norie Guthrie at slg4@rice.edu or Mary Lowery at Friends of Fondren Library at mary.lowery@rice.edu.