The Bugle Boy

The building is a World War Two barracks from Camp Swift, near Bastrop, which was the largest army training camp in Texas and held ninety thousand troops at its peak, along with roughly 4,800 German prisoners of war, most of them taken from Rommel's Afrika Korps in North Africa and later from Normandy. When the camp was broken up after the war, the La Grange Sons of Hermann Lodge bought this barracks from the Army in 1948, hauled it here, and held their meetings in it until 2004. Lane Gosnay then bought the building intending to open a coffee shop, started running open mic evenings in it, and noticed that the only nights doing any business were the ones with live music on. A barracks is a long plain box, which turns out to be a workable shape for a room people come to listen in. It opened as a listening room in January 2005 and has become one of the best regarded in the country. Eighty seats, and talking during a set is genuinely not done, which is the whole proposition and the reason performers want the booking. Anyone playing must have ninety minutes of original material to their name, which rules out cover bands entirely. It runs around a hundred and ten shows a year. In January 2012 it became the first Fair Trade music venue in Texas, a designation tied to guaranteed payment for artists rather than a share of the door. It sits on North Jefferson Street on the north side of La Grange, in a plain long building that still looks exactly like what it is.