Clifford Antone opened a blues club on Sixth Street on the fifteenth of July, 1975, and Clifton Chenier played the first night. It was an eccentric thing to do. Disco was ascendant, the Chicago and Delta players who had made the music were ageing and largely unbooked, and Antone spent his own money flying them to Texas to work. That is the reason the club matters. Muddy Waters, Albert King, Jimmy Reed, Jimmy Rogers and Eddie Taylor played long residencies here, and Antone made a habit of putting young Austin musicians on the same bills, so that Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmie Vaughan, Kim Wilson, Angela Strehli, Marcia Ball and Doyle Bramhall learned the music standing next to the people who invented it. The Austin blues scene of the 1980s came substantially out of that arrangement, and the club's nickname, Home of the Blues, was earned rather than adopted. The address kept changing. Antone's moved to Anderson Lane around 1980, to Guadalupe near the university in 1981, to West Fifth Street in 1997 and to East Riverside in 2013, before reopening downtown at 305 East Fifth Street on New Year's Eve of 2015, about three blocks from where it started. Clifford Antone died in 2006. The booking still leans on the blues, which for a club of this age is not a given.
Getting there
30.2661, -97.7404
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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