CHAPTER ONE

You Are Part of Something That Has Been Here a Long Time

The History and Culture That Make Texas Honky Tonk PR Different from Every Other Kind of PR

It’s a Saturday night in the Hill Country, and the neon over the door has been buzzing since sundown. Inside, the band is tuning up against a wall that’s held a hundred years of cigarette smoke and spilled beer and first dances. Somebody’s racking the pool balls in the corner. A couple has already started two-stepping, even though the band hasn’t really kicked in yet — they don’t need it to, because they’ve been dancing this floor for thirty years and the music is just an excuse. Over by the bar, a man who walked in alone has somehow ended up in a conversation with three strangers about a truck none of them owns anymore.

That right there — that whole picture — is what you’re part of.

It’s also what you’re selling. And here’s the thing nobody tells you when you start working in a place like this: you can’t buy that picture, you can’t fake it, and you sure can’t recreate it with a sponsored Instagram post. But you can tell people about it. You can make sure the folks who’d love this place actually find their way to the door. That’s what this book is about. Not tricks. Not gimmicks. Just learning to tell the true story of a true place, so the right people hear it.

Welcome to the work. Let’s start where all good honky tonk stories start — with where this all came from, because you cannot tell the story if you don’t know the story.

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1.1 Why History Is Your Most Powerful PR Asset

There’s a word that gets thrown around in marketing circles like it’s a strategy you can switch on: authenticity. Brands spend millions trying to manufacture it. Consultants build whole careers promising to deliver it.

Here’s the good news for you, and it’s the single most important idea in this entire book: in the Texas honky tonk business, you don’t have to manufacture authenticity. You already have it. It’s the product. The worn spot on the dance floor where ten thousand boots have scuffed the same six feet of pine. The regular who’s been ordering the same drink since the first Bush was president. The photograph on the wall of a band that played here in 1987 and went on to sell out arenas. None of that can be faked, and none of it can be bought by your competition. It’s yours, and it’s already real.

Your job — the whole job — is to communicate what is genuinely true about your place. That’s it. That’s public relations for a honky tonk, boiled down to one sentence. You are not in the business of inventing a story. You are in the business of telling the one you already have, clearly and proudly and to the right people.

Now, a fair question: what if your place isn’t a hundred years old? What if you opened last spring?

You still have a story. It’s just a different one. A brand-new honky tonk doesn’t get to tell a hundred-year-old story, but it gets to tell the story of why somebody built it now — what was missing in this town, what kind of room the owner wished existed, what the place is trying to become. That’s a real story too, and told right, it’s a good one. The hundred-year-old hall sells heritage. The brand-new one sells conviction. Both work. What doesn’t work is pretending to be something you’re not, because the one thing a Texas crowd can smell from the parking lot is a phony.

Here’s a concept worth tattooing somewhere you’ll see it every day: there is a gap between what you think your place is and what your customers think it is. Every PR problem you will ever have lives in that gap. Maybe you think you’re “the best live music venue in the county” and your customers think you’re “the place with the good burgers where there’s sometimes a band.” Maybe you think you’re a rowdy spot for twenty-somethings and your actual regulars are couples in their fifties who come for the dancing. Closing that gap — getting the story in your head to match the story in their heads — is most of what this book is going to teach you to do.

And one more thing before we go back in time. Honky tonk PR is not restaurant PR, and it’s not hotel PR, and it’s definitely not retail PR. The people who run those businesses sell a product or a service and go home. You’re selling something stranger and more powerful: a place to belong. The music, the community, the weight of the history, the feeling of walking into a room where you’re known — that’s specific to this world, and it means the playbook is specific too. The chapters ahead are built for the honky tonk, not borrowed from somebody’s marketing textbook.

1.2 The Honky Tonk: From Outlaw to Institution

Nobody is completely sure where the words “honky tonk” came from. Folklorists have argued about it for a century. But we know where it first showed up in print, and it tells you everything about the spirit of the thing.

One of the earliest known newspaper appearances came in the Fort Worth Daily Gazette on January 24, 1889, in a report about a petition asking that the “Honky Tonk theater” on Main Street be reopened. A few years later, newspapers were using the term more generally and describing a honky-tonk as a particularly rough, low-grade theater. The exact origin of the expression remains uncertain, but the early record makes one thing clear: the name did not begin as a compliment.

