Local History
Texas Music Historical Markers: Honky-Tonks, Blues Joints, and the Sound of the State
Eight real Texas historical markers trace the sound of the state, from an 1878 dance hall in Gruene to Deep Ellum street corners, the Lubbock Cotton Club, and Scott Joplin's Texarkana.
Photo: Chandler Cruttenden / Unsplash. Texas neon.
You're driving a farm road at dusk and a low wooden building slides past your window. No sign, no cars, just a roofline and a historical marker bolted to a post out front. That building might be where Bob Wills played, or where a man who changed American music first picked up a twelve-string guitar. Texas has more than 16,000 official historical markers, and a lot of them mark music. RoadHistorical is a Texas historical preservation platform that puts those markers on your route. This article walks you through eight real music markers, where they stand, and what the plaques actually say.
The Dance Halls Where It Started
Texas dance halls came from German, Czech, and Polish families who settled Central Texas in the mid-1800s. They needed somewhere to gather. So they built halls, and the halls turned into music venues.
Gruene's Hall in Comal County carries a marker that calls it one of the oldest dance halls in Texas. Christian Herry built it in 1878 as a saloon and social hall for area cotton farmers. He worked under the direction of town developer Henry D. Gruene, who employed many of those farmers. The plaque calls it the center of community social life for over a century. Look for the false front entry and the uneven window and door spacing. It became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1988.
Address: 1281 Gruene Road, Gruene, TX
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Broken Spoke came almost a century later. Austin native James M. White opened it in 1964 on a former lumberyard site south of the city limits. He built it to look like a traditional honky-tonk. Patrons danced to jukebox records on weeknights and live bands on weekends.
The place got popular fast. White added a dance hall and a stage, then started booking country acts from across the Austin area. Bob Wills played here. So did Ernest Tubb, Tex Ritter, and Kitty Wells. White died in 2021, the same year the state marker went up.
Address: 3201 S. Lamar Blvd., Austin, TX
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Two Guitars Out of Deep Ellum
Deep Ellum sat at the far end of Elm Street in downtown Dallas. In the early 1900s it was a large, dynamic Black community, built up around railroad jobs. By the 1920s the nightclubs and dance halls there had made it central to Texas music.
Blind Lemon Jefferson was born near Wortham in Freestone County. He played guitar and sang spirituals and blues on the street as a young man. He wrote much of his own material and sang in a style nobody could copy. A talent scout took him from Deep Ellum to Chicago in the 1920s, where he cut 79 jazz and blues recordings. His marker credits him with influencing Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Tommy Dorsey, and Bix Beiderbecke.
The marker sits along SH 14 outside Wortham with no street number, so navigate by coordinates.
Address: Blind Lemon Jefferson marker, Wortham, TX
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Leadbelly in Deep Ellum honors Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, born in Caddo Parish, Louisiana around 1888. He moved to Dallas about 1910. He heard his first jazz band there, and he found the twelve-string guitar that became his instrument.
Around 1912 he met Blind Lemon Jefferson. The two played together on street corners, in clubs, and on the interurban railroad that ran through the Dallas area. Two careers that shaped Texas blues overlapped on the same sidewalks.
Address: Leadbelly in Deep Ellum marker, Dallas, TX
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Lubbock, Where Country Turned Into Rock and Roll
Lubbock Cotton Club started in 1938 inside a renovated army quonset hut. Clyde Trusty opened it as a ballroom for the big bands and orchestras of the day. He expanded a year later, and the new floor held 1,600 people. Few dance floors in West Texas ran bigger.
Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were among the first western swing bands to play it. Ralph Lowe bought the business in 1952 and started booking national acts. Elvis Presley played a show here in 1955 and met a local teenager named Buddy Holly. Charles Brown played here too. Fire destroyed the club in 1958. It reopened at a new site and ran until 1980.
Address: 5214 Southeast Dr., Lubbock, TX
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Buddy Holly was born Charles Hardin Holley in Lubbock on September 7, 1936. He grew up in a musical house. His mother and siblings sang and played, and he took violin, piano, and steel guitar lessons before picking up a $15 guitar his brother bought.
Seeing Elvis in concert in 1955 changed his direction. An agent caught him opening for country acts at the Fair Park Coliseum and helped him land a Decca contract. Decca misspelled his name on it, and Holley became Holly for good. In 1957 he and the Crickets started working with producer Norman Petty in Clovis, New Mexico. They recorded "That'll Be the Day" on February 25 of that year.
Address: 1801 Crickets Avenue, Lubbock, TX
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Ragtime in Texarkana, Conjunto in San Antonio
Scott Joplin was born in Texarkana on November 24, 1868, five years before anyone platted the townsite. His family lived near where the marker now stands, and he attended Orr School on Laurel Street. His father Giles, born into slavery, played fiddle. His mother Florence played banjo. A German music teacher recognized his talent and gave him lessons.
Joplin left home at 14 and played saloons and honky-tonks across the Midwest. In the 1890s he helped originate ragtime. "Maple Leaf Rag" turned it into a national craze in 1899. He wrote more than 30 piano rags and defended the form against critics who called it frivolous. His folk opera "Treemonisha" is set on a plantation northeast of Texarkana. Nobody staged it until the 1970s.
Address: 901 State Line Ave., Texarkana, TX
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Lydia Mendoza was born in Houston and became a defining singer of the Texas-Mexico border. Her 1934 recording of "Mal Hombre" for Bluebird Records launched a career that ran sixty years. Audiences knew her voice and her twelve-string guitar, and they called her "La Alondra de la Frontera."
She performed at President Carter's inauguration. She won a National Heritage Fellowship in 1982 and the National Medal of Arts in 1999. The Tejano Music Hall of Fame, the Conjunto Music Hall of Fame, and the Texas Women's Hall of Fame all inducted her. A stroke ended her career in 1988. The Postal Service put her on a stamp in 2013.
Address: 746 Castroville Rd, San Antonio, TX
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
How RoadHistorical Finds These Markers
Discovery Mode runs while you drive. When you pass a marker, your phone tells you. You don't have to know a plaque is coming, and you don't have to watch the shoulder for a brown post. That's how most people find markers they'd otherwise blow past at 70.
The AI Tour Guide handles the questions the plaque leaves open. Ask who else played the Cotton Club, or what a quonset hut is, and you get an answer in the car. Offline mode keeps all of it working in places like Freestone County, where cell coverage drops out between towns. Stopping at a marker is how preservation actually happens. Somebody has to show up and read it.
Start Discovering Texas History Today
RoadHistorical is free to download on iPhone and Android. Download it here and turn on Discovery Mode before your next drive. Android users can download RoadHistorical from Google Play.
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