Austin's Home of the Blues chose its founder as much as he chose it. Clifford Antone - a Port Arthur kid running a sandwich shop with guitars accumulating in the back - opened Antone's on 15 July 1975 in an old furniture store at Sixth and Brazos, booking zydeco king Clifton Chenier on night one. Within weeks Sunnyland Slim and Big Walter Horton had spread the word through the old Chicago guard: a young Texan appreciated their work and paid fairly. Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, Albert King and Buddy Guy beat a path to the room, some - Hubert Sumlin, Pinetop Perkins - living at Antone's expense for months at a time. The club became America's great blues academy. House bands around Paul Ray and the Cobras and the Fabulous Thunderbirds put Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan, Denny Freeman, Lou Ann Barton and Angela Strehli on stage nightly with the masters they idolised, and the education took: the club, its record label and its record store made Austin a world blues capital. The address wandered for decades - north Austin, the classic Guadalupe Street era by the university, Fifth and Lavaca - before settling at 305 East 5th Street, two blocks from where it began. Antone died in 2006, a Blues Foundation Hall of Fame inductee with a plaque at the original corner, and the current room operates as his living shrine: nightly blues, soul and roots bookings, the house's own anniversary residencies each July, and a downstairs bar of memorabilia half a century deep. Gary Clark Jr., who calls the club his proving ground, embodies the succession the place was built to produce. The current Fifth Street incarnation restored the club's founding rhythms: early residencies for rising locals, weekend headliners from the blues and soul touring circuit, and the anniversary month each July that turns the calendar into a family reunion of alumni. The walls double as the archive - photographs of Muddy, Stevie Ray and the house bands hang where the audience can study them between sets, which is precisely how Clifford Antone taught the music in the first place.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 305 East 5th Street, Austin, TX, United States, 78701

Website: https://antonesnightclub.com

Opening Date: 15/07/1975