Megan Navarro
BUDA — Families and other music enthusiasts can support Texas artists through a monthly live music event held in downtown Buda.
Hosted from 7-9 p.m. every fourth Friday at Meridian, Southbound Music Series is a partnership between the city of Buda, the Buda Economic Development Corporation and Sun Radio. Offering an avenue to celebrate Texas music and support downtown business, the event was also created to brand the city of Buda as a cultural destination.
Sun Radio has partnered with Güero’s Taco Bar on South Congress in Austin for at least 15 years for a similar music series every Wednesday night. Growing up in Austin and seeing how that increased foot traffic in and around the restaurant, Brian Dyer, assistant director of development and recruitment for Buda EDC, decided to pitch bringing the idea — but on a once-a-month scale, rather than weekly — to the city of Buda.
Dyer said that the shows held as part of the series will help showcase all that Buda has to offer, drive more foot traffic downtown and support neighboring businesses.
“Each event is bringing out about 100 people, even in its early stages, where people hang out afterwards and come downtown earlier, before the show starts and get dinner. So, it's to drive that foot traffic and help out surrounding businesses, as well,” he said.
“What we have with [Meridian] is like a marketing agreement for the duration of the shows that will be held there and that means you have to really be working with other downtown businesses and other businesses throughout greater Buda to be promoting them,” Dyer continued. “That's something that Meridian is doing each month; they partner and collaborate with a downtown business and then, another business in the city to really highlight them on social media, give them a space at Meridian if they want to be there to talk about their product or their services and just kind of make sure that we're helping grow those connections between businesses, so they can help each other out.”
This series also aligns with the city of Buda being designated by the Texas Music Office (TMO) as a Music Friendly Texas Certified Community earlier this year.
“We're supporting the artists. We're supporting the culture and clearly, just working making sure that we show that we deserve to be a certified music-friendly community,” Dyer said.
There have been two shows since the origination of the series, with The Mighty Orq, who focuses on Blues and American roots, in May and then, DEADMAN, which is a Texas-based Americana band known for a sound that blends gospel, rock and southwestern soul in June. So far, all of the artists have been local to Texas.
“There’s always food, there’s drinks and basically an opportunity to sit back and just listen to really great curated music … It could be Texas jazz, Tejano, soul, just whatever makes Texas Texas in my mind; that's a wide variety of different cultural musical influences. So, [people] can sit out back and hear one, a great band and while the show's going, Sun Radio has a DJ there who is, in between songs, plugging other things,” Dyer explained. “Just like you hear any sort of live broadcast, engage with [and] ask questions of the bands as an interview throughout the show.”
From 7-9 p.m. Friday, July 25, Tameca Jones will be the next performing artist in the Southbound Music Series at Meridian, located at 200 N. Main Street, Buda.
This family-friendly event is free and will also be broadcast live on www.SunRadio.com
Stay up-to-date on Buda events at www.budatx.gov.
