So, while progressive country declined as the privileged genre at the Armadillo, what arose to act as country's complement? The second main point to be derived from the list of acts to play the Armadillo is a somewhat obvious one that bears repeating nonetheless-progressive country was not alone. Blues preceded country as the dominant genre at the Armadillo, and some variant of psychedelic rock, or at least florid, counter-culturally- inflected rock and roll, provided the venue's lingua franca throughout. These two forms regained much of their stature as the initial wave of progressive country subsided around 1975.

In fact, the Armadillo World Headquarters' status as a countercultural space (the hippie side of the hippie-redneck confluence) dates to the venue's very origins in Texas psychedelia. The core of the venue's early personnel and audience overlapped significantly with the Vulcan Gas Company, and the list of acts to play the Armadillo in 1970 does not look so different from that of the acts playing the Vulcan before it closed earlier that same year. Shiva's Headband, the artists who had been in some ways the Vulcan's house band, served in practically the same role at the Armadillo in 1970 and 1971, playing more than any other act during that period.

The number of artists explicitly identified with late 1960s psychedelia declined over time, but that period's aesthetics, concerns, and musical language remained the primary backdrop for each of the hybrid genres (country-rock, blues- rock, folk-rock, and jazz-rock) that took the Armadillo stage. This observation matters, as the traditional music styles that are often read as the "redneck" side of the hippie-redneck equation frequently encompassed elements of folk-rock or bluegrass that had a broad audience in the American counterculture, rather than the hard country that actually had quite limited representation in the Armadillo scene.

In the same vein, blues also preceded country as a dominant genre at the Armadillo World Headquarters. Here, too, the Armadillo built on countercultural foundations laid by the Vulcan Gas Company. At that venue, African-American blues acts included James Cotton, Sleepy John Estes, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin' Hopkins, Freddie King, Mance Lipscomb, Fred McDowell, Jimmy Reed, Big Mama Thornton, Muddy Waters, and Big Joe Williams. In fact, after regional psychedelic and blues-rock acts, these blues performers easily rate among the artists most frequently appearing there. What first distinguished the experimental bent of the Armadillo was its addition of country-inflected music to this mix of blues and psychedelia. Indeed, perceptions of a shift from a blues-oriented to a country-oriented mode of performance over 1973 and 1974 in the eyes of local, white blues artists contributed directly to Clifford Antone's founding of a downtown club explicitly for blues acts in 1975.

Prior to the progressive country explosion, though, the Armadillo had served as a regional node of the blues revival, picking up where the Vulcan left off and developing ongoing relationships with such Texas artists as Lightnin' Hopkins, Robert Shaw, Mance Lipscomb, and Freddie King. Al "TNT" Braggs, Lowell Fulson, Etta James, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Big Joe Turner, too, put in appearances in the early years. These musicians served as mentors for aspiring white blues artists in the local audience, including Paul Ray and the Cobras, Storm, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, the Nightcrawlers, and various other acts that comprised the early careers of such notable white blues players as Doyle Bramhall, Denny Freeman, and Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Even as the blues scene sprouted rival centers of gravity in venues such as Antone's and the One Knite, blues performance remained at a fairly stable level on par with the level of country-influenced performance through most of the Armadillo's history.

A third conclusion to be derived from the calendar of performances at the Armadillo is that, by decade's end, the Armadillo World Headquarters became the Central Texas hub of jazz performance. The discrepancy between the common perception of who performed at the Armadillo and the list of acts that actually did is perhaps most evident when it comes to jazz, a genre not typically associated with the club or with the larger Austin scene at the time. Yet jazz played a major role in the Armadillo's middle and later years. Typically, participants explain this with the change in the venue's leadership. The club's ongoing financial troubles convinced Eddie Wilson to leave in 1976, and he turned over management to Hank Alrich.