1. Neely taking country blues to Europe, July 22, 1989
2. Country singer, songwriter Bill Neely dies of leukemia, March 24, 1990
3. Echoes of 1962, May 29, 2000

Singer and guitarist Bill Neely, Austin’s resident master of the country blues, will take his talents overseas in December for a series of shows in France and Italy at a non-profit cultural facility in Paris.

Neely, a veteran of the historic Deep Ellum blues movement of the 1930s in Dallas, will be one of three performers playing 17 nights at the Maison de Cultures du Monde.  The trip also will include a couple of dates in Florence, Italy, according to Alan Govenar, director of Documentary Arts, Inc., a Dallas organization that helped arrange the program.

Govenar said he has worked with Neely since 1981, when he invited him to play at the Dallas Folk Festival, and also featured Neely in various film and record projects about the Deep Ellum blues scene.

“Last year I was in France for a couple of weeks, and I presented my films and tapes to Maison de Cultures du Monde,” Govenar said.  “They contacted me a few months later and expressed interest in me producing a program for them in Paris in December of this year.”

Govenar said he’s excited about Neely’s involvement in the program.  “It’s a great opportunity; I think it’ll give him a lot of exposure,” Govenar said.  “I think he’s great.  I’ve been presenting him for years, and I think he’s a treasure.”

---

Bill Neely, whose talents as a writer and singer of country blues songs made his music an institution of American folklore, died Thursday evening of leukemia at his home in Austin.  He was 73.

Neely was diagnosed as having an acute case of the disease on March 4.  He spent three days at St. Davids Hospital before returning home, where he stayed until his death at about 630 p.m. Thursday, his wife Bobbie said.

Neely began playing guitar in 1929 when legendary country music figure Jimmie Rodgers taught him a couple of chords after a show.  He spent most of the 1930s on the road, as he noted on the liner notes to his 1974 album Blackland Farm Boy:  “Seems like the Depression lasted 100 years to me.  I got tired of it all. Caught me a freight train and rode ‘em for three years.”

After spending time in the Army from 1939-43, he moved to Arizona, where he met Bobbie Hamilton.  The two married in 1948 and the following year moved to Austin, where Bobbie’s uncle worked as a builder.

During the 1950s, Neely hooked up with another Jimmie Rodgers admirer, Kenneth Threadgill, at Threadgill’s restaurant at what was then the northern edge of the city on Lamar Boulevard.  The spot became famous for its Wednesday night music sessions, a tradition that continues.

One of the people Neely played with regularly at Threadgill’s was Larry Kirbo, whom he met in 1968 when they worked together at Austin State Hospital.  “A friend of mine told him that I played guitar, and he said, ‘Well, come on down to Threadgill’s tonight,’” Kirbo recalled Friday.  “I said, ‘Well, I go to church on Wednesday nights.’ And he said, ‘You don’t go to church all night do you?  Well, come on out then, when you get out of church.’”

Kirbo did. As a result, the two became close friends and played together for about 12 years, including a couple of shows in Washington, D.C., at cultural programs presented by the Smithsonian Institution.  Such organizations often enlisted Neely’s talent as an authentic purveyor of country blues.  Three months ago, Neely was part of a program in Paris featuring three traditional Texas music artists who performed for two weeks at the House of World Cultures.

Last week at the Austin Music Awards show, Alejandro Escoveda dedicated a song during his performance to the ailing Neely.  Escovedo first met Neely in 1981, when Neely and Escovedo’s band Rank and File played Sunday gigs together at the Shorthorn Bar.

“I’d go and catch him whenever I had the chance at Threadgill’s,” Escovedo Said.  “He was a big inspiration for me, just for me to get up and start singing.  I was also a big Jimmie Rodgers fan, and he really had that style down.  He was like a bit of history that I could actually talk to.”

