I have lived in Austin for almost 10 years now. Now my reasons for moving here are many, and in the end it boiled down to my career (I’m in tech, don’t judge me). One of the main reasons Austin came on my radar was a teenage viewing of Richard Linklater’s seminal ode to Austin and it’s specific brand of laziness, Slacker. But even before then my love of PBS brought it to my attention through the show Austin City Limits.

Time Life those purveyors of interesting educational material and DVD collections have scooped up a nice collection of the PBS distributed ACL TV show, going back to the pilot in 1974, grabbed some of the best country episode, and put it together in a 10 disc collection.

This set contains not so much episodes, but “performances”. So you go all the way back to 1974, with Willie Nelson’s first performance with Blue Eyes Crying and you get all the classic old school country stars like Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, etc. This leads into the 1980’s and 1990’s with the more popular country stars of those eras. Admittedly, this is where I tune out, as this is the opposite of my cup of tea. Those old more outlaw and classic country singers though, that is worth the price right there.

Now as this is an A/V site I’ll give it to you straight. For a DVD the quality is solid. Most of the episode are 1:33:1 as should be expected, on modern TV’s this means you’ll have black bars on the sides of the screen. But that being said as many TV’s are moving to 4k some of these will look less than great on modern screens. On my TV these looked passable, but not as good as they would have looked previously. Still if you’re still using a 1080p screen, it should look fine.