In New Orleans, saxophonists or trumpeters on street corners joyfully groove to the city’s iconic jazz. Guitar-toting New Yorkers populate the subway, their cases popped open for tips while caterwauling a soulful “Wonderwall.” Human statues pose in Paris, with physical control putting Buckingham Palace guards to shame. Buskers, they’re called. Street performers adding vibrancy and life to a cityscape in exchange for any gratuities the public decides to give.

Now consider Houston. Take a walk downtown and observe the ambient sounds. There’s the perpetually skull-pounding rat-a-tat-tat of road construction, of course. Horns warning responsible sedan drivers that a speeding truck with bigger tires and a bigger attitude needs to ignore this stop sign. Chattering office workers in their eerily matching light blue dress shirts and khakis. Pigeons cooing and snapping their wings.

But where is the music? The performance? The intimate infusion of local arts into the background noise of Houston life? While busking was officially legalized in Houston over two years ago after the city lost a lawsuit, it has yet to find a foothold here. Perhaps the issue is—and always has been—less one of legality but rather, yet again, related to the city’s structural proclivity toward vehicular traffic.

“There’s no place for buskers when 99 percent of people are getting around in cars,” says local musician Anthony Barilla. “Busking happens in public spaces where people are passing through, and in the vast majority of cities that means by the subway station or at the bus stop or at the big open-air city square. Houston doesn’t have those places for the most part.”

Barilla moved to Houston in the mid-1990s after a stint in Milwaukee with his band at the time, though he was born in Austin and went to school in San Antonio. Music has always been a part of his life, being the son of musicians and having taken piano lessons as a child. He’s known primarily for his work as an accordionist and collaborations with the now-defunct experimental theater company Infernal Bridegroom Productions. He’s been busking off and on since the 1980s, even performing internationally. Houston, however, proved a logistical nightmare when he started giving it a shot here.

In a 2018 essay for the Houston Press, Barilla detailed his struggles with getting a permit to busk. He outlined the convoluted history behind the legal roller coaster that busking has been subjected to over the past century. Bands playing in public was outlawed in 1914. Versions of that ordinance stayed in place for much of the twentieth century. When downtown began its makeover in the 1990s, the practice was allowed, but only via permit and relegated exclusively to the Theater District—an area that covers a mere 17 blocks of downtown Houston’s 300 total. Performers had to pay $10 for a 30-day permit and $50 for a yearlong one, as well as securing written permission from the owners of any adjacent property.

Along with the heavy restrictions came communication issues with the City of Houston itself. Requests for permits wouldn’t be returned, Barilla says. Even when he showed up at the Houston Permitting Center on Washington Avenue, he received a polite-but-confused response. At least initially, nobody was familiar with the paperwork minefield needed to launch a busking practice in the city. Between the bureaucratic muddle, cost, hassle of securing permission from businesses, and extremely limited geography, it barely seemed worth pursuing.

It’s also possible that many Houston-area musicians didn’t attempt busking because they never had to. The practice can help supplement a performing arts career, creating opportunities to rehearse and promote oneself between more formalized gigs and staving off boredom while on tour. Barilla wrote in his editorial that busking allowed musicians to practice outside the lonely confines of home or a studio.

“[Busking has] always been part of [music], when there isn’t necessarily a consistent stage. Maybe that speaks to support that Houston has for the arts,” says Matt Harlan, a local singer-songwriter heavily involved in the historic folk scene at Montrose’s Anderson Fair. “People don’t feel pushed outside to have to fend for themselves.”

More opportunities to busk, however small a slice it may be of an artist’s overall performing mix, can open doors to other creative endeavors. Performance artist and poet T Lavois Thiebaud says they busk to “get in reps” and grow their discipline, likening it to going to the gym. They’ve received commissions from people they’ve busked for, even flying out to Seattle to write improvised poems at a wedding reception.

Musician William Larsen doesn’t like practicing at home, so he sits outside and entertains passersby. It’s not particularly profitable—Larsen notes that he can make “20-odd dollars an hour over the course of three hours, or…$9 over the course of three hours.”

The Lawsuit Begins

Busking was not entirely unsupported before the ordinance was lifted, of course. In 2021, the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs (MOCA) launched the Houston wing of the global initiative Make Music Day. Held in June, the event encourages musicians to set up free shows both inside and outside participating venues. Independent of a formal event, buskers could still be spotted downtown on occasion, or in spots like Menil Park and Hermann Park. But the ordinance had to go if the busking scene was to reach its full potential.

