Threadgill's south Austin tribute
— a room that held the songs after the room was gone.
Not only on a wall.
Threadgill's south Austin tribute, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Kenneth Threadgill ran a filling station and beer joint on North Lamar that became the room where Janis Joplin learned to sing in public. Decades later, Eddie Wilson opened a second Threadgill's south of the river on the old Armadillo World Headquarters lot, hung the Armadillo posters on the walls, and kept the chicken-fried steak honest. Both rooms have closed now. The artwork sits in that absence. A tribute to a Wednesday night that Austin used to take for granted. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Threadgill's began in 1933 as a Gulf filling station on North Lamar Boulevard in Austin, opened by Kenneth Threadgill on the day Travis County repealed Prohibition. By the late 1950s, the back room hosted Wednesday-night singalongs that drew folk and country players from the University of Texas, including a young Janis Joplin, who sang there regularly between 1962 and 1964. Eddie Wilson, who had run the Armadillo World Headquarters from 1970 to 1980, reopened Threadgill's in 1981 and added a second location, Threadgill's World Headquarters, at 301 West Riverside Drive in 1996, on the lot where the Armadillo had stood. The south location closed permanently in 2020.
The room held a small list of fixed nights. Wednesday singalongs ran from 1953 onward at the original North Lamar location, originally hosted by Kenneth Threadgill himself and continued for decades by friends and house players after his death in 1987. The south Riverside location kept gospel brunch on Sundays and a long roster of Texas singer-songwriter sets. The 1981 reopening followed the Armadillo's New Year's Eve 1980 closing concert by about ten months. The Riverside building was demolished after the 2020 closure, but the original North Lamar building, on the National Register of Historic Places since 1996, still stands.
The Austin that Threadgill's belonged to is mostly gone. The Armadillo lot is an office tower. The Riverside restaurant is a parking lot waiting on a high-rise. The North Lamar building closed as a restaurant in 2018, briefly reopened, and shut again in 2022. The Wednesday singalong, which ran for nearly seventy years across hosts and ownership changes, ended quietly. The artwork is not of a building so much as of an evening: a long pine-board room, posters layered on the walls, a steel guitar tuning up, somebody's grandmother eating chicken-fried steak at the next table. The kind of room a city only realizes it had after it loses it.