Neely’s influence crossed generation gaps.  Escovedo is just one of many local musicians who came to know and love Neely’s songs despite the differences in the musical styles of the eras in which they were raised.  Dan Del Santo, an Austin musician and KUT-FM disc jockey who has known Neely for fifteen years, attributes this to “the timeless nature of his music.”

“His writing has never really received the attention and the acclaim that it should have,”  Del Santo added.  “Frankly, it’s a little late, but I’m still hoping we can get some of his songs covered by some big people.”

Neely is survived by his wife Bobbie; twin daughters Wanda Liarakos and Wilma Sikes, both of Austin; son Charles Neely, also of Austin; and daughter Pam Allee of El Paso.  Funeral services are at 10 a.m. Monday at Hyltin-Manor Funeral Home.  Several local musicians will pay tribute to Neely in a benefit concert for the family’s expenses and the Leukemia Society of America on April 8 at Steamboat nightclub.

---

The spirit in Threadgill's this night is all about Austin's past - - even though the two gray-haired men on stage are singing a country ballad called "All the Good Times are Past and Gone." These gentleman singers -- Bill Malone and Stan Alexander -- were singing this same song 40 years ago, when this place on North Lamar called Threadgill's was a scruffy little beer joint on the outskirts of town. The audience here goes back a few decades, too. Many are alumni of a long- lost campus-area apartment house known as "the Ghetto" -- and as it turns out, this evening of music is an extension of their annual reunion. In the 1960s, The Ghetto was the spiritual home of folk singers and artists -- the "beats" of old Austin. Janis Joplin and her friends hung out there. And on Wednesday nights, the legend goes, they hung out at Threadgill's.

All the good times are past and gone. I'm stuck on the line, stuck on the faces in the crowd. One long table, along the north wall, is filled with some 20 people -- and every one of them must be at least 50 years old. The men's hair is cropped short. They wear button-down shirts. Beyond the wrinkles, beyond the gray, I imagine them here – in Threadgill's -- and it's 1962.

Near the bar, a dark-eyed man with gel in his hair is lost in time, too.

"The big table. It was here," he says, looking into the eyes of a friend, hoping that their memories match. He's remembering a round wooden musician's table, the centerpiece of "old" Threadgill's. One night, all the Wednesday Night regulars, including Janis, carved their names into it. "It would have been right about here. . . ."

Where was the table? What were the words to that old song? What happened to those young dreams? I've come to Threadgill's tonight to consider Austin's past, to muse about the passage of time. How funny that there are a hundred vintage clocks in this place -- and each one tells a different time. A place in the past

Bill Malone and Stan Alexander are not professional musicians, so their audience forgives them when they miss a beat and forget a verse. The two friends -- who first visited Threadgill's in early 1959 as UT graduate students -- are not performing tonight to make an impression. Rather, they've come to honor the casual tradition of the old place.

"There was never a formal music scene here, and that's something that's really been distorted in a lot of books and articles about Threadgill's," says Malone, an author and music historian based in Madison, Wis. "There were no microphones. There was no amplification. There was no payday. I smile when I hear Janis supposedly got her first musician's paycheck at Threadgill's. No one got paid. It was more of a communal thing. We just sat around a table and traded songs, singing one after another."

Bill Malone was working on his doctorate in history in 1960; Stan Alexander was a graduate student in English. But both loved music -- especially bluegrass and country -- and that was the bond that brought them to Kennethl Threadgill's simple tavern, built in the shell of a service station, on what was then the old Dallas Highway. Four men used to make the journey together: Malone, Alexander and two graduate school friends.

"It was a working-class bar back then. There weren't a lot of people there," recalls Malone. "Kennethl Threadgill would serve (the) beer -- and when he'd get caught up, we'd coax him out (to sing). He'd walk out, still wearing his apron, holding a bottle of beer in his hands. He'd sing and yodel Jimmie Rodgers songs, mostly. But he did other things, too. I think us coming there actually did a lot to revive music here -- and Kennethl started singing more and more as a result of that."