So how did a rough-house label become a badge of honor? How did a warning become the proudest sign a Texas town can hang?

This is the first and maybe the best PR lesson in the whole book, and you got it handed to you by history for free: the honky tonk took the insult and wore it. It didn’t argue that it was respectable. It didn’t soften itself up to win over the church crowd. It leaned all the way into being exactly what it was — a little dangerous, a lot of fun, the place where the real living got done after the respectable people went to bed. And over a hundred years, the culture came around to the honky tonk, not the other way around.

There’s a lesson in that for how you position your own place. The strongest brands in this business are not the ones that try to be everything to everyone. They’re the ones that know exactly what they are and say it without apology.

While honky tonks and dance halls were busy being disreputable or overlooked, something else was happening inside them: American music was being shaped. Texas country music, western swing, the Bakersfield sound carried west by Texans, and later the intertwined Texas Country and Red Dirt circuits all depended on working rooms where bands learned what moved a crowd. These weren’t concert halls. They were places where a band played four sets a night to people who would dance to the good songs and holler for their money back on the bad ones. That crucible made the music tough and true, and it made the honky tonk one of the country’s most important small-room music institutions. Your stage, however modest, is a descendant of that.

Then came 1980, and a movie changed everything overnight. Urban Cowboy — John Travolta, a mechanical bull, Gilley’s in Pasadena — put honky tonk culture in front of the entire world. Suddenly everybody wanted boots and a bull ride. Honky tonks opened in cities that had never had one. The look went mainstream and then, as these things do, the trend burned hot and burned out.

And here’s the PR lesson buried in the Urban Cowboy moment, the one that matters more than the mechanical bull: a trend will make you famous, but it won’t make you last. When the fad faded, the places that survived were not the ones that had jumped on the bandwagon. They were the ones that had been honky tonks all along and would still be honky tonks after the cameras left. The trend-chasers closed. The real ones are still open. We’ll come back to this hard truth in the next chapter, because there’s a cautionary tale in it worth studying — but file the principle away now: authenticity outlasts trend, every single time.

That’s why the word still has power. Walk into any town in Texas, point at a building, and call it a honky tonk, and everybody within earshot knows what you mean — the music, the dancing, the cold beer, the welcome, the slight whiff of trouble that makes it fun. No marketing department built that meaning. A hundred and thirty-five years of real places earned it. When you hang that word on your door, you inherit all of it.

1.3 The Dancehall: The Honky Tonk’s Older Cousin

If the honky tonk is the rowdy heart of this book, the dancehall is the older cousin who taught it how to dance in the first place. You can’t understand one without the other, so let’s give the dancehall its due.

Long before the word “honky tonk” showed up in a Fort Worth newspaper, German and Czech immigrants were pouring into the Texas Hill Country and the blackland prairies, and they were building halls. Here’s a detail that tells you everything about these people and what these buildings meant: in a lot of these communities, they built the dance hall before they built the church. Before the permanent house of worship, before the school in some cases, they raised a big open-sided wooden hall where the whole community could gather — to dance, to hold weddings and funerals and meetings, to sing in the old language, to stay a community in a new and lonesome country.

Those weren’t bars. They were the original community centers, and many of them are still standing and still running today, often owned by the same fraternal organizations that built them — the SPJST (the Slavonic Benevolent Order of the State of Texas), the KJT, the various German singing societies and benevolent unions. When you dance at Anhalt Hall or any of the SPJST halls, you are dancing in a building that a community raised with its own hands as an act of cultural survival.

Texas preservation organizations reported in 2019 that as many as 1,000 dance halls had been built across the state and fewer than 400 remained. That is a dated preservation benchmark, not a confirmed 2026 count; researchers continue identifying halls, and no comprehensive, continuously updated statewide inventory establishes exactly how many still stand or operate. The scale of the loss is the reason organizations exist to save them — we’ll talk a lot more about preservation later in the book, because for a historic hall, preservation is public relations. The halls that remain are precious in a way that gives them enormous PR power. Scarcity plus authenticity plus a hundred years of community memory is about the most compelling story a Texas venue can tell.

