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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Villafranca quietly bought the Westerner in 1965, borrowing $52,000 from a friend on a handshake after being turned down by area banks. The hall was then the centerpiece of an eighteen-acre theme park called Pleasure Island (so named because it sat inside an oxbow flow of water on the Guadalupe River bottom), with a swimming pool, baseball field, and skating rink. Villafranca moved his family onto the property and ran it with his six children, who served as lifeguards, janitors, handymen, and bartenders. Before shows they liked to sneak onstage and play the bands’ instruments. “My brother James usually played drums,” says Debbie Escalante, who has owned the place with James and another brother, Tali, since their dad died, in 2007. “Tali always sang. He wanted to be Sunny Ozuna.”
Little Joe y la Familia is the family’s favorite act now. Joe Hernandez and Villafranca got along much like Willie and John T. Floore. Villafranca put up the money—$125—for Joe’s first recording, with David Coronado and the Latinaires in 1958, and over the years the Westerner remained a regular stop when Joe was traveling around the state. I attended one of his triumphant returns in October. The room was still decorated from an early-summer wedding—most of its business now is quinceañeras and weddings—with Christmas lights wrapped in white chiffon draped from the low ceiling to white posts on the edge of the dance floor. The audience was mostly older folks, all dressed to the nines and all apparently old friends of Little Joe’s, who handed the microphone into the crowd between songs for dedications. He also accepted a number of gifts from people who knew he’d just celebrated his birthday. There was just one strict rule on the dance floor: Even if you weren’t dancing in your partner’s arms, you had to keep moving in a circle. 1005 W. Constitution, 361-575-9109, clubwesterner.com
The Old Coupland Inn and Dancehall, Coupland
Who To See: Kyle Park, John Conlee
Secret Tip: Guests at the inn stand an outside chance of unwinding with the band in the parlor after the show.
Coupland represents the new wave in dance halls, a strange designation for a 105-year-old building. But dancing at the red-brick cavern is a relatively recent phenomenon. Opened as a mercantile in 1904, it knew a brief life in the fifties as La Casa Grande Ballroom. When it was a roller rink in the seventies, some kids probably danced there, and later, when it was a saloon known as Slow Joe’s, barkeepers poured out cornmeal when drinkers wanted a dance. But the floor back then was plywood.
Dancing came in earnest when Tim and Barbara Worthy bought the place, in 1992. They laid an oak wood floor and hung feed sacks from the rafters to help with acoustics and patterned their operation after Austin’s Broken Spoke. Like Spoke owners James and Annetta White, Tim shook hands and Barbara called the shots. If dancers stood still while the band played, she’d walk the floor and twirl a finger over her head like an umpire signaling a home run. The dancing promptly resumed.
But the place has followed a new model since the Worthys sold it two years ago. Austin banker Rick D. Smitherman now runs the hall and adjoining restaurant, living in the five-room hotel upstairs, which was reputedly once a whorehouse. He offers a great deal: For roughly $200, depending on who’s playing, you’ll get a room and dinner for two, a table by the stage, and breakfast in the morning. But thin crowds taught him early what TDHP means by “disappearing dance halls.” Without the plum location of Gruene or the hit-song fame of Luckenbach—halls that make enough money from T-shirt sales to keep their owners flush—Smitherman had to hustle.
So like Schroeder Hall, near Victoria, he embraced the rowdy Texas music scene and its Oklahoma cousin, Red Dirt country. Those acts have an edge to their twang, drawing a younger crowd who packs the dance floor to stand, drink beer, and sing. But even when the Stoney LaRue army commandeers the hall, the back half of the room belongs to dancers. LaRue, for one, sees the distinction. “Sometimes we’ll have kids or granddads in the crowd,” he said before a Coupland show. “When we do, it’s a Texas dance hall.”
The bigger alcohol sales keep Smitherman in business, allowing him to book throwbacks like Moe Bandy and Gene Watson on the weekends in between. All of which has made the hall a budding community hub. “We had a Kyle Park show here on a recent Saturday, and a kid came to the door and asked who was playing,” says Smitherman. “I said, ‘Why did you come if you don’t know who’s playing?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s Saturday, and this is Coupland.’ ” 101 Hoxie (8 miles south of Taylor), 512-856-2226, couplanddancehall.com
Sengelmann Hall, Schulenburg
Who To See: Heybale!, Shiner Hobo Band
Secret Tip: See who’s playing at nearby Swiss Alp Dance Hall and the Moravia Store and do a dance hall crawl.
When Junior Brown played Sengelmann Hall’s grand reopening this June, it occasioned the first proper use of the dance floor since World War II. But after six mournful decades of neglect, the hall now hosts three dances a week, including free polkas on Sundays, and TDHP purists hold it out as a dream example of restoration done right. The new owner, Dana Roy Harper, a 37-year-old Houston artist, held back nothing of his money or time. The new life he gave the hall was a function of family. One of Harper’s great-great-grandfathers was Hugh Roy Cullen, “King of the Wildcatters,” and the portion of the Cullen fortune that made its way to Harper paid for the hall’s million-dollar-plus renewal. That another great-great-grandfather, Gustav Cranz, lived in Schulenburg and was friends with Gustav Sengelmann, the hall’s original owner, provided the inspiration.
Shortly after moving to Schulenburg, in 1877, the brothers Sengelmann, Gustav and Charles, purchased a wood-frame saloon on the site. After it was destroyed in 1893 by a fire that took out much of downtown Schulenburg, then a town of roughly one thousand, the Sengelmanns built its replacement to last and impress. They crafted the walls of brown and yellow bricks, a favored late-nineteenth-century German style, and put cast-iron Corinthian columns inside, with a pressed-tin ceiling over the street-front bar and bead-board panels above the dance floor upstairs. It was home to Charles’ singing society, a Woodmen of the World Lodge, and weekend dances attended by Czech and German families who didn’t want to make the long ride out to their own halls in the country.
Harper bought it in 1998 and started to redo it two years ago. Where possible he stuck with what was there; where he had to replace things he was exacting. He used archival photographs to reproduce the towering front doors and the long saloon bar. He referred to old catalogs for period bar equipment and then had that made. He reclaimed the original piano from a descendant of the Sengelmanns’, then tracked the original benches to a nearby ranch and commissioned replicas. And then he got creative. The new green-velvet curtain behind the bandstand was matched to lederhosen on an oompah band shown in a large portrait hanging upstairs.
He opened a restaurant downstairs that serves family recipes passed down to his Czechoslovakian-born wife, Hana, and prepared by an accomplished, Schulenburg-raised chef, Kenny Kopecky. They rely as much as they can on area farmers for meat and produce and have brought enough dancers to town that three B&B’s have opened in recent months.
“I heard stories growing up from my grandmother about her opa,” says Harper, “so it’s great to see people falling in love with his place again. It’s not a museum devoted to what once was. It is what was.” 531 N. Main (halfway between San Antonio and Houston, 1 mile south of Interstate 10), 979-743-2300, sengelmannhall.com
A slide show of more dance halls, a two-stepping video, and country songwriter Bruce Robison’s ultimate dance hall iMix all at texasmonthly.com/texana
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