Texas Venue Directory
Arkey Blue’s Silver Dollar
Historic honky-tonk and dance hall · Bandera
Long-running Bandera honky-tonk associated with Texas dance-hall music and live country performances.
About this room
You get in through a red door at 308 Main Street and down a wooden stairway into the basement of the Bandera General Store. The room opened in 1921 as a nightclub called The Fox Hole, became the Silver Dollar in the 1940s, and in 1968 was bought by Arkey Charles Juenke, a Fredericksburg kid who had spent ten years wrangling and entertaining at the Lost Valley Dude Ranch and who had gone by Arkey Blue since he started writing songs as a teenager in the 1950s. He expanded the dance floor, put sawdust down, and filled the walls with fifty years of his own belongings. The state gave him a Texas Treasure Business Award in 2018, and Bandera named its stretch of Main Street after the bar.
History sources checked August 29, 2026.
Things you may not know
- The whole honky-tonk is in a basement, downstairs from a general store, which is not how Texas dance halls are usually built. Arkey's line about it: plenty of out-of-towners come down the stairs grinning, and plenty get halfway and turn around. Source
- A table in the room is displayed as the one Hank Williams Sr. carved his name into. The table is not originally from here; it came from The Cabaret, another Bandera club where Williams played. Source
- There is a shrine to Arkey's dog, Sidney G. Shepherd, alongside a Dolly Parton pinball machine, a vintage wooden phone booth, and Arkey's first Sears & Roebuck guitar. Source
- The bar top is covered in knife carvings, not as decoration but as accumulated damage from decades of customers. Source
- The bar appears in the 1975 Peter Fonda horror film Race with the Devil. Source
- Bandera designated its length of State Highway 16 as Arkey Blue's Silver Dollar Highway. Source
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Continue through rooms connected by Bandera or the Hill Country region.