TAYLOR — When the Black Sparrow Music Parlor reopens on April 6, downtown Taylor will get its living room back.
Shannon Bagent, the owner and founder of the venue at 113 W. Second St., chose the first Saturday in April for her reprise to support the Taylor Studio Tour debut the same day.
Bolstering the creative community by offering a “third place” that facilitates creative expression has always been Bagent’s vision. She wrote about it in notebooks while touring as a production manager for concerts and music festivals long before first opening Black Sparrow in 2016.
Though Bagent’s commitment to fostering creativity and connection remains, the 2024 iteration of Black Sparrow is cozier and quieter. Where in the past there was late-night floorboard-rattling heavy metal, now there will be coffee (and also Texas Beer Co. suds on tap), conversation, contemplation and, of course live, music and live radio broadcasting from the in-house KBSR|Black Sparrow Radio studio.
In January 2023, Black Sparrow — then operated by Greenhouse Craft Food owner Rob Snow in a subleasing agreement with Bagent — had to close down, a situation that only compounded grief that had started earlier for Bagent.
“I suffered some personal major losses in the year leading up to us closing,” Bagent said. “A partner died unexpectedly and that was followed closely by my little brother’s suicide. Those two losses changed my perspective and healing became my priority in 2023, and while I was processing through my grief, I gave myself time and space to decide what to do with Black Sparrow.”
She chose to create a coffee and beer bar, similar to Austin venues she’d known after moving to Central Texas in the 1990s from her hometown of Anahuac near Houston and the Gulf Coast.
The Sparrow, as it’s come to be known, will operate 2-10 p.m. Thursday through Sunday.
But even during its 15-month closure, Black Sparrow didn’t remain completely shuttered. In April 2023, Bagent reached out to Stephen Belyeu, host of the paranormal investigation podcast “The Night Owl,” because she was interested in having Belyeu and his team investigate her building.
During a conference call, Belyeu mentioned the medium on his podcast had moved on to pursue independent work. Two weeks later, in an unrelated call, that medium reached out to Bagent, noting she recently had been near Black Sparrow and couldn’t shake this compulsion to look deeper.
“She came out with four other psychics and they did a reading on the building,” Bagent said. “The main thing that they all kept saying was that this building was asking for me to bring the people back in.”
At the time, the entrepreneur decided to open the doors every Sunday and “give everything away for free so that I could see what I wanted to do next — hence ‘Sunday Service.’” She added, “I wanted to see if there was a community here for me to serve and if I could do that after I had experienced deep grief. People gave back three-times fold: they brought food, they brought board games, they brought stories, they brought their own ingredients to mix and share drinks and they left tips, unsolicited, and the greatest reward of it was to see the surprise on people’s faces when they walked in for the first time.”
The last Sunday Service was in December. Bagent began the new year excited to regain creative control of BSMP and infuse it with her own deep-dive interests such as coffee and ‘zines, or fan-made magazines.
“I’m going to coffee school in Dallas, for my own thrills,” Bagent said about enrolling in the weeklong barista-certification program offered by White Rock Coffee, dubbed “coffee college” by her friend and former bartender, Jarred Brown.
“I always felt like the coffee shop in every community defined the counterculture or subculture of that community,” Bagent said.
Bagent likened a community coffee shop to a ‘zine or a journal.
“That feels like my natural role in a community is to be those blank pages that people from that community can fill with their own thoughts and needs and stories and laughter and tears,” she said.
The term “third place,” coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book “The Great Good Place,” refers to comfortable spots outside of work and home, including cafes and coffee shops.
The music parlor has closed twice since 2016. From March 2020 to July 2021, the pandemic forced the venue to shut down, and during that time the online Black Sparrow Radio|KBSR was forged as sort of a multimedia third place. Bagent recruited radio hosts during the worldwide downtime that was 2020. She quickly built up a roster of volunteer “Free Range DJs” to host live and prerecorded shows from home studios, and Bagent taught herself how to get an internet-based radio station up and running.
The online station can be found at https://www.blacksparrowmusicparlor.com/radio.
When the venue reopened in the summer of 2021, Bagent and other KBSR deejays broadcast live shows from “the booth” in-house. One of those shows was “Load in Live,” which gave listeners a chance to catch soundbites and on-air banter as the parlor filled for music shows. During broadcasts, DJs interviewed band members.
Though the idea was Bagent’s, Taylor resident Rory Smith (also known as “Storytime”) and Billy Gartner of Hutto made the show format their own.
Bagent plans to bring back the “Load in Live” shows on KBSR.
“Being in the booth, you’re kind of in the fish tank is what I’ve heard people say, but I consider them in the fish tank,” Gartner said. “People are interested in it and you pull them in and put them on the radio and it makes for a whole nice kind of interaction.”
In so many ways, Bagent plays an important role in the community, local leaders said.
“Shannon is a force of nature and a bundle of energy,” Mayor Brandt Rydell said. “Her enthusiasm is infectious. And through the Black Sparrow, she’s done a lot to bring people together and challenge preconceived notions outsiders might have of what Taylor is about.”
Shortly after BSMP closed in 2023, Bagent arrived and found a wooden sign bearing a quote from Charles Bukowski — her literary hero and the inspiration for the name of her business — affixed with screws to the exterior of her building, which has received Texas Historic Landmark designation.
The sign from an anonymous fan read, “I want so much that is not here and I do not know where to go.”
Bagent wept on the spot. “Somebody cared enough about my literary hero to make art by quoting that and came to do it in the middle of the night without wanting any credit,” she said.
The sign is just one more artistic act she and her third place have inspired, from radio shows and live recordings to a rock opera created and staged by Taylor resident Ben Sands and even a song, “That Beautiful Place,” written by her late partner, musician Jefferson Brown.
“As much as the town needs the Black Sparrow, it also needs Shannon running it,” said Jojo Bone, a Taylor resident, KBSR deejay and Black Sparrow regular. “She knows everybody in town and it just emphasizes that it’s the place where you go to stay in touch with Taylor.”
Bone said Bagent’s role as a community ambassador and amplifier takes on even more significance with the changes heralded by the multibillion-dollar investment Samsung Austin Semiconductor is making in Taylor. The South Korean-owned chipmaking plant on the outskirts of the city is adding thousands of jobs and residents to the region.
“The town needs a keeper of its soul or it could become kind of sterile. With all this growth you need a place that is the keeper of the soul of the town and Shannon is that person,” Bone added.
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