Houston: Guy Clark and the Folk Music Scene

When Guy Clark arrived in Houston in the early 1960s, he was a kid from Rockport with a guitar and no particular plan. What he found was a scene that would define the next fifty years of Texas music.

The Houston folk revival was centered in the Montrose neighborhood and around Rice University, in coffee houses and listening rooms where young musicians could perform and hear each other play. Clark fell in with a group of writers who were just beginning to understand what they had: Townes Van Zandt, Mickey Newbury, and Jerry Jeff Walker were all part of the circle. They were absorbing the tradition of blues giants like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb — Texas originals who were still performing in the city — and forging something new out of it.

Clark spent the better part of a decade in Houston. He worked. He played. He listened. He met Susanna Talley there — in complicated circumstances — packed her Volkswagen and drove her down from Oklahoma City to join him. They would eventually marry in Nashville in 1972, with Van Zandt as best man.

The City That Made the Scene

The Houston folk scene was not yet famous. Nashville had not yet discovered these writers. But inside the coffeehouses of Montrose, the rough material of what would become known as the Texas singer-songwriter movement was taking shape, song by song, open mic by open mic.

Clark later described those years as foundational: he was learning how to write, how to perform, and how to exist in a community of artists who pushed each other forward. Van Zandt was already the most otherworldly talent in the room. Newbury was already technically sophisticated. Walker was already the most charismatic performer. Clark watched all of them and developed his own thing — a precise, poetic craftsmanship that would eventually earn him the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album in 2014.

Houston did not hold him forever. He and Susanna eventually headed to California in pursuit of a record deal, then to Nashville where the world found them. But the city on the Gulf — its blues history, its folk coffeehouses, its community of broke and brilliant musicians — was where the most important education of his life took place.