KENNETH THREADGILL: Father of the Austin music scene
Advance chapter of "Austin Music Is a Scene Not a Sound," coming in 2024
Willie Nelson famously brought the rednecks and the hippies together in musical affinity when he debuted at the Armadillo World Headquarters in August 1972. But Kenneth Threadgill laid the groundwork for the co-mingling of the species the previous seven years when he played every Sunday night at the Split Rail Inn, a country beer joint on South Lamar that served as defacto clubhouse for the Pitch & Putt across the street.
Mr. Threadgill was a hardcore country singer, a throwback to Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, but he often had longhairs in his band. “Where the heads meet the necks” was the Rail’s unofficial slogan.
This yodeler with the bushy white sideburns and prominent beer belly had counterculture bona fides for giving queen Janis Joplin her spiritual breakthrough at his beer joint on North Lamar in 1962. The tavern owner’s enthusiasm for how she put a song across was the validation Janis so desperately needed- and she never forgot. What set Threadgill apart from the UT students who applauded Janis at the “folk sings” in reserved rooms at UT’s Texas Union, was that he had seen it all. He knew his hero Rodgers, “the Singing Brakeman,” had been hosting music since the ‘30s, and sang with local country bands in the ‘40’s and ‘50s. Everybody knew the story of when Threadgill was the impromptu opener for Hank Williams at Dessau Hall in 1948. The headliner looked to be a no-show, so Dessau owner Hallie Price plucked the local country singer from the audience to cover. Backed by the house band, Threadgill was singing “Lovesick Blues” when Hank walked in with a big smile.
Threadgill always celebrated his Sept. 12, 1909 birth at the Split Rail, so the “KT Jubilee” in July 1970 was a “thanks for everything” tribute not tied to the calendar. A crowd of about 500 was expected at the BRW Party Barn in Oak Hill, with an advertised lineup of Mance Lipscomb, Shiva’s Head Band and Threadgill’s Hootenanny Hoots. But 5,000 showed up after Joplin checked into the Holiday Inn on Town Lake the night before, flying in from Hawaii with leis. Janis didn’t do incognito.
Joplin sang two songs at the Jubilee by her new friend Kris Kristofferson, “who’s gonna be famous, I give him a year,” she said introducing “Me and Bobby McGee.” She also sang “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” backed on both songs by Julie Paul and Chuck Joyce, the married couple who played in Threadgill’s Hootenanny Hoots. Janis recorded “Bobby McGee” just a few days before she died of a heroin overdose in October 1970. It became her first and only #1 single in 1971.
After Janis died, Kristofferson followed up on her promise to get Ken Threadgill a record deal. Kris heard him yodel at Darrell Royal’s afterparty for 1972’s Dripping Springs Reunion, then flew Threadgill and the Joyces to Nashville the next month for four sessions at Jack Clement’s recording studio. Using royalties from “Bobby McGee,” which fulfilled Joplin’s prediction of stardom, Kristofferson paid for everything. But apparently nobody wanted Jimmie Rodgers covers in ‘72 and the sessions were never released. Threadgill’s only album, 1981’s Silver-Haired Daddy on Armadillo Records, was credited to his Velvet Cowpasture band, which played regularly at Bevo’s Westside Tap Room at 24th and Rio Grande.
He loved to perform, but Threadgill never made any real money in music until 1980’s Honeysuckle Rose, starring his friend Willie Nelson. Threadgill was not really a songwriter but he got an original, “Coming Back to Texas,” on the double-platinum soundtrack.
This son of a preacher man is remembered less for sheer talent than for the community he nurtured with his example of love, kindness and acceptance.
That was the spirit Rod Kennedy was looking for when he launched the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1972. In acknowledgement of Jimmie Rodgers living in Kerrville before his 1933 passing, Kennedy christened the event with Threadgill singing “Blue Yodel # 1 (T For Texas)” the first night. Today, the covered Threadgill Memorial Theater is a prominent showcase stage at Kerrville.
John Kenneth Threadgill was born in Hunt County just outside of Greenville, the 9th of 11 kids. His family came to Austin in 1923 when he was 14. After graduating from Austin High in 1928, Threadgill moved to Beaumont, where his father had led a Church of the Nazarene for four years before Austin. Beaumont was where a 19-year-old Kenneth first heard Rodgers, who he started emulating instead of his first fave Al Jolson.
Back in Austin, he worked at a Gulf Station on the Dallas Highway (North Lamar) and made a little extra selling $5 copies of the Austin American morning paper, wrapped around bootleg liquor. Eventually he bought the gas station and when Prohibition ended in 1933, Threadgill waited in line overnight to get the first license to sell beer in Travis County. The fillin’ station became Threadgill’s Tavern.
Threadgill’s closed during WWII, when Kenneth got a job as a welder for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, repairing bridges and other structures on area bases. He wanted to go fight in the war, but kept getting 90-day deferments. He was too valuable to send into combat.
After the war, Threadgill’s reopened and stayed open, 24 hours a day. He took out the gas pumps in 1947 and concentrated on the tavern. “I didn’t have a key for nine years,” Threadgill told the American-Statesman in a 1970 profile that provides much of the information here.
After the clubs closed, the party would end up at Threadgill’s. “Pop Wheeler would come by with his bass, Mildred Womack would sit at the piano, and Joe Ramon would be on fiddle,” Threadgill said of the afterhours jams that would sometimes last until 5 a.m. Threadgill had his own string band at the time with Shorty Zeiger, Ole Peterson, and Herman Thompson, the one-legged fiddler.
Kenneth and wife Mildred started keeping business hours in the mid-’50s, when the Saturday night jam sessions were getting so crowded that they moved to midweek. At 9 o’clock every Wednesday night, Threadgill would come from behind the bar, still wearing his apron, and yodel a short set that would end with a crowd-pleasing jig. Threadgill otherwise forbade dancing, lest he be hit with a dancehall tax.
There was always a big groan at last call, but Threadgill would say, “we don’t make the laws, we just try to get along with them.” On one particularly chaotic Wednesday night, Threadgill was told he had a lot of patience. “Thanks,” he said, “but I prefer to call them customers.”
Threadgill and his Hootenanny Hoots wanted to see how good they really were, outside the “home cooking” embrace of the Tavern, so Zeiger and Bill Neely, the great white country bluesman, approached Bob Bass at the Split Rail in 1965. He gave them Sundays.
The Rail was more of a hangout with cheap pitchers and touted onion rings than a music venue, though such honky tonk singers as Roger Beck and Barney Tall played weekends. “It was just a couple picnic tables and an old shed,” is how Threadgill described the joint, where good ol’ boys came to relax after a day of chopping cedar in what would later be called West Lake Hills. The Joyces wrote “Split Rail Inn” about the club’s inclusionary mindset. “Are you straight, are you hippie, are you Klan?” goes the chorus.
With his smattering of pot-smoking, war-protesting fans growing into a throng, Threadgill was the link between Barney Tall and Marcia Ball. What KT started on Sundays at the Split Rail, Freda (Marcia) and the Firedogs turned into a local sensation in 1972. If you didn’t get there a couple hours early, you wouldn’t get in. “I’d go into the Split Rail and sing ‘Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone’ and everybody would flip out,” regular Freda guest Doug Sahm told Ed Ward of the Statesman. “There was all this love that I needed.”
Willie didn’t start the progressive country scene in Austin, but he gave it a name and a face for the world.
Great piece - a gem in every paragraph.