The highest point in Butler Park is a grassy mound with a paved spiral path to the top, and from it you get the postcard view of downtown Austin across Lady Bird Lake. In 2008 the city named it for Doug Sahm, and a permanent marker was later installed at the summit by his sons Shawn and Shandon. Sahm is the most under celebrated major figure in Texas music. A child prodigy on steel guitar from San Antonio, he led the Sir Douglas Quintet to a national hit with She's About a Mover in 1965, a record with a Tex Mex organ sound that no British invasion band could have made, and which many listeners assumed was English anyway. He spent the late 1960s in California, came back, and became a central figure in the Austin scene of the 1970s, playing country, blues, conjunto, western swing and garage rock without regarding them as separate things. In 1990 he put together the Texas Tornados with Freddy Fender, Augie Meyers and Flaco Jimenez. He died in 1999. The marker at the top carries a caricature of him by the Austin artist Kerry Awn, surrounded by a jukebox, a Texas flag and a tornado, with a short biography written by the Austin Chronicle's Margaret Moser. It is a fitting monument: not a statue on a plinth, but a good place to stand and look at the city.
Getting there
30.2625, -97.7540
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
