This week in Texas music history: Janis Joplin, 13th Floor Elevators play Teodar Jackson Benefit

On March 13, 1966, folklorist Tary Owens hosted a benefit for old-time fiddler Teodar Jackson featuring an intergenerational who’s who of the burgeoning Austin scene.

Jackson had grown up in rural Gonzales County before moving to East Austin in the 1940s. He brought his fiddle with him and played locally at house parties.

His was a Black vernacular style of country fiddling that reverberated in his segregated neighborhood but rarely beyond until the University of Texas “folk revival” brought new attention to the deep knowledge of folk styles that Jackson possessed.

Tary Owens organized his first recording session with Teodar Jackson in 1965. It was a revelation, made more poignant by the fiddler’s declining health.

Owens rallied his friends for a benefit at the University’s Methodist Student Center that brought together the old-timers Owens revered: singer Kenneth Threadgill, barrelhouse piano player Robert Shaw, Navasota bluesman Mance Lipscomb, with a younger generation of artists.

And, it provided the rare instance where two soon-to-be Sixties icons shared the stage.

Owens knew Janis Joplin from their Port Arthur days, and he was excited about her recent return to Texas from San Francisco. At the Jackson benefit, she appeared in a somber black dress with her hair in a bun, singing softly and still channeling Joan Baez.

But, another set of folkies-turned-rockers, the 13th Floor Elevators, may have pointed her toward a different future that night in the Methodist Center. Singer Roky Erickson’s trademark wail echoes in the more exuberant turn Joplin’s vocal performance took when she returned to San Francisco to join Big Brother and the Holding Company.

But, that was all in the future during this 1966 benefit, honoring Teodar Jackson’s rural tradition even as a new musical revolution took shape.

Sources

Paul Drummond. Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Pioneers of the Psychedelic Sound. Los Angeles: Process Media, 2007.

Alice Echols. Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin. New York: Owl Books, 1999.

Dan Foster, “Teodar Jackson: African-American Fiddling from Texas,” The Old-Time Herald (15:1).

Ben Graham. A Gathering of Promises: The Battle for Texas’s Psychedelic Music, from the 13th Floor Elevators to the Black Angels and Beyond. Washington, D.C.: Zero Books, 2015.

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