Robert Shaw

Musician. Neighbor. Austin legend.

Robert Shaw spent decades behind the counter of the Stop and Swat Grocery store on East Austin's 22nd Street, but anyone who knew him knew the register was just a day job. The real draw was the upright piano he kept in the back. Bertram Allen, BCDC's retired maintenance staffer and a neighborhood historian, still remembers stopping by as a kid and watching Shaw step away from the counter, sit down at the keys, and play. The Salty Sow restaurant now occupies that same corner. The Robert Shaw Echo Village, BCDC's 8-unit elderly housing complex, stands nearby in his honor.

Robert Shaw

A Life in Music

Robert "Fud" Shaw was born on August 9, 1908, in Stafford, Texas, the son of farm owners Jesse and Hettie Shaw. The family owned a Steinway grand piano, and his sisters took lessons, but his father refused to let him near it. Shaw learned anyway, sneaking in practice sessions whenever his family was out of the house. The first song he taught himself was "Aggravatin' Papa Don't You Try to Two-Time Me."

As a teenager he made his way to Houston, drawn to the jazz musicians performing in clubs and roadhouses around the city. He found a piano teacher, paid for lessons with his own earnings, and began absorbing the barrelhouse style coming out of the Fourth Ward. By the 1920s he was traveling the "Santa Fe Circuit," a loose network of musicians who moved between Texas towns on freight trains, playing clubs, roadhouses, and any venue that would have them. He performed across the state, from Sugarland to Dallas, and ventured as far as Chicago, Kansas City, and Oklahoma City, where he hosted a radio show in 1933.

Austin became his home. He met Martha Landrum there in 1936, and they married on December 22, 1939. He had two children from a previous marriage, a daughter named Verna Mae and a son named William. In Austin, Shaw built a life that was equal parts music and community. He opened the Stop and Swat, ran it for decades alongside Martha, and in 1962 was named Austin's Black businessman of the year. He kept that old upright piano at the store and played it every day, for himself and for anyone who wandered in.

On Record

In 1963, Shaw recorded an album called Texas Barrelhouse Piano, produced by Robert "Mack" McCormick. Arhoolie Records later reissued it under the title The Ma Grinder, the name of his most celebrated piece. The album also included "The Cows" and the characteristically irreverent "Whores Is Funky," songs that had circulated for years but were considered too raw to release until then. Additional recordings followed in the 1970s and 1980s on the Arhoolie, Document, and Wolf labels.

Shaw had a particular way of describing what his music was for. "When you listen to what I'm playin'," he once said, "you got to see in your mind all them gals out there swingin' their butts and gettin' the mens all excited. Otherwise you ain't got this music rightly understood."

Back on Stage

In 1967, seven years before he retired from the grocery business, Shaw returned to performing. The second chapter of his career took him further than the first. He played the Kerrville Folk Festival, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the Smithsonian Institution's American Folk Life Festival, and the World's Fair Expo in Canada. He performed in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and at the Berlin Jazz Festival. In 1973 he shared the stage with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band at the Austin Aqua Festival. In 1981 he turned up unexpectedly in California to help celebrate Arhoolie Records' 20th anniversary.

He was preparing to join the Texas Music Tour for the state's sesquicentennial celebration when he died of a heart attack in Austin on May 16, 1985. He was 76. A funeral service was held at Ebenezer Baptist Church, and he was buried at Capital Memorial Gardens. Two weeks later, the Texas State Senate passed a resolution honoring his contribution to the state's musical heritage. In 2009 he was inducted into the Austin Music Memorial.