What is
Honky-Tonk Two-Step?

Same family, tighter frame

It's a dialect, not a different dance

Two-step is a folk dance, and like any folk dance it varies from place to place. There is no governing body that crowns one version the only correct one. Even the traveling Texas two-step most people picture was only standardized around 1983, after Urban Cowboy. Austin has its own variation, the same family as the traveling Texas two-step and country western two-step, shaped by the room it grew up in.

Go to any Hill Country dance hall and watch the dance floor. Every couple out there is dancing their own version of whatever they learned to call two-step, with different swaggers, different frames, and a few who do not much care about the beat. No two couples look the same, and that is exactly what a living folk dance looks like.

Founder Vanessa Vaught, quoted in Tribeza, describes it simply: "swing in the style of two-step."

Out in a big open dance hall, couples travel a long, gliding line with room to stretch each step out. On a small, crowded Austin honky-tonk dance floor there is no room for that, so the step stays compact and smooth, and a couple keeps moving through a packed room without running anyone over. It moves with the song, too: quick when the band picks up, loose and bluesy when it slows down, which is half the fun.

Texas Monthly described this style the same way, noting that dancers are "packed together on the small floors, forcing them to move in place."

None of this means ignoring the room. In a Hill Country dance hall, or anywhere the room travels in a line, we travel right along with it, and we slide to the center of the dance floor or the corners when we want to work in the swing and stationary moves. That is just floor etiquette: you dance to the room you are in.

Nobody taught this in a studio first. Austin once had big dance halls with room to travel, but as those floors gave way to small, packed honky-tonks, the dance tightened to fit. The swing feel is not new either: Western swing and two-step have been intertwined in Texas since Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys in the 1930s.

Big, traveling steps do not work when the dance floor is small and every inch of it is taken, so over the years dancers made the two-step their own, tighter and smoother to match. You can watch it happen any night at Sagebrush, the White Horse, the Broken Spoke, Donn's Depot, the Continental Club, Sam's Town Point, and the Little Longhorn Saloon.

See it for yourself

Where you'll find it

Austin has live honky-tonk music every night, and where there is a band, there are two-steppers. For who is playing and where to go tonight, there is a daily list of every honky-tonk in town at wheretotwostepaustin.com.