Honky Tonkin'

 

Photos by Rachel Newton, Text by Mitch Baranowski

 

This show is no longer available for touring.

This is an exhibit about dancing, drinking and socializing. In other words, it's about honky-tonkin', the kind of woozy fun that Texans have been enjoying since the frontier days, when Czech and German immigrants used to spread wagon sheets on the ground for a makeshift dance floor. But honky-tonk culture as we know it sprang to life in the 1930s and '40s.

The Depression-era oil boom gave people money to burn in East Texas, and saloons rose as fast as derricks. The end of Prohibition in 1933 turned thousands of illegal bars into legitimate enterprises, and the region's diverse musical influences (Bohemian, German, Cajun, Mexican and African-American) shaped the dance-oriented repertoire of the string bands that played these steamy clubs.

By 1940, with farmers flooding cities for wartime defense jobs, honky-tonks became known as "fightin' and dancin' clubs." And the music changed to accommodate its tough new urban environment. Acoustic fiddle-and-guitar arrangements weren't loud enough to be heard over the din. Nor were songs about God, mother and country as appealing to the displaced country boy as songs about drinkin', cheatin' and hell-raisin'.

Ernest Tubb, often called the father of honky-tonk music, popularized its "hard" electric sound with his 1941 hit weeper, "Walking the Floor Over You." Tubb paved the way for other Texas honky-tonk pioneers, including Al Dexter, Ted Daffan, Floyd Tillman, Lefty Frizzell, Ray Price and Hank Thompson.

Six decades later, Texas continues to be the cradle of America's honky-tonks. The state boasts nearly 90 authentic dance halls, several more than 100 years old, and hundreds of clubs where it's easy to hear the sock rhythm, warm vocals and sliding steel guitar that characterize classic honky-tonk tunes like "Slippin' Around," "Born to Lose" and "I Ain't Goin' Honky-Tonkin' Anymore."

A honky-tonk can be a beer joint, saloon, tavern, roadhouse, ice house, country store, dance hall or night club. Any establishment with four walls that provides reasonably priced drinks and country music by a live band or jukebox. It can be as small as the one-room Ginny's Little Longhorn in Austin, where the band sets up in a dusty corner near the back, or as big as Billy Bob's in Fort Worth, which, at 127,000 square feet, claims to be the world's largest.

The dance floor might be a rink-sized hardwood floor, a sawdust-covered concrete slab or a patch of worn linoleum, but there is always room for dancing - two-steps, waltzes, polkas and traditional line dances like the Cotton-Eyed Joe. There is still the occasional fight, but gone are the "blood bucket" days when men like Obie Conway, a retired cop who patrolled Dallas hotspots, suffered broken limbs when corralling roughnecks. The honky-tonk is not only safer, it's a more inclusive hangout than it once was, with people of all ages, races and backgrounds enjoying the scene, but its appeal is still broadest with working-class whites.

The photos and stories in this exhibit represent a small cross-section of Texas honky-tonks today.

Club 21, once called Uhland Hall, and London Hall typify small-town German dance halls. Riley's Tavern, reportedly the oldest legal bar in Texas, and Ginny's Little Longhorn represent two of the many beer joints. There are famous venues, too, like James White's Broken Spoke, and historic urban clubs like the Top Rail Ballroom, where Stanley Hawk has been a regular since 1968. And there are places that defy strict categorization, like Arkey Blue's Silver Dollar Bar in Bandera. Its subterranean cowboy chic includes mounted deer heads hanging next to black velvet nudes and battered license plates.

Though honky-tonk culture peaked in the '50s, it never went away, and in the last decade it has made a comeback of sorts in the Lone Star State. A new crop of neo-traditionalists and musical outlaws, led by independent singer-songwriters like Jerry Jeff Walker and Robert Earl Keen, has expanded the fan base and built on the honky-tonk traditions. The so-called "Texas Music Revolution" even has its own cottage industry, with dedicated magazines, web sites and radio programs. It's proof that a new generation is beginning to make its own journey through the dim lights, thick smoke and loud, loud music.

Happy honky-tonkin'.

Artist's Statement

Anyone who has ever lived in Texas and moved away knows that the Lone Star State stays in your blood, no matter how far you travel or how long you stay gone. We're not the first transplanted Texans to come down with the "honky-tonk blues" - that deep longing to spend a Saturday night dancing through dim lights, thick smoke and loud, loud music. But after three years of living in Brooklyn, anxious for the moon-cry of a steel guitar, we knew we had to go honky-tonkin' again and try to capture a snapshot of this world's storied culture.

Borrowing a family pickup, we returned to Texas and journeyed through towns known for their beer joints and dance halls. Some spots were familiar; others completely new. We saw fights, became privy to secret love affairs, ate pickled eggs and waltzed with strangers who by the end of the evening seemed like old friends.

At every stop we were reminded that, for most people, the local honky-tonk is a place called home, a timeless buffer zone where regulars and visitors alike can go to work out their hopes and frustrations. Perhaps this is why honky-tonks have such a mythic quality: they welcome celebration as openly as despair. A crowd can glide happily across the hardwood while a loner sits at the bar with his demons.

Real honky-tonk music may be hard to find on the radio dial and record charts, but it's still out there in rural outposts like Club 21 and windowless bars like Ginny's Little Longhorn. Thanks to tireless owners and managers like Ginny Kalmbach and William Ilse, honky-tonks continue to thrive in Texas when they have vanished in places like Bakersfield or become tourist traps in Nashville. It's easy to see why the tradition spans generations here. Texans love music, and they love to dance. We suspect they always will.

-- Rachel Newton and Mitch Baranowski

About the Artists

Born in Los Angeles and raised in New York, photographer Rachel Newton first became interested in honky-tonks during her seven-year tenure with the Fort Worth-Dallas Ballet, where she learned to dance the two-step for a performance with the Dixie Chicks. Rachel holds her bachelor's in architecture from Pratt Institute, where she also concentrated on photography. She recently completed a photo essay on another unique subculture, New York City's Fulton Street Fish Market, which is set to move from its historic location by the end of the year.

Writer Mitch Baranowski is a fourth-generation Texan who, during this project, located the former site of Brazos River Hall, where his cotton-farming grandparents worked dances during the '40s. With degrees in journalism and radio-television-film from the University of Texas, Mitch has written about music for a variety of publications, including American Way, Atomic and No Depression, while recent TV projects have found him trailing New York City street musicians and tracing the roots of break dancing.

Earlier this year the husband-wife team collaborated on a travel essay about Hill Country honky-tonks for the Houston Chronicle. They currently live in Brooklyn and are working to expand this exhibit into book form.