Austin

In Photos: A Look Back at the Early Days of SXSW

KUT 90.5 | By Andrew Weber

Published March 18, 2015 at 2:03 PM CDT

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Roland Swenson at the second installment of SXSW.

Austin History Center

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The very first SXSW Music lineup.

Via Traveling Hymns

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A South By staffer organizes the schedule for the music portion of the festival on a whiteboard.

Arts + Labor, via YouTube

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Long-time poster artist Nels "Jagmo" Jacobson designed the logo for SXSW. He initially wanted to tag each fest with Roman numerals, but that idea was shot down before the third installment.

Courtesy of Nels Jacobson

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A comparatively tame crowd of fest-goers in the Austin Convention Center.

Arts + Labor, via YouTube

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A shot of an early SXSW Music schedule, which features Billy Ray Cyrus (whose name is misspelled). Believe it or not, Cyrus got big after his performance at SXSW.

Arts + Labor, via YouTube

Today marks the beginning of SXSW Music — the final stretch of the three-headed chimera of a festival that draws in droves of music-loving revelers and fills the streets of downtown Austin with both music and traffic.

With that in mind, this edition of Wayback Wednesday looks at the fest's earliest days, with images courtesy of Arts + Labor's 2011 documentary "Outside the Industry: The Story of SXSW," as well as posters from SXSW's first art director (and logo designer) Nels "Jagmo" Jacobson and the Austin History Center's photo archives.