About Asylum Street Spankers

The Asylum Street Spankers, formed in Austin, Texas in 1994, is an American old-timey, swing, jazz, and dirty-blues band. Their tone is often raucous and irreverent. For many years, they performed their show acoustically, without any type of amplification at all. The band derived its name from an Austin street where they would often busk that was nicknamed Asylum Street, now named Guadalupe Street, and the term "spanker" which is an old musician's term for "one who plays his instrument vigorously and proficently". It was along Guadalupe that the group played a number of early shows; Asylum Street led (and still leads) to a state asylum.