Sam's Town Point

A dance hall in deep South Austin that began as one woman's specific ambition. Penny Grossman left Chicago in 1979 wanting to run a dance hall, bought four rural acres out near Slaughter Lane and Manchaca Road, and opened Sam's Town Point in 1981. The name comes from the property itself: the Austin city limit once ran through it, so the parking lot was in the city and the bar was out in Travis County, and Sam was a business associate of hers. The room is unreconstructed. Acoustic panels on the ceiling, mismatched chairs, a wooden dance floor that gets used, and a low stage, all of which reads less like a Texas honky tonk than like a working class corner tavern in the upper Midwest, which is more or less what Grossman built. Ramsay Midwood, a songwriter who played his first show here in 2002 and spent the better part of two decades as a house act and talent booker, bought the place from Grossman when she retired in 2017. He still plays a weekly residency. The booking runs to country, western swing, blues, Tejano and a good deal that resists categorising, and the crowd is local rather than touristic. It is a long way from downtown, out past the point where the city thins into ranch land and self storage, and the drive is a large part of why it still sounds like this. Rooms of this kind used to ring Austin, and most of them were bought out or priced out as the city grew south. This one survived by being far enough away to be worth nothing, for long enough, and it now sits behind a screen of trees on a road that has houses along it in a way it did not in 1981.