FYI - FOR TRIED & TRUE WARRIORS
Jerry Jeff's Tried & True Foundation - A Report to the Fans
Susan's Update for SPRING 2003:
This year’s birthday was another great success - big thanks to all the fans who attended!
We are still actively pursuing the realization of the vocational school for popular music, hopefully here in Austin, TX. We are receiving continuous support and encouragement from the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, our sister school in England, and its executive director, Mark Featherstone-Witty, who has joined our board of directors.
We did briefly hire a development director last year, but soon learned we had moved too quickly. We have more organizational work to do before that post is cost-effective. We are back to building our board and fundraising, while targeting foundations geared towards education/arts in the first phase of a capital campaign.
Most of our money continues to come from contributions guided to us from our fans! We received a call last fall from Steve Sellery of the Golf Channel, who wanted to make the school the beneficiary of a Pro-Am tournament the channel was bringing to Austin, in exchange for putting together a Pickin' Party for the final night. With the help of our talented friends in Austin: Steve Fromholz, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Ray Benson, Turk Pipkin, Harry Anderson, Pat Green, and of course Jerry Jeff and Django - we knocked them out with great music and lots of laughs. All this fun while raising $50,000 for the school - not to mention all the great exposure on the Golf Channel. Hopefully, this relationship will continue and we can look forward to more great times and exposure for the school.
I would also like to acknowledge Vinson & Elkins law firm, who has taken our Foundation as pro bono work, and continues to steer us on the straight and narrow. Also, many thanks to Danny Powell at Powell, Ebert & Smolik for donating time to the school, keeping us on the up and up with the IRS and our 501(c) 3 status.
We raised another $13,000 for the Tried & True Foundation at this year’s silent auction, and we thank those who contributed to our event. With those funds, we have $163,000 in the Tried & True Foundation - all ear marked for the school.
Thank you all so much for your ongoing support, and please keep us in mind when you hear of fundraising possibilities. As I mentioned, our fans have been the driving force for donations, even sending us matching grant information from their companies, and realizing the great cause and need we have. Times are tough out there now and it is certainly going to take more time than I originally thought to make this school a reality, but we remain dedicated.
The site is moving along, and we should know before the Spring if we will be able to secure the building we have targeted. We have some of Austin’s best architects and real estate experts helping us.
Finally, we anticipate having 501(c)(3) status for the school itself in the Spring. In the meantime we can accept donations through the Tried & True Foundation. All donations will do directly to the seed funds to make the school a reality. While we are years away from opening doors, those who so generously support the school play a large part in the founding of a truly unique school for musicians from around the world.
Susan
www.austinsound.org
Your Continued Support Is Needed
For the time being, the primary funding for the Foundation comes from events surrounding Jerry Jeff’s Birthday Weekend.
The biggest such fundraiser has become the Silent Auction held at the Driskill during the reception following Saturday night’s Paramount concert. You can be a huge help in our labors by contributing items for the auction and by suggesting items you would like to see in the auction. We are not too proud to say that we relish the idea of your putting expensive, valuable, unique items up for bid to help us out. After all, Jerry Jeff’s attic and closet are getting very close to being depleted. We need your help.
We continue to offer the Paramount box seats and limited prime seating in the theatre in return for contributions to the Foundation. Please give us a call if interested. These contributions are in the $1,000 range and have been very well received.
With only the Silent Auction as the primary source of funding for the Foundation at the moment, we urge you to help us by donating auction items. And we ask you to drop by the auction tables between drinks, stay long, bid high, bid often, bid high, outbid your friends and take home some memorable treasures.
1986 -2001 : Fifteen Years of Tried & True
In 1986, Jerry Jeff was a man without a contract. Touring audiences still enjoyed his shows, but he was burned out on the entire mentality that accompanied the "record bidness." His last major-label album, Cowjazz, had come out four years previously and the last thing he wanted to do was jump back on the star-making merry-go-round.
But he still wanted to make his music available for people to enjoy. So he and his wife Susan sat around the kitchen table, so to speak, and dreamed up Tried & True Music. Susan was the president and manager; Jerry Jeff was the creative spark plug and chief-cook-and-bottle-washer. Jerry Jeff recorded the Gypsy Songman album in his music room out at the Oak Hill house, Susan had a bunch of cassettes of the session run off to sell at shows, and T&TM was off to the races.
More than fifteen years later, T&TM is just one part of a multi-media enterprise that includes CDs and tapes (eleven albums so far, and counting), T-shirts and assorted merchandise and a 50,000 plus-member fan club, the Tried & True Warriors--that's you guys.
In addition, Susan founded Goodknight Music, Jerry Jeff's management company, and Tried & True Artists, which handles his bookings. Now, with the publication of the Jerry Jeff Walker Songbook, Vol. 1, we seem to have launched Tried & True Press. And since we've started going to Belize, that makes us a multi-national corporation. As Hondo Crouch used to say, "Scare me!"
None of it would have been possible without the ceaseless help and enthusiasm of the Tried & True Warriors. As Susan and Jerry Jeff say, it's like having 40,000 booking agents coast to coast.
Even on the best days, we're making it up as we go along. Dogs run in and out of the office and loll about under the fax machine; the president of the company goes barefoot nine months out of the year; and though we manage a country music artist, we may not call Nashville once a month (and vice-versa).
What keeps it all going is Jerry Jeff's determination to produce his music as close to the bone and true to the moment as he can manage. On an average day, he may get up, fix some coffee, take his son Django to school, surf the Internet, sign some pictures, and do a couple of phone interviews. There is a lot of guitar playing and songwriting that goes on between the cracks. Every day.
What he needs, for the most part, is a record company that will stay out of his way and yet be totally responsive to his creative needs. For better or worse, that's what we've constructed here at Tried & True. We've been happy to have you all along for the ride!
