This Week in Texas Music History, the world’s largest honky-tonk opens its doors.
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On April 1, 1981, the venue Billy Bob’s Texas opened in the Fort Worth Stockyards. In the four decades since, the club has become one of the state’s most iconic, among its biggest stages with the biggest names. While the stockyards’ original function of holding cattle prior to shipment by rail had petered out by the 1950s, their revitalization as a tourist destination gained steamed when designated as a historic district on the National Register in 1976.
The building housing Billy Bob’s itself originated as a cattle warehouse in 1910, added an auction ring in the 1930s, and had a brief tenure as an airplane factory during WWII. When Billy Bob Barnett bought the place, it had most recently been a department store.
Billy Bob’s opened in The Urban Cowboy era that made Texas country dancing a national fad, inspired by the film about Gilley’s of Pasadena, the world’s other largest honky-tonk at the time. In the club’s first week, Billy Bob’s hosted Larry Gatlin, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson.
Big names ZZ Top, Ernest Tubb, Marty Robbins, and more came around soon enough, and other soon-to-be-stars arrived in the early stages of their careers, such as George Strait and Rick Treviño.
Venues are a tricky business, though, and the club struggled and closed briefly in the late 1980s, before being reopened by Holt Hickman, Steve Murrin, and Donald Jury in 1988, with Billy Minick also taking on a leadership role. The reinvention came at the perfect time, allowing Billy Bob’s to become a center stage for the revived Texas country scene of the 90s with folks like Robert Earl Keen, Jack Ingram, and Pat Green.
In 1998, producer Rick Smith launched the Live at Billy Bob’s album series that would become a calling card for Texas Country artists and featured such folks as Lynn Anderson, Roy Clark, Merle Haggard, Billy Joe Shaver, and the Randy Rogers Band. Billy Bob’s remains the heart and soul of the Fort Worth Stockyards, a historic venue still resounding with Texas Music today.
Sources:
Tanya Krause in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
