Down in Houston: Documenting a Texas Blues Community

The UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures and San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum are teaming up to show a new exhibit complementing the archive’s Fiesta Family Blues Festival. The institute will showcase “Down in Texas: Documenting a Texas Blues Community,” as a temporary component of the African American Texans exhibit.

Houston’s African American community birthed a vibrant and unique slice of the blues. In the clubs, ballrooms, and barbecue joints of neighborhoods such as Third Ward, Frenchtown, Sunnyside, and Double Bayou, Houston’s African American community birthed a vibrant and unique slice of the blues. Ranging from the down-home sounds of Lightnin’ Hopkins to the more refined orchestrations of the Duke-Peacock recording empire and beyond, Houston blues was and is the voice of a working-class community, an ongoing conversation about good times and hard times, smokin’ Saturday nights and Blue Mondays.

Photo exhibit adapted from “Down in Houston: Bayou City Blues,” University of Texas Press, 2003, by Roger Wood and James Fraher.