Ask a musician here where Austin's legend started, and they'll point not to a venue but to a television screen. Austin City Limits launched on PBS in 1976, featuring a performance by Willie Nelson, and became the longest-running music program in American television history — still broadcasting from Austin five decades later. The show gave Austin's music scene a national platform before the internet existed to provide one.
Antone's nightclub opened in 1975 on a stretch of downtown Austin, founded by Clifford Antone as a dedicated blues venue, and became the stage where a young guitarist named Stevie Ray Vaughan developed the ferocious technique that would make him a legend before his death in a helicopter crash in 1990. Willie Nelson's 'cosmic cowboy' movement of the early 1970s — country music played with rock and roll attitude for hippie audiences — put Austin on the national map as a place where musical genre boundaries dissolved. South by Southwest was founded in 1987 by Louis Black and Nick Barbaro of the Austin Chronicle as a music industry conference; within two decades it had become a global cultural event encompassing music, film, and technology that transforms the city every March.
All of these threads — the TV show, the blues club, the cosmic cowboys, the conference — run through these blocks and define what Austin means when it calls itself the Live Music Capital of the World.