Music & Memory

Country Music in Fort Worth: From Bob Wills to Miranda Lambert

By Maggie Saunders

It is possible to argue that the most important moment in the history of American country music took place in Fort Worth on a Saturday afternoon in February 1934, when a small western band led by a fiddle player named Bob Wills walked into the studios of KFJZ on Throckmorton Street and began a regular broadcast called the Light Crust Doughboys program. Wills did not invent western swing in that broadcast. He had been playing some version of it in dance halls all over North Texas for several years. But the broadcast, and the dance hall residencies that followed at Crystal Springs on the west edge of town, gave the sound its first sustained public, and that public was Fort Worth — Fort Worth oil workers, Fort Worth cattlemen, Fort Worth wives and daughters and grandmothers, dancing on Friday and Saturday nights to a band that had decided, more or less on principle, that the rules separating fiddle music from jazz and blues from popular song were rules they were under no obligation to obey.

Wills moved to Tulsa in 1934 and took most of the credit for western swing with him. But the sound was a Fort Worth sound first. The dance hall on Jacksboro Highway where the Doughboys cut their teeth is gone — paved under by a tire warehouse sometime in the 1970s, with no marker. The radio station is gone. The Crystal Springs pavilion burned in 1939 and was never rebuilt. What remains of that era in Fort Worth is, almost entirely, the music itself, available now on remastered CDs and streaming services and absolutely nowhere on the physical map of the city that made it.

This is a recurring pattern. Country music in Fort Worth has, for almost a century, been treated by Fort Worth's civic apparatus as a kind of weather: pleasant when it happens, not a thing requiring infrastructure. The honky-tonks that dotted Jacksboro Highway and the Mansfield Highway in the 1940s and 1950s — the Skyliner, the Mountaineer, the Showboat — produced or hosted at one time or another almost every figure of consequence in mid-century Texas country music. Most of them are gone. The ones that survive, survive as bait shops or storage facilities. The Skyliner's marquee is in a private collection.

The post-war generation of Fort Worth country was a generation of working musicians, not of stars. The stars who came through — Hank Williams played the Skyliner in 1952, Patsy Cline played the North Side Coliseum in 1961 — passed through on tour and never quite belonged to the city. The musicians who belonged to the city were people whose names are now known mostly to record collectors: Hoyle Nix, who held a residency at Crystal Springs's brief 1950s revival; Lefty Frizzell, who grew up partly in Greenville but cut his teeth in Fort Worth honky-tonks before he moved to Dallas and onto Columbia Records; Charlie Walker, who DJed at KMAC in San Antonio but played Fort Worth more nights than any other city in Texas through the late 1950s.

Billy Bob's Texas opened in 1981 in a former cattle barn on the north end of the Stockyards. It was, and remains, the largest honky-tonk in the world, with a capacity that has been variously listed at six thousand and seventeen thousand depending on whether you count the bull-riding arena. Billy Bob's has the curious quality of being simultaneously the most famous music venue in Fort Worth and a venue most serious Fort Worth musicians regard with affection rather than reverence. It is a tourist destination. It also, for forty-four years now, has paid working country musicians actual money to play actual sets in front of actual audiences, which is a thing fewer and fewer American venues do.

The 2000s produced what was, briefly, a Fort Worth country renaissance. Pat Green grew up in San Antonio and lived in College Station but played Billy Bob's so often through the late 1990s and early 2000s that he became, by acclamation, a Fort Worth artist. Miranda Lambert, who is from Lindale, made her recording-industry first moves in Nashville but kept her songwriting compass pointed at small-town East Texas in a way that read, to Fort Worth ears, as kin. The Texas country radio format, which broke nationally in the mid-2000s, was largely a Fort Worth and Austin invention.

What the city has not quite produced, ever, is a country institution on the scale of the Grand Ole Opry or the Ryman Auditorium. Billy Bob's is the closest, and Billy Bob's is a barn. The smaller venues that did the slow work of making the next generation of musicians — the White Elephant Saloon, Pearl's Dancehall and Saloon, the Stagecoach Ballroom on Mansfield Highway, Lola's Saloon on the indie-rock side of things — have closed or are closing on a rolling basis. The city does not lack musicians. The city lacks rooms for them. That is a problem the next decade will, one way or another, have to solve.

The Venues That Built the Sound

By Tom Reyes

Three rooms have done more for Fort Worth music in the last fifty years than all the others put together. They are very different rooms. They do very different things. The argument of this piece is that the city needs all three, and that the city has, in characteristic Fort Worth fashion, taken at least one of them for granted to the point of losing it.

The White Elephant Saloon stands at 106 East Exchange Avenue in the heart of the Stockyards District. The current building dates to 1976, a deliberate reconstruction on roughly the site of the original White Elephant, the saloon outside of which Luke Short shot Jim Courtright in 1887. The reconstruction is honest about being a reconstruction. The bar inside is long, dark, and oak. The stage at the back is small enough that the band can hear each other without monitors. The White Elephant runs live music six nights a week, mostly Western swing and traditional country, and has been doing so without significant interruption since the year it opened. Its house bands are not famous outside Fort Worth. Inside Fort Worth they are something close to civic.

Billy Bob's Texas, three blocks north, is the opposite kind of room. It is enormous. It is loud. The headline acts are advertised on the marquee a month out. The audience comes to dance, and the dance floor is the size of a small basketball arena. Billy Bob's is the venue Fort Worth shows visiting cousins. The criticism — that it is a tourist trap — is true and beside the point. The relevant fact about Billy Bob's is that for forty-four years it has reliably booked working country musicians and paid them above-scale wages, which is the entire material basis on which a regional music economy stands.

Lola's Saloon, until earlier this year, was the third room. It was tiny — capacity around two hundred — and located in a converted feed store on West 6th, just off the West 7th Street corridor. Lola's was not a country venue. Lola's booked indie rock, garage rock, occasional roots music, the kind of touring acts that pass through Texas on the I-35 corridor and need a Fort Worth date between Dallas and Austin. For twenty-three years Lola's was where you saw Fort Worth's indie bands before they were anything, and where you saw the better national indie bands when they were not yet famous enough to play larger rooms. The closing of Lola's, addressed in our lead feature this issue, is not just the loss of a venue. It is the loss of an entire scaffolding by which young Fort Worth musicians could imagine a career.