Threadgill didn't play guitar. But there was a regular customer -- a man the old-timers remember only as "Shorty" -- who liked to accompany him whenever he sang. "One of the world's worst guitar players," recalls Alexander, affectionately, as Malone nods in agreement. "He played with his thumb." Malone says Shorty loved introductions: "This song's in the key of A , as in egg," he used to say. Or: "This one's in the key of G, as in gnat."

When Joplin and her crowd from the Ghetto heard about the music at Threadgill's in 1962, the scene changed -- and Wednesdays got crowded. Malone describes it as a refreshing confluence of musical attitudes: "Folk revival meets old-time country." Threadgill used to drag out old beer crates so that people would have a place to sit.

"Hicks like us had a tremendous advantage," adds Alexander, a retired English professor who still lives in Austin and eats regularly at Threadgill's. "We had this huge repertoire of classic country music. And the kids couldn't tell the difference between that and folk. So we were `in like flint' without even trying."

There were moments on those nights when everyone sang together -- Threadgill Janis, the crowd of Ghetto students, Bill Malone and Stan Alexander -- on songs such as "Silver Threads and Golden Needles" or "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." The older players shared traditional songs and the younger players introduced contemporary ones. And if someone missed a beat or forgot a verse . . . that was OK. It was all a part of the casual tradition of the place. Placing the Ghetto

The myth of the Ghetto -- and its connection to Threadgill's -- is a bit more ill-defined, especially since the physical structure no longer exists. I'd always imagined the place as a blocky, dorm-style apartment house with a drug problem. And though I knew the address: 2812 1/2 Nueces Street -- I'd naively thought it shared a long, cool block with a fraternity house and oak trees.

"No, no. The Ghetto was a derelict group of garage apartments right behind Dirty's -- the hamburger place," says Austin activist and former Ghetto resident Jim Baldauf, stepping outside Threadgill's for a cigarette. "Those of us who lived there were all sort of students. You know: Sort of English majors. Sort of art majors. . . ."

"But how many people actually lived in the Ghetto?" "It doesn't matter that you actually lived in the Ghetto," explains Baldauf. "It only matters that you were there. And to that extent, we all lived there. Those of us who didn't live there passed out there."

In time, I learn that the Ghetto actually consisted of five apartments. The main, two-story "block" contained two ground-floor apartments and two top-floor apartments. A popular young folk musician, John Clay, once lived in a fifth apartment over the garage. It's Clay, now -- glazed, but hauntingly earnest -- who's playing on stage as Baldauf remembers what it was to live the Ghetto life 40 years ago.

"It was during Christmas vacation, 1962 -- and the temperature was like 17 degrees. There was a night, after Threadgill's, when Janis, Julie Paul and I squeezed into Julie Paul's TR-3 two-seater convertible. And in the sleeting, wet, rainy night, the three of us took off for New Orleans. . . .

"In Lake Charles, L a., we were pulled over by police officers of some sort. You could imagine what we looked like: I had long hair and a beard, and Janis was Janis, wearing her Buffalo Bill jacket. It turns out the guys who stopped us were immigration officers -- and they suspected us of being illegal Canadian immigrants!

"I told them: `Look. You can look at us and say that we're a great many things. But if there's one thing we're not, it's illegal immigrants from Canada. . . .' "A younger time

Powell St. John is quiet, a gentle man who came of age in a wild time. He lived in the Ghetto, ran with Janis, backed her on harmonica as a member of Austin's Waller Creek Boys. Like Joplin, St. John eventually moved to San Francisco -- and he still lives there. Today, however, his instrument of choice is the computer. He works in the information services department of a health care HMO.

"I wasn't a musician when I first came to Austin," says St. John, sipping a beer, a beret pulled low over his forehead. "I came here (in 1958) as an art student; I was going to be a painter. Austin was a much smaller city then. I remember there was no Town Lake; the water just ran through town. . . . The old river looked kind of mean. It had rocks on the banks. You could go fishing there, but that's about all you'd want to do."