For the historic dancehall, the story is always three stories braided together. It’s a preservation story — this building is endangered and worth saving. It’s a heritage story — this is where your great-grandparents danced, and you can still dance here too. And it’s a community story — this hall belongs to all of us and always has. The art of dancehall PR, which we’ll build out across this book, is telling all three at once without getting maudlin about it.

And here’s why the honky tonk owner should care about all this even if their building is a 1970s cinderblock roadhouse with zero German heritage: the honky tonk inherited everything from the dancehall. The dance floor at the center of the room instead of off to the side. The idea that the music exists so people can move to it, not just watch it. The notion that the venue is a community’s living room, not just a place to buy drinks. Every honky tonk in Texas is running on an operating system the dancehalls wrote. Knowing that history makes you a better steward of your own room — and gives you a richer, truer story to tell.

1.4 The Tejano and Conjunto Tradition: An Equal Story with a Different Ecosystem

Here is something that a lot of honky tonk books get wrong by leaving it out entirely, so let’s get it right: the Anglo dance hall tradition is not the only deep-rooted dance-and-music institution in Texas. Down in South Texas and the border country, a parallel tradition grew up at the same time, just as rich, just as old, and just as central to its community — the world of Tejano and conjunto.

In the 1930s, a man named Narciso Martínez, working in the Rio Grande Valley, took the German button accordion that those same immigrant communities had brought to Texas and combined it with the Mexican bajo sexto, and something new was born. Conjunto. The accordion-driven dance music of the Texas-Mexican working class. Martínez is remembered as the father of it, and the sound he helped invent has been filling dance floors for almost a century.

The center of this world is the baile — the dance. And the baile serves exactly the same function in its community that the German dance hall served in the Hill Country: it’s the gathering place, the community anchor, the spot where the whole extended family from the grandparents to the babies shows up to dance to the same band. Same human need, different music, equally deep roots.

Now here’s where this matters for you in cold practical PR terms, and it’s important enough that I want to be blunt about it: the PR strategy for a Tejano venue is fundamentally different from the strategy for an Anglo country honky tonk, and treating them as the same is a mistake that shows. Different media — the Spanish-language radio stations, the specific publications, the community networks. Different cultural calendar. Different community protocols around family, around language, around respect. We’ll dig into all of that specifically in the chapters on the entertainment landscape and on getting press, because a one-size-fits-all approach insults the very community you’re trying to reach. If your venue serves the Tejano community, you cannot just translate your country-bar playbook into Spanish and call it done. You have to actually understand the world you’re operating in.

The institutions of this tradition are as legendary as any in the state. Cowboys Dance Hall in San Antonio. Stetson Dance Hall in Helotes. And the Tejano Conjunto Festival in San Antonio, which has been running for more than forty years — the oldest and longest-running conjunto festival in the nation, a genuine cultural treasure. These places and events have all the heritage power of any German dance hall, and the venues that honor that tradition rather than diluting it earn a loyalty from their community that money cannot buy.

1.5 Zydeco and the Blues: Louisiana Roots, a Crucial Houston Chapter

Ask the average person where zydeco comes from and they’ll say Louisiana. They’re not entirely wrong, but they’re missing a huge part of the truth, and that missing part is a Texas PR story waiting to be told.

Zydeco grew from the older music of Louisiana’s Black Creole communities. When Creole migrants moved west for work, Houston — especially Frenchtown and the Fifth Ward — became one of the places where that rural dance music was urbanized, amplified, recorded, and brought into public venues. A Christmas Eve 1949 performance by Willie Green at Irene’s Café is often cited as a key Houston milestone. Louisiana supplied the roots; Houston played a crucial role in the genre’s urban development and public life.

Why does that matter to you? Because correcting and completing the historical record is itself a piece of public relations — and a powerful one. A Houston-area venue that tells the true, under-told story of how the city helped urbanize, amplify, record, and popularize zydeco has a genuine, surprising, press-worthy story in its hands. Journalists love a “there is more to this history than most people know” angle when it is accurate, and this one is.

