The classic dance hall ranks among Texas’s most visceral images — cowboy boots scuffing hardwood floors; fiddles, steel guitar and maybe an accordion sharing the bandstand; salt-of-the-earth couples circulating counterclockwise during a waltz or kicking up their heels during “Cotton-Eyed Joe.”

Deb Fleming doesn’t hesitate to use words like “sacred” and “magical” when she talks about these places.

“They all have their own unique feel and personalities,” says the executive director of Texas Dance Hall Preservation, a nonprofit founded in 2007. “As Texans, I think they were the cornerstones of building the Texas that we know today.”

For musicians weaned on the hodgepodge of country, Czech, and conjunto sounds that once flourished here, dance halls are even more vital.

“To me, as someone who did not grow up in Texas, they were emblematic of everything that I envisioned about Texas — where you could go to play this kind of music, and they would dance (and) appreciate it,” says Ray Benson, who fell in love with Bob Wills and Western swing long before he moved his band, Asleep at the Wheel, to Austin from the East Coast in the mid-‘70s.

“And if you look at who came up in dance halls, even to the present day,” continues Benson, now a leading advocate for both Texas music and its historic dance halls, “they’re also the training ground for everybody from George Strait, Bob Wills, [and] Willie Nelson, to Asleep at the Wheel to a dozen of the new Texas/Red Dirt kids who are playing some of the dance halls that are still operating on a commercial level — Gruene Hall, for instance.”

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Not every dance hall can be Gruene Hall, though. Places like that, or John T. Floore’s Country Store in Helotes, increasingly stand out as beacons of a bygone age. Although thriving themselves, thanks largely to the tourist-friendly image of Texas they present to the world (though regularly hosting great music certainly doesn’t hurt), these places have fared far better than their less publicized counterparts.

Located in smaller farming or ranching communities, such halls were often erected by first- or second-generation immigrants to the state. Their designs bear distinct signs of the builders’ Central or Eastern European ancestry. But as Texans wired in and moved to more populated areas, the era of “air conditioning and cable TV,” to use Ray Benson’s words, left many rural dance halls marooned in the past.

In these places’ heyday, the Asleep at the Wheel leader explains, “what did you do on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday? You didn’t sit around, there was no Internet, there weren’t mobile phones [or] anything, and you went out.”

Asleep at the Wheel When: 5 p.m. Oct. 6 Where: Klein High School’s Performing Arts Center, 16715 Stuebner Airline Rd., Klein Details: $40-$70; Part of the Cypress Creek Foundation’s FACE program; asleepatthewheel.com Neon Boots Dancehall & Saloon 11410 Hempstead Rd., Houston neonbootsclub.com; 713-677-0828 Mo’s Place 21940 Kingsland Blvd., Katy mosplacekaty.com; 281-392-3499 Texas Dance Hall Preservation The organization is devoted to the history of Texas dance hall; texasdancehall.org

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Dwindling numbers

Some halls remain strictly devoted to live music, opening only on weekends or even just a few times a year. But as the only large public structure of any stature in many communities for miles in any direction (besides the courthouse, perhaps), many others — such as Galveston’s Garten Verein, operated by the Galveston Historical Foundation — have diversified, hosting a variety of events including town meetings, weddings, baby showers, high-school graduations. Some have since become restaurants, others antique stores.

Fleming estimates that from a high of 1,000, fewer than 400 historic Texas dance halls remain active; she calls about 25 per-cent of those “at risk.” But don’t count these places out just yet. Dance halls remain etched into Texas’s collective DNA.

“The more people you talk to about halls that are gone, they really miss those places because they hold so many memories for them and their families,” says Fleming. “You know, ‘My grandfather got married there; he met my grandmother there,’ ‘I met my husband there,’ ‘I had my first kiss there,’ whatever it might be. And multiple generations have those stories.”

The numbers may have dwindled, but Texas Dance Hall Preservation’s efforts to reclaim and restore these halls have been gaining traction.

In June, the L.A. Times published an article detailing the travails of Jo Nell Haas, who runs the Twin Sisters dance hall in Blanco. Texas Dance Hall Preservation helped Haas secure the funds necessary for a new roof, explains Fleming, but maintenance on these aging buildings is often near the top of their owners’ chief worries (and expenses).

Barely a year ago, Hye Hall near Johnson City was an overgrown, derelict building with a rotting floor and a bunch of junked-out cars out front. With a little encouragement (and a little funding), Fleming convinced the property’s owner, longtime Hye postmaster Oliver Deike, to restore it.

He did so with astonishing speed, she marvels.

“No one dreamed that it would ever come back to life like that,” says Fleming. “Oliver and his wife got to dance in that hall for the first time [on] June 1.”

Ray Benson has been doing his part by leading the Texas Dancehall Tour — periodic long-weekend excursions through parts of Texas where the dance-hall concentration is high. Customers sightsee or take dance lessons by day; Asleep at the Wheel and special guests perform at night; proceeds benefit Texas Dance Hall Preservation. The fourth edition, this past June, visited such storied DFW venues as the Longhorn Ballroom (renowned among music fans for hosting the Sex Pistols one night in January 1978 and Merle Haggard the next) and Sons of Hermann Hall.

