The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock

By Jan Reid

University of Texas Press, 379 pp., $29.95

The Armadillo World Headquarters still casts a long, long shadow over Austin. It’s been closed for nearly 25 years, but the ramshackle former National Guard armory’s legacy stretches from KGSR and Austin City Limits to those ubiquitous, borderline-xenophobic 78704 bumper stickers. And despite the author’s sometimes prickly relationship with ‘Dillo talent and management, the venue is central to Jan Reid’s The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock. First published by Austin-based Heidelberg Publishers in 1975, and reissued in paperback by New York’s Da Capo Press two years later, Redneck Rock has been revived yet again by UT Press. New are 80 photos by ACL house shooter Scott Newton, since original photographer Melinda Wickman’s archives were destroyed in a flood, as well as a lengthy new coda. As such, Redneck Rock is really two books in one. The first is Reid’s portrait of the mid-1970s “progressive country scare” as seen through the eyes of its instigators, including Steven Fromholz, Rusty Wier, Jerry Jeff Walker, Kinky Friedman, and Willis Alan Ramsey. Half journalism and half narrative, the text remains a highly readable and historical assessment of the hippies, hicks, visionaries, and no-accounts who often inadvertently laid the foundations for the “Live Music Capital of the World.” The best chapter is probably Reid’s hilariously acute depiction of Willie Nelson’s 1973 picnic in Dripping Springs. The second half chronicles the aftermath, beginning with the obliteration of progressive country by punk rock and blues, and concludes with sketches of Armadillo heirs like Charlie Robison, James McMurtry, Kelly Willis, and the Gourds. This part is much more sterile and academic, but given what Reid went through in writing the original, it’s hard to begrudge him. Just as the Armadillo remains foremost in the minds of many Austin music fans, Redneck Rock should remain an essential component of their libraries.

This article appears in May 28 • 2004.

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