The institutions are still standing. The Eldorado Ballroom in Houston’s Third Ward — opened in 1939 as a gift from Anna and Clarence Dupree to their community — was beautifully restored and reopened in 2023. The historic Silver Slipper Lounge in the Fifth Ward has long been associated with Houston’s zydeco, blues, and rhythm-and-blues traditions. These are living institutions with stories most of Texas has never heard.

And here’s a practical PR asset that almost nobody in the zydeco world is fully using: the dance floor itself. Zydeco dancing is unlike anything else in American music — fast, intricate, joyful, completely unfamiliar to most people who’ve never seen it. Which means a thirty-second video of a packed zydeco floor on a Saturday night is some of the most arresting, share-worthy content a Texas venue could possibly produce. It practically introduces a whole genre to everyone who sees it. We’ll talk a lot more about content like this later, but plant the flag now: if you’ve got a zydeco floor, you’re sitting on a visual goldmine.

1.6 The Texas Country and Red Dirt Connection: West Texas’s Songwriter Country

Red Dirt’s geographic origins center around Stillwater, Oklahoma, where artists such as Bob Childers and Tom Skinner helped shape the scene. West Texas developed its own fiercely independent songwriter tradition, and over time Texas Country and Red Dirt became closely linked through shared artists, audiences, radio, and touring circuits.

In Lubbock, the Blue Light Live — in the Depot District, a few steps from Buddy Holly Avenue — became one of Texas’s most important songwriter rooms. It is not the birthplace of Red Dirt, but it is a place where an entire generation of Texas songwriters cut their teeth and where careers that went on to fill arenas began in front of a few dozen people on a weeknight. The connected Texas Country and Red Dirt world — Pat Green, Cory Morrow, Wade Bowen, the Josh Abbott Band, Flatland Cavalry, and a long list of others — built itself outside the Nashville machine, in rooms exactly like the ones a lot of you are running.

Here is the single most important thing to understand about the Texas Country and Red Dirt audience, and it’s a PR fact as much as a musical one: this crowd has one of the most finely calibrated authenticity detectors in regional music. They will know if you’re faking it. They can smell a marketing campaign at a hundred yards, and the moment they sense one, they turn on it. This is an audience that prizes the songwriter over the star, the true story over the slick one, the room that gave an artist a chance before they were famous over the venue that booked them once they were a safe bet. If you operate in this world, your PR has to be story-first and honesty-first, always. We’ll build that out in detail later. For now, just know: with this crowd, the unvarnished truth isn’t just the ethical choice, it’s the effective one.

Worth noting too: Lubbock is an official Texas Music Friendly Community, a designation from the Texas Music Office that we’ll explain fully in the chapter on heritage and tourism. It’s the kind of credential that, used well, becomes part of a whole region’s PR story — and the venues in that ecosystem benefit from it.

1.7 LGBTQ+ Honky Tonks: The PR of Genuine Welcome

In Houston there’s a honky tonk called Neon Boots Dancehall and Saloon, and its story carries one of the clearest PR lessons in this entire book.

Start with the building, because the building alone is a story: Neon Boots operates in the former Esquire Ballroom, a historic country venue where local history holds that Willie Nelson wrote “Night Life.” That’s a heritage hook most venues would kill for. Neon Boots is widely described as one of Texas’s largest LGBTQ+ country-and-western dance clubs — a place where the two-step, line dancing, and the whole honky-tonk tradition are alive in a room built around genuine welcome.

And here’s the lesson, which Texas Monthly underlined when it included Neon Boots in its roundup of the best honky tonks in the state: genuine community identity becomes press-worthy all on its own. Neon Boots didn’t earn that recognition by sending out a slick press release. It earned it by authentically being something — by being a real honky tonk that genuinely welcomed a community that hadn’t always felt welcome in honky tonks — and that authentic identity was the story. Round-Up Saloon in Dallas, the White Horse in Austin, and others carry versions of the same truth.

