On closer examination, though, the counterculture's attraction to jazz makes sense and brings us to the final point to be derived from the calendar of acts to perform at the Armadillo World Headquarters. Common aesthetics join the performance of each of these generic forms by the Austin counterculture, whether at the Vulcan, Soap Creek Saloon, the Armadillo, or any of the myriad musical venues that sprouted across Texas during the 1970s. This article has gone to great lengths to distinguish among the genres popular in the Austin music scene over the decade of the 1970s. However, the countercultural interpretation of each of these (country, blues, rock, folk, jazz) rested in a parallel coupling of written expression to improvisation and sincere performance to technical brilliance. In this regard, the Austin scene exhibited qualities then characteristic of the broader field of popular music in the 1970s.

To place Willie Nelson's performance of "Bloody Mary Morning" on the Austin City Limits pilot episode alongside Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart's "Muffin Man" from Bongo Fury and next to the live tracks from Freddie King's Larger than Life recorded at the Armadillo, is to begin to understand something of the structural and performative similarities that belied the stylized poses of genre performance in the 1970s. Each was true, in a sense, to its genre, whether country or rock or blues, but their shared audience at the Armadillo should be no mystery. As native Texan (and former member of the highly successful band, The Monkees) Michael Nesmith predicted in Jan Reid's seminal study of progressive country, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, "'There's another coming trend.... The development of music music, instead of country music, rhythm-and-blues music and so forth. The lines are becoming very cloudy, very obscure.'"

The Austin scene's larger contribution to the national narratives of the 1970s lay in these artists' attempts to bridge and combine genres in ways that would sketch a future "Americana" field, with one eye toward collective tradition and another toward individual experiment and expression. The celebrated union of "hippies" and "rednecks" at the Armadillo can too easily be overplayed, but this is the larger kernel of truth from which it developed. The counterculture's quest for authentic, experimental expression made its peace with the traditional forms of Texas music and saw in them something valuable, aesthetically pleasing, instructive, and, well, fun.