Barilla’s Houston Press article landed on the desk of Joshua Polk, an attorney for Pacific Legal Foundation, a national nonprofit dedicated to representing citizens when the government threatens their rights. He reached out to offer his services to fight the City of Houston in the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas. The permitting stood out as particularly appalling to Polk, even if the up-front cost wasn’t egregious.

“Whenever it comes to matters of freedom of expression, [fees] shouldn’t matter. You shouldn’t have to pay the government to express oneself,” Polk says.

During the case’s discovery phase, it was even found that one city official referred to the ordinance as “stupid.” Yet the City of Houston stood its ground when Barilla and Polk challenged it, responding that busking would cause congestion, confusion, and chaos in the streets. When the new anti-busking laws passed in the 1990s, the defense said, it was to help maintain order.

“It was a bit of a surprise to us that the city would defend it,” Polk says. “There was never any evidence, and this was admitted by the government in deposition, that those concerns were real, that there was some big problem with buskers flooding the streets and causing traffic and pedestrian movement problems.”

Because the defendant could not produce a strong enough argument in favor of keeping the ordinance on record, Anthony Barilla v. City of Houston clinched a valuable victory for the arts in the Bayou City on December 20, 2022. Busking was now fully legal in Houston.

The Aftermath

Barilla accomplished what many local musicians considered a Sisyphean task—convincing the city’s government to take artists’ concerns seriously.

“Good for him for actually getting out there and doing something, man, because that is difficult, and it is a very thankless labor of love,” says Shawn Parks, founder of Bojangles Music School, who mentions his own difficulties getting advisory boards to even listen, much less act.

Yet the ruling was also met by some degree of confusion. Harlan says he “didn’t know it was an issue until it became an issue.” He notes that the handful of performers who did busk never much minded the legality or illegality of it all, though he still considers Barilla’s successful suit a net positive for Houston’s creative community.

Thiebaud was also unaware that busking was ever outlawed in Houston. When they moved back here from Los Angeles, they continued their busking habit without stopping to consider if it was even legal. Their practice blends improv with poetry: Audiences give them a word and they create a poem on the spot using their trusty typewriter. And they’ve been doing it here for 11 years, well before Barilla even wrote his fateful article.

“I’ve busked in Rice Village, in Montrose. This was all before I even knew about the law. I never tried busking downtown,” they say. “I was getting permission by the places I would set up.”

They cite Agora, the area around Ninfa’s on Navigation, Urban Harvest Farmers Market, and other farmers markets as busking-friendly locations with good foot traffic and amenable businesses, so they never worried about getting fined or shooed away by police.

If you’re a Montrosian indulging in one of La Guadalupana’s beloved weekend brunches, you may find yourself treated to a sidewalk performance by Larsen. He sets up his amp and guitar out there on select weekends to serenade diners and passersby. He moved back to Houston from Austin in 2021, right in the middle of Barilla’s lawsuit. As Larsen was becoming aware of the ordinances in place, his tight, mutually beneficial relationship with the neighborhood-favorite Mexican restaurant kept him insulated from any legal intervention. Still, the two-year-old foundation afforded by the lawsuit has given local performers more flexibility when exploring options in the city.

“It is weird to sort of be on the frontier of finding out what places will be good to busk,” Larsen says.

“In my broader experience of business owners, I know plenty of people who think it would be wonderful to have a musician sitting outside their bar,” Barilla says of the hunt for an ideal spot to post up and get to playing, or writing, or singing, or any other performance. “There are also lots of businesspeople in town who I think would think it was wonderful, and, in fact, kind of a draw if you hear somebody playing some beautiful music, and that catches your eye, and then you notice that, hey, there’s a taco stand behind them, and I’m hungry.”

The Real Issues

But two years after Houstonians bid a none-too-fond farewell to the ordinance, have things improved all that much for buskers in the city? Established performers like Barilla, Thiebaud, and Larsen are still pounding the pavement and entertaining Houstonians, but have any new faces come to join them? There’s no hard data on whether busking has increased. Ask around, though, and it looks like more creatives are at least making an attempt.

“Since the City of Houston removed the prohibition from the city code, anecdotally it seems Houston has seen a slight rise in busking on our streets,” Mary Benton, Mayor John Whitmire’s chief of communications and senior advisor, said in an email. “Noticeably, corners at Jones Hall and Discovery Green, Metro stops, and parking lots have been turned into platforms for impromptu performances by local musicians.”

It’s certainly not the surge of unmitigated cacophony the city clutched its pearls over during the lawsuit. But a robust busking scene was never going to burst forth like a fully war-ready Athena from Zeus’s forehead regardless of how well publicized or significant Barilla’s win was. That’s simply not how street performing works.

