Kick Up Your Heels 
Dance, Dance, Dance 
Step Right Up
Ever wonder what happened to the good old country dance halls, where the floors are packed with boot-scootin’ couples, the beer costs two bucks, and the folks at the table in the corner can tell stories all night? It’s all still out there. Follow me . . .
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She opens the downstairs bar daily and runs it by herself. If you happen to be in while there’s dancing upstairs, the sound of their steps will echo through the room like rain on a rooftop, light and steady on the shuffles but like a thunderstorm on the polkas. You’ll also notice a rotary phone hanging on the wall, a dumbwaiter to take beer and ice to the dancers, and a stately bar brought in by her dad from Cameron. “He said he bought it from the Buckhorn Saloon for thirty-five dollars. He couldn’t sleep that night because he thought he’d spent too much money.
“I have a guy who comes in who’s after me to put a sign advertising his lumberyard upstairs,” she said, referring to the advertisements on the cherished glass panels. “I told him I can’t because this is our history. He said, ‘If one ever breaks, keep me in mind.’ I said I would. But we’ve never had one break.” 800 Seaton Rd (8 miles east of Temple), 254-985-2356
Anhalt Hall, Anhalt
Who To See: Gary P. Nunn, Donnie Wavra and the Hi-Liters
Secret Tip: The highlight at the harvest festivals—better even than the pot roast—is the Grand March, a half-hour-long Old World polka.
Purists describe anhalt as the quintessential Texas dance hall. It’s a monstrous gabled barn in a field ringed with live oaks, with a chicken-coop vent on the roof and pressed-tin sheets on exterior walls that are patterned like granite blocks. The dance floor is considered the best in the state: six thousand square feet of dark oak kept perfectly smooth by beeswax polish. Benches, not tables, line the perimeter, and the windows have shutters, not glass. The bandstand extends from the south side of the building, jutting out the back like a firebox on a meat smoker, with a low, curved ceiling to amplify the music. Electricity wasn’t run to the bandstand until 1986.
But the room’s true marvel is its arched trusses. They were the signature touch of builder Christian Herry, who designed Anhalt in 1908 and was, along with Austin County’s Joachim Hintz, one of the two great Texas dance hall architects. (Herry also designed Gruene Hall, though he used conventional trusses.) To curve the wood he soaked long one-by-four slats in water, used mules to bend them around posts in the ground, then stacked them to make them stronger. They span the grand dance floor, stretching to a height of forty feet, making Anhalt feel like a cathedral.
Because the large room was added to an older structure, the members of the verein that owns it still refer to it as “the new hall.” But keeping current has never been a priority here. In the verein’s 134 years of existence, it’s had only eight presidents, and the present one, a stern 85-year-old rancher named Wilton Steubing, still speaks with a noticeable accent. He was born in Texas, but English is his third language, after German and Spanish. He’s been a member since 1952 and in charge since 1992, and his subordinates on the board, men in their fifties and sixties, sound like intimidated teenagers when they describe trying to sell him on even small concessions to modernity, like changing the listing in the phone book from “Germania Farmer Verein” to the easier to comprehend “Anhalt Hall.” But Steubing has little use for newness. When I asked him if Elvis had ever played there, a common, often true claim of many halls, he snapped back, “Hell no. Those rock and roll fans would have tore the place up.”
The old man has eased on other fronts. Though signs on the wall still ban pedal pushers and “indecent, uncommonly dancing,” those rules are no longer strictly enforced. More significantly, he relented on the matter of monthly dances. For Anhalt’s first century it was open to the public only twice yearly, for its spring and fall harvest festivals. But this summer it started booking bands the third Saturday of every month. You should go, no matter who is playing. But don’t expect the lights to dim as you glide along the floor. Steubing doesn’t approve of people dancing in the dark. 2390 Anhalt Rd (24 miles west of New Braunfels), 830-438-2873, anhalthall.com
Quihi Gun Club and Dance Hall, Quihi
Who To See: Billy Mata and the Texas Tradition, Cactus Country
Secret Tip: The rental fee for a wedding is $400.
The beauty of Quihi sneaks up on you. It’s a tin-barn hall in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Hondo and Castroville, at the end of a dirt road lined by live oak and elm trees. The treat comes when you walk around to the entrance: The better part of the hall stretches out over Quihi Creek, supported by dozens of six-foot-tall cedar posts. A friend who grew up in Castroville told me he stole his first kiss under there after sneaking out of a Saturday dance with a girl. It’s unlikely that they were the only couple ever to do so. By his recollection they weren’t even the only one that night.
The dance hall was built in 1890 by the local schuetzen verein (“shooting club”) in a farming community, Quihi, that took its name from the Mexican eagle buzzard. The area never grew much beyond one hundred people, but club membership totals over six hundred—all men, all Germans, and all having resided at some point in Medina County. (A requirement that members be able to read and speak German was dropped in the sixties.) The club still holds a turkey shoot each fall, but its main function now is hosting twice-monthly dances. The biggest comes on Christmas night, when five hundred people attend the D’Hanis High School booster club’s annual fundraiser. For that one, club secretary–treasurer Clyde Muennink, who usually runs the place with just his wife, Kathy, and a couple volunteers, actually hires security.
But there were only about one hundred people there the night I went. A San Antonio band played to a large birthday party for two seventh-grade girls and a handful of couples celebrating date night. I sat with Al and Gin Gray, 80 and 75, respectively, as they sipped on beers and watched kids scoot across the floor where they had enjoyed their first dance. Al described the night, while Gin sat and giggled. “At the end of that first song, she whispered in my ear that if I didn’t dance with her again she was never coming back here,” he said. “She says she fell in love while we were dancing, but I didn’t fall until she called the next day.”
“I didn’t think girls called boys back then,” I said, turning to Gin. “Oh, this happened earlier this summer,” said Al. “We just got married on July 18. This is our two-month anniversary.” Driveway is off FM 2676, 6 miles east of the intersection at Texas Highway 173 (35 miles west of San Antonio); 830-426-2859; quihidancehall.com
John T. Floore Country Store, Helotes
Who To See: Willie Nelson, Ray Price
Secret Tip: The Sunday dances are still free.
Despite the hall’s long association with willie Nelson, the outsized persona touching everything at Floore’s belongs to its founder and namesake.
John T. was a king in search of a kingdom when he moved to Helotes in the late thirties. He’d just lost a run at the San Antonio mayor’s office, and the first piece of his new empire was a Red and White grocery that he bought in 1942 and ran as a combination market, real estate office, and beer joint. But he’d managed the Majestic Theatre during the Depression, and his background was showbiz. After a couple years watching San Antonians blow past Helotes cornfields on their way to Bandera honky-tonks, he moved to a larger space across the street, painted the cinder-block walls the color of split-pea soup, and added a dance floor. In 1949 he poured a big concrete slab under the oak trees out back and billed it “the largest patio in the Southwest.” His star-lit family dances were a departure for country acts passing through.
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