Rebirth with a twist

Sadly, that tour won’t be coming through Houston anytime soon.

Greater Houston has no dance halls left, at least none that satisfy the classic definition of the term. (The difference between “dance hall” and “honky-tonk” is a whole different discussion, but the former are often all-ages and BYOB while the latter are usually 21-and-up and less, shall we say, family-oriented.)

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The last was Tin Hall in Cypress, the sprawling, two-story building that opened in 1885 and was reportedly the oldest entertainment venue in Harris County until it shut down at the end of 2015. For a while rumors persisted the owners wanted to reopen, possibly by moving the hall in pieces to a new location, but those plans seem to have hit a dead end.

However, if a dance hall is simply somewhere neighbors gather to gossip, flirt, brag, meet, or nurse a broken heart — places where people can express their personalities, not to mention dance — two Houston-area spots fit the bill quite nicely. One is an LGBTQ joint, the other the fruits of an Iranian immigrant’s American dream, but each establishment neatly folds the old Texas into the new.

If anywhere does, Neon Boots may have the most direct local claim on the dance-hall tradition. It’s the only area club mentioned in Texas Monthly’s current cover story, “The Best Honky-Tonks In Texas”; the room is “a bit big for a honky-tonk, but most nights it retains the intimacy of a pocket-size club,” writes author Christian Wallace.

That may be, but “a bit big” is big enough — it holds around 1500 people — to make Neon Boots Texas’s largest LGBTQ country bar. It was founded in 2013 by a group of friends who had been displaced when their favorite hangout, Montrose’s Brazos River Bottom, closed . Instead of looking around for somewhere they felt as comfortable, which could take who knows how long, they decided to buy one themselves.

They found somewhere with a pedigree that could easily match most rural Texas dance halls. From 1955 to 1995, the building housed the Esquire Ballroom, a regular stop for country music’s top names for most of its tenure.

A fan’s encounter with Patsy Cline here sparked the Broadway musical “Always…Patsy Cline.” It’s where African-American Charley Pride, who faced some opposition when playing an early gig opening for Faron Young at which Young declared, “if he don’t sing, I don’t sing.” Before moving to Nashville in the early ‘60s, Willie Nelson worked at the Esquire and wrote “Crazy” and “Night Life” during those months.

“I remember going to the Esquire Ballroom, and that was the [spot] in that part of town,” says Ray Benson.

Today, on any given day, Neon Boots might be hosting a corporate event, fundraiser, or meeting of the Texas Gay Rodeo Association’s Houston chapter. Free dance lessons are on Thursdays; Friday is Latin night. As they should, the owners take pride in the bar’s inclusive, down-home atmosphere.

“A lot of bars are elegant and sharp…we’re not like that,” says co-owner Jim Gerhold. “This is very traditional — hell, almost a state-fair appearance.”

“My parents and my grandparents used to come dancing here before I was even born,” says Debbie Storrs, another partner. “And then I remember them leaving me with the babysitter for them to come over here dancing.”

“What our customers are now is what my parents were then,” she adds.

From Iran to Texas

In Katy, Mo’s Place fulfills a similar function for a somewhat different community.

The supermarket-size club, which holds around 1500, takes up the bulk of a strip-style shopping center off Kingsland Road. It was a fraction of its present square footage when owner Mo Jeloudarzedeh opened in 1988; there wasn’t even room for a dance floor. Friends donated a jukebox. But people kept coming, and he kept expanding.

Fascinated with John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies while growing up in Iran, Jeloudarzedeh worked at bygone Houston nightspots like Cowboy’s and Fool’s Gold after studying at the University of Houston. He fell in love with country music by listening to KIKK, connecting with the songs about “family and mom and dad, good friends…it gave me comfort.”

Like Neon Boots, Mo’s is a modern country bar. Stars from Merle Haggard to Little Big Town and Chris Stapleton have played there — fresh off “Old Town Road,” Billy Ray Cyrus performs October 11 — but neither are its dancers immune to the Wobble. On Mo’s packed dance floor, it’s a sight to behold.

Jeloudarzedeh thinks the community has embraced his bar because he and his customers have “been there for each other, through the good times and the hard times.”

After one hurricane or another, he invited them to take all the ice and milk they wanted from his coolers. The club had gas but no power, so he convinced Sam’s Club to donate “50 or 60 pounds of ground beef” and threw a giant cookoff. During the recent oil and gas downturn, he opened up at 9 a.m. so his customers would have somewhere to go.

“I think their wives gave ‘em some money and said ‘Just go see Mo’,” he says. “So they came out there, we had drink specials, we had a buffet for ‘em.”

“Mo’s done a good job,” says Ernie Rodriguez, a mechanical engineer who has been a regular since the bar was three days old. “He’s a good person. He thinks I work for him.”

“Mo’s is just like a home for our friends, our fans,” says Jeloudarzedeh. “They’re gonna go here and there, but at the end of the day they’re gonna come back home. That’s why I always tell people, ‘Welcome home.’

“It’s been proven to me, and I believe in that,” he adds. “That’s what’s kept us alive.”

Chris Gray is a Houston-based writer.

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