There’s a broader principle here that applies to every venue in this book, gay or straight or anything else: a venue that genuinely, visibly welcomes people communicates that welcome long before anybody walks through the door, and that welcome is one of the most powerful PR assets a place can have. The mechanics of how you do that — how a room signals “you belong here” through everything from your social media to your door staff to your dance lessons — is something we’ll come back to throughout the book. The foundation, though, is simple and it’s not a marketing trick: you actually have to mean it.

1.8 What Every Texas Venue Has in Common

We’ve just walked through a lot of different worlds — the German dance hall and the South Texas baile, the West Texas songwriter room and the Fifth Ward zydeco lounge, the rowdy roadhouse honky tonk and the LGBTQ+ saloon. On the surface they look like different businesses serving different people with different music.

Underneath, they are the same thing, and naming that sameness is the key to understanding what you actually do for a living.

Every one of these places offers the same handful of things: community, music, cold beer, honest prices, a warm welcome, and a good time you can’t get at home. That’s the whole list. Strip away the genre and the decor and the demographics, and a honky tonk in Bandera and a conjunto hall in San Antonio and a zydeco lounge in Houston are all answering the same human need — the need for a place to gather, to belong, to be known, to set down the week’s troubles and dance.

There’s a straight line running from a German immigrant family raising a dance hall in 1880 to your room tonight, and it’s this: people need a place to come together, and that place is worth protecting. You are the current keeper of one of those places. That’s not a small thing, and it’s not just a business. It’s a responsibility.

And that responsibility is where public relations stops being a marketing function and becomes something closer to stewardship. When you run a community institution — and make no mistake, that’s what a honky tonk is — telling its story well isn’t vanity and it isn’t hype. It’s part of keeping it alive. The better the right people understand what your place is and why it matters, the longer it gets to keep being what it is. That’s the real job. Everything else in this book is just the how.

1.9 Writing Your Venue’s Brand Story

Alright. Enough history and philosophy. Let’s make something you can use tomorrow.

Everything in this book — every press release, every social post, every conversation a bartender has with a curious stranger, every pitch to a journalist — flows from one document you probably don’t have yet: your brand story. Not a logo. Not a slogan a consultant sold you. The true, clear, repeatable story of what your place is and who it’s for. Get this right and everything else gets easier. Skip it, and you’ll spend years sending mixed signals and wondering why the story in customers’ heads never matches the one in yours.

Here’s how to build it.

The two-sentence version. Can you say what your venue is and who it’s for in two sentences? Not a paragraph. Two sentences, the kind you could say to a stranger on a barstool without sounding like an advertisement. “We’re the oldest dance hall in the county, and we’ve had live Texas country every weekend since 1952. If you want to two-step to a real band on a real wood floor, this is the place.” That’s it. That’s a brand story. It goes at the top of your press kit, it’s the first thing a new employee learns, and it’s the answer every single person on your staff should be able to give when somebody asks “so what’s the deal with this place?”

The three-word voice. How does your venue talk? Pick three words and write them down where your staff can see them. Are you “rowdy, welcoming, unpretentious”? Are you “historic, warm, proud”? Are you “wild, loud, fun”? Those three words decide how you write an Instagram caption, how the door staff greet people, even how you answer a bad review. We’ll use this again in the chapter on staff, because brand voice is really just every person in your building talking the same way. But it starts here, with three honest words.

The detail no competitor can copy. What’s the one specific, concrete, true thing about your place that nobody else can claim? The 1882 floor. The bullet hole in the back wall from the night nobody talks about. The fact that George Strait played here when nobody knew his name. The bar top your great-grandfather built. Find that detail, because it’s the thing journalists will lead with and customers will repeat. Generic dies; specific travels.

The exercise. Sit down — owner, manager, your sharpest bartender, whoever knows the place best — and answer these four questions honestly. Write the answers down.

What was this place built for?

What music do we actually believe in?

Who are our people — who walks in and feels at home?

What would be lost, specifically, if we closed our doors for good?

That fourth question is the most important one, and it’s the one most owners have never sat still long enough to answer. The answer to “what would be lost if we closed” is, almost always, your real brand story — the thing that’s worth protecting, the thing worth telling people about. When you can answer that one in a way that makes the hair on your arm stand up a little, you’ve found it.

Do this exercise. Don’t just read past it. Everything in the rest of this book works better once you have.