On a wintry Thursday night in the late 1980s, Don White went to an open mic night at a place he had heard other singer-songwriters rave about: the Old Vienna Coffee House in Westborough. The club was packed, but White was the last to perform, and when he did, there was hardly anyone else there except club booker Timothy Mason and host Robert Haigh. After his long drive home to Lynn, White said to his wife, “I’m not going there anymore. That place sucks!”

The next day, Mason White called and offered him a slot opening for blues legend Taj Mahal. “I’d never opened for anyone before. So I said, ‘I was just there last night—I love this place,'” he laughs. White and his witty but poignant songs soon became a regular at the club, appearing on a Smithsonian Folkways reissued compilation recorded at the club. Today, he says he owes his career to the venue, which operated from 1986 to 1996. He’s not the only one: Grammy-winning singer and Taylor Swift collaborator Lori McKenna sang publicly for the first time at Old Vienna’s open mic, and several other acts that would become a significant part of the local folk scene performed that same night.

Now, nearly 30 years after its closure, Old Vienna’s legacy is being celebrated with a revival/reunion on Saturday, August 17, in nearby Hopkinton, as well as an ongoing archive project. The reunion event will include music from Old Vienna regulars such as 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 a connection to Old Vienna: Todd Winmill first handled sound before launching a career in Hollywood.

Henson-Conant had played mostly in jazz venues before lugging her 6-foot concert harp up the stairs to the second-floor music room at Old Vienna. She says she found a receptive audience there. “I had no problem taking on another role. Instead of just having to be a jazz musician, I could sing and interact with the audience,” she says. “Even when I play with symphony orchestras, that’s an element I bring to all my performances, and it came from the safety I felt in that environment.”

Co-owner Pam Graves had hired Mason to work at Coffee Kingdom in Worcester before opening the Austro-Hungarian restaurant downstairs. (Service during shows could be notoriously slow, as wait staff had to carry each meal up the stairs.) Mason says early concerts by Irish balladeers Shaw Brothers and folk icon Ramblin’ Jack Elliott helped put Old Vienna on the radar of touring artists. In a larger market, Mason says, a venue might have specialized only in folk, comedy or jazz, but since there was no other venue in town, he was able to showcase a broad mix of sounds.

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

But despite all the stars that packed the hall on the weekends, it was the weekly open mic and the community that came from it that seems to be most remembered after all these years. Some attendees, like Dar Williams and Ellis Paul, went on to become well-known folk artists, while others simply enjoyed the chance to perform in front of their fellow songwriters.

Haigh admits he’d “been to an open mic maybe once in my whole life” before he started hosting the Thursday night event at Old Vienna. “I usually had something meaningful to say to every artist,” he says, recalling that his goal was to make every artist feel encouraged and welcome, no matter how advanced their skills were. “And that got to the point where we had standing room only, and most of it wasn’t artists. It was just people who came because they knew they were going to get something for their money and see a great show, and that led to so many people who went through that phase going on to have careers.”

“I thought there was a place like this that would build you up,” White says, “but there was hardly any other place like this that had a system in place that would take someone out of the open mic, make them an opener and allow them to build a career in 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 complained about the financial difficulties facing the small family business. Many of the musicians playing at the reunion are still active in the acoustic music scene and still remember the time when Westborough was the unexpected center of the folk universe.