Houston’s music legacy echoed through iconic Bronze Peacock
Former site of legendary club reduced to an empty slab
In the late 1940s, the Bronze Peacock nightclub would catch the eyes of those driving Old Highway 90 coming in from the east.
Above the venue’s door was a little architectural embellishment, a sharp triangular shape that reached upward beyond the roof. Upon its face, owner Don Robey placed a blinking neon peacock.
For a few years the Bronze Peacock on Erastus Street in the Fifth Ward served as the epicenter for African-American nightlife in Houston. Then the club was shuttered, and the space transformed into the headquarters for Robey’s Houston-based music empire, where he oversaw his Duke and Peacock labels and the successful Buffalo Booking Agency.
The building for years was home to the Charity Baptist Church. Pieces of the original structure, including the Bronze Peacock stage, had been torn down over time, though its distinctive facade stood for more than 70 years. But in the past week that landmark of Houston music history was razed, leaving an empty slab.
“It’s the starting part of the story, that ground is where all this Houston history really began,” said blues historian Roger Wood, author of “Down in Houston: Bayou City Blues.” “And it was one of the last landmarks from that time. About the only one left is the Eldorado Ballroom.”
Tax records show the building is owned by Charity Baptist Church. A new brick building was erected next to the Bronze Peacock building in 1992. A dove was hand-painted above the door where the peacock once was. Charity Baptist had used the older structure as an education building. But today the entire lot — Wylie Street to the north, Erastus to the east, Liberty Road to the south and Fontinot to the west — has a chain-link fence around its perimeter. Two discarded images of Jesus sat in the dirt Monday. Calls to Charity Baptist were unanswered.
The Bronze Peacock was the culmination of several years of entertainment development by Robey, a Fifth Ward native. Robey was a ruthless and wily businessman and gambler, who started opening nightclubs in his neighborhood in the 1930s. In February 1946, he opened the Bronze Peacock, designed to be the finest upscale club in the Fifth Ward.
The distinctive facade, with the blinking sign, was the point of entry.
“That was probably where they had the offices and a hat check,” Wood said. “You get past it and you cross the gauntlet into the area where they’d run games. That gave them some space to close things down if the law showed up.”
The Peacock was a bustling destination in postwar Houston and quickly became the city’s prime hub for live music on the Chitlin’ Circuit, where top-tier black entertainers would perform.
Country singer Johnny Bush recalled that the sounds of the club would resonate beyond its walls into the streets.
“I’d walk out to the street and just listen,” he told the Chronicle. “The music, the sounds were something else. It seemed almost like a dream.”
The venue became the launching point for blues great Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, who stepped up on stage in 1947 and dazzled on a night when T-Bone Walker was too ill to perform. Robey signed Brown to a record deal, and had him record for the Aladdin label, but the recordings went nowhere. Frustrated, Robey decided to enter the music industry himself.
His interests quickly became grander than being a club owner. Robey started to build a music empire in Houston, as he realized the financial possibilities in music publishing and recordings. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top called him “a mover and shaker on the Houston blues, gospel and R&B scene.”
Around 1949, Robey launched Peacock Records, one of the first, if not the first, music business run by a black man in the United States. Eventually his endeavor grew too large for its office on Lyons, so in 1953 Robey converted his club into an office with a small recording studio. That year he bought the Memphisbased Duke Records, and began releasing music on the Duke and Peacock labels by artists like Bobby “Blue” Bland, Junior Parker, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, Brown, the Bells of Joy and numerous others.
Robey drew inestimable input from business manager Evelyn Johnson, a Louisiana native who grew up in the Fourth Ward. From the Erastus location, Johnson ran the Buffalo Booking Agency, which put numerous Duke/ Peacock artists on the road. Buffalo Booking also helped B.B. King get his start, coordinating his touring when the guitarist was an unknown.
Robey courted the city’s deep pool of music talent, including the writer Joe Medwick and the brilliant producer and arranger Joe Scott. Though Robey’s musical aptitude has been described as marginal or nonexistent, he managed to grease his name (or one of his pen names) onto scores of recordings so he’d get a cut of the publishing. His business acumen was brass-knuckled, which created loyalty and animosity.
According to Wood, the bulk of the recordings Robey released on his labels were made at professional recording studios, but he often had local musicians demo new songs at the Erastus location. Those recordings would then be sent to his artists to record.
By the 1970s the industry had changed such that Robey’s corner of the business had been reduced significantly. He sold what was left of his music business holdings in 1973. Two years later, he died of a heart attack.
Almost all the major players from the Peacock era have died. Guitarist Milton Hopkins — who played on some 1950s gospel recordings — and saxophonist Grady Gaines are among the few around, and both are active performers in the city.
With the building and its golden era representatives gone, the Peacock legacy is left to the smaller room at the House of Blues venue downtown, which is named the Bronze Peacock Room in honor of the older venue.
And the University of Houston also keeps alive the memory of that storied time. In the 1980s, Houston music historian Andrew Brown, then just a high school student, visited the site after it was abandoned and came across recording logs, session information, checkbooks and vintage photographs.
Brown gave the collection to the University of Houston, which has digitized the artifacts and made them available for viewing through its digital library. Along with the recordings that circulate, the artifacts provide documentation of a peak time for music in Houston, one that revolved around the Bronze Peacock.
“Back in the day, the state was segregated to the bone. So there may be a few of those old clubs around, but among the places we would play, the Eldorado is probably the last one,” Hopkins said Monday.
Now that the Bronze Peacock is gone, “I can’t think of any other place from back then that’s still standing.”