Remembering the Old Vienna Kaffeehaus, the tiny suburban venue that could

One wintry Thursday night in the late 1980s, Don White went to the open mic night at a venue he’d been hearing fellow singer-songwriters rave about: The Old Vienna Kaffeehaus in Westborough. The club was packed, but White was the last act to appear, and by the time he went on there was barely anyone left except for club booker Timothy Mason and emcee Robert Haigh. After his long drive home to Lynn, White told his wife “I’m not going there again. That place sucks!”

The next day, Mason called White and offered him a slot opening for blues legend Taj Mahal. “I had never opened for anyone. So I said ‘I was just out there last night – I loved that place,’” he laughs. White and his funny but poignant songs soon became a regular presence at the club, appearing on a Smithsonian Folkways-reissued compilation recorded at the club, and today says he owes his career to the venue, which operated from 1986 to 1996. He’s not the only one: Grammy winner and Taylor Swift collaborator Lori McKenna first sang in public at the Old Vienna’s open mic, and on that same night, there were several other acts who would become a significant part of the local folk scene.

Now, nearly 30 years after it closed, the Old Vienna’s legacy is being celebrated with a revival/gathering on Saturday, Aug. 17, in nearby Hopkinton, as well as an ongoing archival project. The reunion event includes music from Old Vienna regulars like McKenna, White, Christine Lavin, groundbreaking harpist Deborah Henson-Conant, guitarist Duke Levine (who now plays with Bonnie Raitt), and many others. Even the sound engineer will have an Old Vienna connection: Todd Winmill’s first time running sound was at the coffeehouse before he went onto a career in Hollywood.

Henson-Conant had largely been playing jazz venues before she dragged her six-foot concert harp up the stairs to the Old Vienna’s second story music room. She says that she encountered an open-minded audience. “I felt okay adding another part to me. Instead of just having to be a jazz player, I could be singing with and interacting with the audience,” she says. “Even when I’m playing with symphony orchestras, that's an element that I still bring to all of my shows, and it came from the safety of being in that environment.”

Co-owner Pam Graves had hired Mason to work at the Coffee Kingdom in Worcester before she opened the Austrian-Hungarian restaurant that occupied the first floor. (Service during shows could be notoriously slow as wait staff had to carry every meal up the stairs.) Mason says early concerts by Irish balladeers the Shaw Brothers and folk icon Ramblin’ Jack Elliott helped put the Old Vienna on the radar of touring artists. In a larger market, Mason says, a venue might have specialized in just folk, comedy or jazz, but with no other venue in town he was able to present a wide mix of sounds.

It’s hard to believe that such major musical figures as Bill Monroe, Kris Kristofferson, Gil Scott-Heron, Ani DiFranco, Alison Krauss and Townes Van Zandt all played a 120-seat room in MetroWest, but they were just a few of the major names who appeared on the calendars that went out to a mailing list of 10,000 in the days before online promotion. The low-ceilinged room was so small that both White and Henson-Conant say if the artist onstage stuck their foot out they risked knocking a plate or glass off of the front table.

But for all of the star power that filled the room on weekends, it was the weekly open mic and the community that it spawned that seems to be most remembered all these years later. Some participants, like Dar Williams and Ellis Paul, became prominent folk artists, while others simply enjoyed the chance to perform in front of their songwriting peers.

Haigh admits that he had “maybe attended one open mic in my entire life” before he started hosting the Old Vienna’s Thursday night affair. “I usually had something meaningful to say about every artist,” he says, recalling that his goal was to make every performer feel encouraged and welcome regardless of how developed their skills may have been. “And it led to a point where we were standing room only, and most of that was not performers. It was just people coming because they know they’d get their money's worth and see an amazing show, and it led to so many people that passed through that stage having a career.”

“I thought every place was like that, where they would build you up,” says White, “but there were hardly no other places like that with a system built in to take someone out of the open mic and then become an opener and have them build a career within the club.”

The club closed in 1996 with a New Year’s Eve concert by blues guitarist Ronnie Earl. At the time, The Boston Globe cited financial hurdles being faced by the family-owned small business. Many of those playing at the reunion are still active on the acoustic music circuit and share a memory of when Westborough was the unlikely center of the folk universe.

“Being the age that I am, that there will be people there that I have not seen in a long time, and there may be people there that I might not see again,” says White.

The Old Vienna Kaffeehaus Revival takes place Saturday, Aug. 17 from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. in Hopkinton. For full event details and to RSVP, click here.