It was years later -- in the early 1960s -- when Powell St. John first met Janis Joplin. She'd been interested in painting once, too. But that wasn't the bond that brought them together. "My first impression of her was that she was part of a counter-culture," says St. John. "And I desperately wanted to to break into that.

"In Austin, at that time, there was this six-month lag between what happened on the East Coast and anyone finding out about it. . . . but Janis had traveled. She'd been to the West Coast, where they'd called her "the little child chick from Texas." And she could also play music, which I was already doing -- and it made my hair stand on end. Plus, I thought she was pretty cute."

Of course, they found Threadgill's and played music together there. The magic of the place, he says, was the "social and cultural matrix" of blue collar regulars and college musicians on Wednesday nights.

"I think Threadgill's was the only place I went regularly in Austin where I didn't ever see a fight break out," he says. "In those days, if you got a bunch of people together drinking beer, in a club, chances were that somebody was gonna take a swing at someone 'long about midnight. There's a lot to be said for how we all coalesced in this rather small place and got along."

And what of Janis?

"I think biographers have a tough time with her, because she was so multi-faceted that everyone who knew her came away with a different impression," says St. John. "For me, Janis was a very complicated person -- and at the same time, very vulnerable. She was extremely intelligent, yet prone to very poor judg ments. Her practical side was overweighed by poor decisions. It's hard to describe what Janis was like, because she was like a kaleidoscope. She was a lot of different people inside.

"She told me one time that if a war came along, and she was married, that she'd gladly be a `Rosie the Riveter' to free her man to fight. And I think she was serious about that. I'd say, `Well great, Janis -- but I don't think people outta be fighting, do you?' She also had those 1950s illusions about being a wife and a mother and staying home in a house with an apron on and living in a modern electric kitchen."

Across our table, John Clay is wrestling with two beers and a ferocious cough. He breaks into our conversation: "There was a part of her that really wanted that," he says. "She almost got married one time. . . ."

"There was a part of her that was that conventional," says St. John, nodding. "But you have to juxtapose that against the exact opposite -- the unconventional Janis -- to really know her. Telling you what Janis was like: You'd have to specify what time of day." He laughs here, but it is a laugh of love and affection. "She was marvelous. She was incredible. I was lucky to have known her."

Powell St. John remembers a song -- "Women is Losers," which she would later record with Big Brother and the Holding Company. She played it first for him.

"That song encapsulates Janis' feminist side -- connecting to that strong female that was in her," he says. "It was a gripe about what a bitch it was to be a woman. . . . Janis was smart. Women are smart. And it's not hard to realize their frustration of knowing that the world is run by us drones. We know they're the queens. They know what's going on. And Janis struggled with that a lot."So what remains?

I've come to Threadgill's tonight to consider the past -- and put it into context with Austin's present. These people who came of age in the 1960s and managed to survive it: What do they make of the city they see today? How do they draw the line between history and sentiment? What is it that endures?

"It's a much different place," former Ghetto resident Jim Baldauf had told me earlier in the evening. But is it? Baldauf is every bit the activist he was 30 years ago. Last year, he was even arrested during a protest in front of the Governor's Mansion. Certainly, he can't suggest that the passions of his time are dead. . . .

"Let me tell you a story," he says with a laugh, slowing me down. "There was this place I remember -- it was called Dead Dog Cave. It was way out there in the country. It was an adventure to go there. And though it was really just a big sinkhole, it had these really neat crawl ways and passageways that branched off the bottom of it.

"Well, the other day I ran into a guy I knew from those days. And I said, `Do you remember Dead Dog Cave? Where was it? I'd love to go out there!' He just laughed and laughed and laughed. And then he said: `l'Il tell you where Dead Dog Cave is -- it's underneath the parking lot of the Luby's Cafeteria at Steck and MoPac.' "

I'd never heard of Dead Dog Cave. But as the music of the past swirled about us, I told Jim Baldauf that I know that story. It's as familiar as the melody of a sad, old song.

Bill Neely | Lost Art Home