SXSW co-founder Louis Meyers puts down roots in KC with Folk Alliance International

Even before he became one of South by Southwest’s four founders, Louis Meyers knew how things worked.

In 1987, the first year of the Austin, Texas, music conference, Meyers was working in that city as a promoter, manager, agent and talent booker. (He ran the 1,000-seat venue Liberty Lunch, which is now defunct.) Over the next seven years, the born-and-raised Austinite helped build South by Southwest into the country’s most vital destination for music-­industry insiders and their targets. Every spring, Meyers’ hometown was the place for labels and agents to convene and scope out the nation’s best new talent.

“The reason South by Southwest worked for the industry is because we took the time to be the A&R people,” Meyers says. “We cleared through thousands of showcase entries to find a few hundred acts that we felt were ready to be seen by the industry. It was critical to me personally that every act at South By was worth seeing, that nobody could walk away going, ‘How the hell did that band get booked at this thing?’ “

But by the eighth year of the fest, Meyers had grown frustrated. “That year, there were 640 acts, and my goal was to scale that back to around 500,” he says. “Now, of course, there’s 2,300 official acts. And what you lose by having that many acts is quality. You can’t prescreen all that talent efficiently and put it out in a way where the industry can digest it. And so I felt that the continued expansion of South By was — I don’t want to say greedy but find a nice way to say greedy.”

So, in 1994, Meyers sold his share of SXSW and, as he puts it, “retired.” In the years that followed, he lived on an island in Denmark; ran a music conference in New Orleans; moved to Amsterdam and put together a SXSW-style event for the Dutch government (it was marred by 9/11); and finally returned to Austin to run a 24/7 music TV channel.

Concurrent to some of these activities, Meyers was a member of Folk Alliance International, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting and celebrating folk music through education, networking and an annual three-day conference.

“I’d been going to their conference for about five years and bitching to the people in charge about all the ways it could be better,” Meyers says. “Finally, they said, ‘Put your money where your mouth is,’ and offered me the position of executive director. That was nine years ago.”

Until last year, Folk Alliance International kept its headquarters in Memphis. But the organization recently resettled in Kansas City. And its conference — which draws more than 2,000 registered participants for music showcases, panels, workshops and, now, a music camp — will be held at the Westin and Sheraton hotels at Crown Center through 2018. (The first KC-based conference is scheduled for February 19-23, 2014; Graham Nash is the keynote speaker.)

Meyers also now operates the Folk Store, at 509 Delaware in the River Market. Here, he sells vintage and new music equipment, with an emphasis on strings: guitars, dobros, ukuleles. (The shop has been gently opening over the past few weeks, but its grand opening is set for 10 a.m.–6 p.m. Saturday, August 24.)

“The store is our way of trying to get to know the community here,” Meyers says. “The conference is an international event, but it’s only one weekend a year. We want to make it easy for people to walk in and interact all 52 weeks of the year. We’re ultimately planning to do in-stores and meet-and-greets with musicians coming through town on gigs — things like that.”

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Why KC? Meyers cites some practical reasons: Crown Center, with its multiple hotels and attached Amtrak station, was ideal for the conference. The ease of booking Southwest Airlines flights in and out of KCI was also a factor. But he also liked what was already in place culturally.

“We looked at 32 other cities, and everything about KC worked,” he says. “There really wasn’t a close second.

“A big thing was that there seemed to be a demand for what we do here,” Meyers adds. “We were looking at whether there was a place for a local alternative community like the one we envision to grow. And there seems to be. And, obviously, there’s a lot of folk music happening here already — everything from shows with Sam Baker at the Folly to venues like Grinders and Knuckleheads and Davey’s Uptown. We also liked how much the local government seems to value the arts and music, whether it’s the Kauffman Center, the new ballet or 18th and Vine.”

In addition to revenue from membership, sponsorships, donations, conference entry fees, and the Folk Store, the alliance’s operating budget comes from state and local grants. It hasn’t yet received anything from ArtsKC or the Missouri Arts Council, but Meyers says his organization is exploring what’s available from economic-development and tourism offices.

“The access to funding was one of the reasons we chose KC, but we didn’t demand any money to make the move,” he says. “We’d rather prove ourselves by being a stable organization and letting the several million dollars a year, in economic impact the city will see from the convention, speak for itself.”

Meyers participated this year in the Mayor’s Task Force for the Arts, a series of meetings and brainstorming sessions that this summer yielded a long document outlining how KC’s arts and cultural future might play out. He says Mayor Sly James’ task force had looked to Austin as a role model — and he objected.

“I tend to take the role of pointing out what didn’t work there,” Meyers says. “We had eight years of a real-estate-driven City Council that sold everything to the highest bidder. It screwed the city. I watched the city get sold. Everything that had local ownership is now part of some conglomerate that could care less about what Austin was.”

He goes on: “Austin is unlivable now for the creative community. That was another thing that was appealing about KC: Artists can still affordably live here. I hope — and I think this current mayor gets it — that doesn’t change. I’m not trying to bring Austin to KC. KC doesn’t need Austin.”

Meyers’ vision for Folk Alliance International is, in many respects, antithetical to the corporate orgy that SXSW has become. He has modeled the nonprofit after the 1992 and ’93 versions of SXSW, when the fest was thriving but before it sprawled into a behemoth.

But it is also a very good time to be a folk organization — culturally and financially. Just 10 years ago, mandolins and banjos were confined to the periphery of popular music. Today, Mumford & Sons is the biggest band in the world. The Lumineers and the Avett Brothers sell out the kinds of large venues previously inhabited by rock acts. Retail banjo sales reached an all-time high in 2012. Eight years ago, the average Folk Alliance member was 50–55 years old. Today, he or she is 30–35.

“When I took this job, folk was not a very good word,” Meyers says. “It had no hip factor. People shied away from it. We’ve seen that change pretty rapidly over the past few years. I mean, Mumford is essentially a skiffle band, but to a lot of kids these days, they might as well be new-wave. There’s no fear of folk music and folk culture anymore.”

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But Meyers prefers to approach Folk Alliance International as an altruistic endeavor.

“In a lot of ways, we see ourselves as stewards of the word folk,” he says. “Our definition of folk is broad, and we’re OK with that. I love arguing with people who have degrees in folklore and ethnomusicology about what folk is. I know a guy who believes the day Alan Lomax turned on a tape recorder is the day traditional folk music died.

“It’s great that you want Rev. Gary Davis’ style to live on, but in my world, every single day marks a new day of traditional music,” he says. “The Beatles — they fit every criteria of traditional music. Anywhere you go, everybody can sing Beatles songs. You can sit down anywhere on the planet and play a Bob Marley song and people will know the words. That’s tradition. To me, that’s folk.”