Blues Family Tree Project
About the Blues Family Tree Project
Founded in 1990 as a non-profit documentary collective, the
Austin Blues Family Tree (ABFT) was conceived as an oral history
project intended to capture a vanishing, but distinct cultural
community in East Austin, Texas. Harold McMillan, a University
of Texas graduate with an MA in American Civilization, recognized
the need to create, as well as preserve, documentation about
the lives and work of African American blues/jazz/gospel musicians
in Austin. These individuals not only helped develop the unique
sound of Austin blues, but also nurtured young white musicians,
newly awakened to the music long familiar to segregated Texas
black communities. Most of the now elderly (or deceased) musicians
who were introduced into the Austin scene in the late 1940s-early
1950s drew on the influence of pianists/singers such as Grey
Ghost, Robert Shaw and Dr., Hep Cat, legendary Texas blues
guitarists T-Bone Walker and Lighten Hopkins, country blues
and gospel styles, and the touring territory jazz dance bands,
connecting local musical roots to a distinct community-Black
East Austin.
In Austin's Jim Crow past, the social segregation that relegated
most African Americans to East Austin neighborhoods also spawned
a community with strong cultural institutions, two colleges,
commerce and a lively nightlife. In its heyday, the 11th-12th
Street Corridor was indeed the home of Austin's most lively
music scene. With desegregation, also came the gradual disintegration
of the cultural core of Black East Austin, hence the obliteration
of the East Side music scene. Unfortunately many of Austin's
pioneering blues and jazz artists never found sufficient work
or acknowledgement once the music scene moved west of Interstate
Highway 35 (the Tracks). And, because the legacy of this creative
community was rarely documented in the popular press or by
scholars, histories of Austin-the Live Music Capital of the
World-seldom acknowledge Austin's true community of jazz and
blues pioneers.
The Austin Blues Family Tree Project seeks to address this
scarcity of documentation, to increase awareness and to celebrate
East Austin's African American musical roots. By systematically
taping and collecting live performances of local blues and
jazz artists, and by recording well planned interviews with
musicians and their agents, the organization hopes to provide
a more complete and compelling report on the rise and fall
of the East Austin music scene At a time when the remnants
of the community are further besieged by gentrification and
real estate development pressures, DiverseArts has taken on
the challenge of fortifying Austin's African American musical
legacy with our effort to reaffirm Central East Austin as
the birth place of Austin's blues and jazz scene.
The production/collection phase of the BFT was during the
decade of the 1990s as a series of annual African American
History Month Concerts were staged specifically as a means
to create a documentary trail of performances and oral histories
of significant members of Austin's aging blues, jazz, and
gospel musicians. Those concerts, along with selected Clarksville
Jazz Festival performances and isolated club dates, constitute
the bulk of photographs, audio-and videotaped materials of
the archive. The collection currently includes interview transcriptions,
hundreds of photo-negatives, and the production books, contracts,
and administrative records of the decade of productions.
The current work of the Project focuses on the analogue-to-digital
conversion of collected materials in preparation for broad
dissemination through the WWW, a series of commercially available
archival CD/DVD releases, and other activities to make the
collection more accessible to the public.
Mission
The broad mission of the Blues Family Tree Project is to
foster and sustain broad public appreciation and knowledge
of the richness/significance of the musical traditions born
in African American culture; and to actively engage in all
aspects/facets of work to support in Austin the creation,
performance, documentation/preservation and dissemination
of traditional African American musical culture.
The Archive
Although valuable for scholarship in various fields including
ethnomusicology, history of African American culture and blues
music, the collection is intended to allow the average citizen
to explore the vibrancy of the historical East Austin music
community and discover the relationships that connection this
history to the music and careers of nationally recognized
musicians such as Jimmy and Stevie Ray Vaughan, W.C. Clark,
Bill Campbell, the Fabulous T-Birds, Angela Strehli and others.
In combination with local collections, and those of Dallas
and Houston, the Austin Blues Family Tree provides an unequaled,
and irreplaceable, resource to anyone interested in the music
of Texas and blues in general.
Presently the ABFT collection consist of 150 hours of live
performance recordings25 hours of oral histories including
approximately 500 pages of transcripts from the interviews;
an extensive photographic collection; and a 30-minute documentary
titled Austin Texas: East Side Blues.
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