These lyrics from Gary P. Nunn's "London Homesick Blues" adorn the wall above the exit from the Austin Bergstrom International Airport baggage claim. For years, they also played as the theme to the award-winning PBS series Austin City Limits. In short, they have served in more than one instance as an advertisement for the city's sense of self, the face that Austin, Texas, presents to visitors and national audiences. The quoted words refer, if obliquely, to a moment in the 1970s when the city first began fashioning itself as a key American site of musical production, one invested with a combination of talent and tradition and tolerance that would make of it the self-proclaimed "Live Music Capital of the World."

In many ways, the venue of the Armadillo World Headquarters served as ground zero for these developments, and it is often remembered as a primary site for the decade's supposed melding of Anglo-Texan traditions and countercultural lifestyles. This strand of public memory reveres the Armadillo as a place in which "hippies" and "rednecks" closed the political, social, and generational gaps of the 1960s by coming together to revel in the joys of "good country music from Amarillo and Abilene." In doing so, these individuals created a new musical sub-genre known as "progressive country" (an amalgamation of honky-tonk, Western swing, folk, blues, rock and roll, and other influences), which would help redefine mainstream country music and provide a foundation for the "Americana" singer-songwriter tradition that continues to flourish in Texas today.

This story of the Armadillo World Headquarters as a place in which disparate social groups set aside their differences and joined together in common celebration of live music has been told often enough to become part of Austin's cultural mythology. Archived sources, oral histories, and personal memories go a long way in supporting this notion, but there are also discrepancies between the folklore and fact connected to the Armadillo.