The White Horse

A honky tonk that opened on Comal Street in December 2011 and immediately became the centre of gravity for country music in East Austin. Nathan Hill and Denis O'Donnell built it deliberately: O'Donnell had managed the Hole in the Wall for years, and the idea was a room where the honky tonk players they most respected could work several nights a week rather than occasionally. That residency model is what makes it worth stopping for. Modern outlaw and traditional country acts including Mike and the Moonpies and Leo Rondeau established themselves on this stage through repeated weekly bookings, which is how a scene is actually built and is close to extinct as a business practice. There is a dance floor, it is used, and free dance lessons early in the evening mean a room full of people who can two step by the time the band starts. It sits a block south of the East Sixth Street bar strip in a plain building with a patio and a taco trailer out back, and free dance lessons early in the evening mean the floor fills with people who can actually two step by the time the headliner starts. Austin has older country venues and grander ones, and the Broken Spoke on South Lamar is the famous one, a 1964 dance hall with a four lane road built up around it. This is where the younger half of the same tradition plays. The revival of two step dancing among Austinites in their twenties and thirties over the past decade ran substantially through this room, and on most nights it is the busier of the two.