Texas Venue Directory
Mercer Dancehall
Country dance hall and live-music venue · Driftwood
Driftwood dance hall presenting country music and social dancing after reopening in 2026.
About this room
In 2012 the Dotins' sixteen-year-old daughter Shelby had just got her driver's license and wanted to drive Hill Country dance halls with her friends. Her parents did not love the idea of her on back roads late at night; her answer was that there were no dance halls in Dripping Springs. Nick Dotin - a contractor being pushed into early retirement by health problems, with forty-five years in the music industry behind him - took that as an idea. With Gay's hospitality experience, they opened Mercer Street Dancehall in downtown Dripping Springs on February 1, 2013, at 320 Mercer Street. Opening night packed over four hundred people in. The hall later moved to a larger building on Ranch Road 12 in Driftwood, between Dripping Springs and Wimberley, where it ran as a family business for more than a decade. It closed as the couple looked toward retirement, and reopened on April 19, 2026.
History sources checked August 29, 2026.
Things you may not know
- The dance hall exists because a teenager complained there was not one. Shelby Dotin's line - there's no dance halls in Dripping Springs - is the venue's own account of its origin. Source
- Opening night drew more than 400 people from Austin, Canyon Lake and Dripping Springs itself. Source
- The floor is hickory, which the owner describes as the best and only one of its kind in the area. Source
- The Driftwood building was previously owned by the late H.C. Carter. Source
- The reopening act was Tumbleweed Hill, an Austin dancehall band, playing 3 to 6pm on a Sunday - the venue reopened on an afternoon dance rather than a Saturday night. Source
- The owners still want to sell. They hope to visit their daughter in New York and travel; reopening was not a change of mind about retiring. Source
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Continue through rooms connected by Driftwood or the Hill Country region.