“It’s definitely not exploding [in Houston]. We also don’t have the culture here. This is a thing that happens in other places because people see possibilities already around them,” he says. “People busk because they see other people busk. It takes a while to build up a culture of that happening.”

Even with the newly minted legality, both active and aspiring buskers still contend with numerous infrastructural and environmental challenges that prevent them from growing their practice. The swampy swelter of Gulf Coast weather is but one factor.

“Houston is inhospitable outside enough of the year that there are stretches in the summer where even La Guadalupana is going to be a pretty miserable place to try and sit outside to play guitar,” Larsen says.

The city’s very infrastructure ultimately stands more in the way of attracting and bringing together buskers than the law ever did. Barilla believes the lack of walkability contributes heavily to why busking isn’t as popular here as it is in denser cities. It’s difficult to find a spot with the right balance of foot traffic, space to set up shop, and electrical outlets for plugging in equipment, which is why Thiebaud and Larsen tend to stick with the farmers markets and the comparatively walkable parts of Rice Village and Montrose. This can also lead to difficulties in buskers connecting with one another to share insights on the best places to perform and businesses open to welcoming live music outside. When touring musicians ask Harlan where to busk before and between shows, he isn’t always sure what to tell them.

“Houston’s so sprawling and spread out, and sometimes it’s hard to find the other people who are like you,” Thiebaud says. “So I don’t really have a good awareness of other people right now, unfortunately. Maybe soon I will.”

Parks points out that Houston is a music city that doesn’t always do the best job of advertising itself as a music city. When touting what has been accomplished on the banks of these bayous, the STEM fields tend to receive a lot more attention.

“It’s a grown-up city. This is a city that puts men on the moon, powers the world, and cures cancer. When you do that, you don’t really lead with, ‘Oh man. The folk scene is also fantastic,’” Parks says. “But if you look at the history of Houston’s music, there’s so much that actually really comes from here.”

He also believes Houston lacks a cohesive sonic identity that attracts tourists. New Orleans with its jazz and zydeco, for example, or Nashville and country. Parks mentions La Mafia, ZZ Top, the overall hip-hop scene, and SugarHill Recording Studios as iconically Houston, but to nail down one particular style wouldn’t properly credit the world-class talents in another.

“It’s not because we have a lack of sound. It’s because Houston’s an international city. We have all kinds of different sounds. There’s great blues here. There’s great folk music here,” he says. “It is really reflective of the city. But that also makes it hard to market.”

What May Come

Local buskers could receive a boon from new and upcoming development projects. In March 2023, the City of Houston announced it would permanently shut down seven blocks of downtown to vehicular traffic. Coined the Main Street Promenade, the pedestrian walkway will stretch from Rusk to Commerce and feature dining, bar, retail, and other options meant to encourage more people to visit the area. Walkability and foot traffic: the two most desirable traits in a busking location.

“I think this is a wonderful step in the right direction of making Houston more walkable in general,” Barilla says. “It might encourage a bit more busking, but busking is just one minor side effect of having a more walkable city, where Houston citizens can interact with each other and their environment more directly, which can’t help but foster a stronger sense of community overall. If that includes a little more art and creativity as well, then that’s great, too.”

Not every new outdoors project is an instant venue, though. Lynn Wyatt Square opened in 2023, replacing the old Jones Plaza in the heart of the Theater District. Busking was built into the park’s design, with nooks for performers to post up. However, according to the park’s rules, they may do so only for “personal enjoyment” and not for cash. Any musicians hoping to accept tips at Lynn Wyatt Square have to first get permission from Houston First Corporation.

And while greater walkability, more green spaces, and public transportation all encourage busking, our elected officials and TxDOT continue to center a car-based philosophy in city planning, tearing up barely completed bike lanes and demolishing what little remains of the East End’s Old Chinatown to expand I-45.

There are other ways to help bring in more busking in the meantime. Parks believes that more overarching support for local music could help establish a trellis for a robust busking scene to climb up. More gigs, more publicists, more relevant businesses can all bring in and build out musicians who may organically fill the city’s footpaths with their gifts. Even individual Houstonians can help.

“I think it’s really meaningful when a customer reaches out as the go-between, between a venue or a business and a busker. If somebody really loves an artist…then they make an extra call to that farmers market and say, ‘Hey, this is the website of this great person I love. You should have them here,’” Barilla says. “That really does make stuff happen in Houston, and it’s very special when people do it.”

Let businesses, parks, markets, and other artist-friendly spaces know that street performance is wanted. For Barilla, the man whose dedication fought the law—and the law didn’t win—one of the best ways to facilitate more busking is to simply ask for it.