{"id":399314,"date":"2026-08-06T14:14:38","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T14:14:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/399314\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T14:14:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T14:14:38","slug":"austins-two-stepping-scene-became-the-setting-of-my-love-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/399314\/","title":{"rendered":"Austin\u2019s Two-Stepping Scene Became the Setting of My Love Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Digital subscribers can listen to this article. <\/p>\n

Subscribe today<\/a> for unlimited access to Texas\u00a0Monthly. Already a subscriber? Log in<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The ink was barely dry on my divorce decree when I arrived in Austin on May\u00a01, 2021. I\u2019d been offered a job at Texas Monthly, but I wasn\u2019t sure if Texas would become home or just another stopover in my itinerant early adulthood, which had included nine moves in as many years. Twelve months in, the job was inspiring, but the city was not. I packed up again and relocated thirty miles north, to Georgetown, hoping that life on the periphery might do the trick. This felt less like moving to a place than getting the heck out of one I\u2019d held at arm\u2019s length.<\/p>\n

One night in 2022, I met Kate, a friend of a friend, at a Charley Crockett<\/a> concert in Austin. During the show, I noticed people in the audience two-stepping in the aisles and realized I hadn\u2019t been out dancing in years. Raised in Chicago, I grew up in a Cuban-Colombian family; my sister, cousins, and I were taught to dance salsa and cumbia\u00a0pretty much as soon as we could stand, and at family gatherings our living rooms would transform into mini\u2013Buena Vista Social Club dance floors. I told Kate about my attempts to teach my ex-wife to dance and how she mocked my efforts, which stung. Kate suggested I give two-stepping a try. \u201cGo to the White Horse on a Tuesday,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s when the best dancers show up.\u201d<\/p>\n

A month later, I walked into the East Austin honky-tonk<\/a> expecting to see boots, cowboy hats, starched jeans, and a crowd of white faces. Singer-songwriter Devin Jake was onstage with his band\u2014a drummer, a guitarist, and a fiddler\u2014playing loud and fast. The dark dance floor was packed. There were boots, though also quite a few pairs of Converse high-tops, and the room was predominantly filled with white faces\u2014it\u2019s Austin, after all\u2014but nobody was dressed like Woody<\/a>. I beheld a spinning, bobbing, dipping tapestry of tattoos and cuffed pants, fishnets and ripped jeans, shaggy mullets and pixie cuts. I watched a short guy with long hair dip a leggy woman in a pencil skirt, an old-timer with stiff knees smile as he turned a giggling thirtysomething, a woman with high cheekbones and short pigtails wrap her arms around the waist of another woman who gazed into her eyes, and a skinny Black man twirl his partner so fast and tight that it looked like her feet might drill into the floor.<\/p>\n

\"photo The iconic White Horse sign. Photograph by Chad Wadsworth \"portrait Marshall McHone, co-owner of the White Horse, where line dancing is not encouraged. Photograph by Chad Wadsworth <\/p>\n

I asked a woman to dance. Then I asked another and another. I spun around the floor until the place shut down at 2 a.m. I returned the next night and the night after that. For the next year, I danced in Austin\u2019s honky-tonks as often as six nights a week for four to five hours a night. I partnered with and befriended people from all walks of life: native Texans and runaways who\u2019d changed their names, ex-addicts in recovery and hard partiers sneaking bumps between songs, ambitious entrepreneurs and aspiring artists, pining monogamists and choosy polyamorists.<\/p>\n

I became a regular. And we regulars, I discovered, were all a little broken. We joked about taking up two-stepping after major breakups\u2014and feeling as if we were reborn on the dance floor. Grasping for connection and emotion in one another\u2019s arms allowed for an affection that was as intense as it was fleeting. Each dance was a chance to plunge naively into the whirl of sights, sounds, and scents, to surrender one\u2019s heart completely to sudden and irresistible joy. That Tuesday at White Horse changed my life. And it wouldn\u2019t be the last to do so.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a sign that hangs in the White Horse<\/a> that reads \u201cNo F\u2014in\u2019 Line Dancing.\u201d At first I thought this was an amusing dig at a hokey dance style. But during my early heady months of nearly nightly dancing, I learned that it\u2019s a polemic\u2014and the manifesto of one side in Austin\u2019s divided two-stepping community.<\/p>\n

Exploring country joints in and around the city, I found what I consider three distinct scenes. The one I\u2019m fond of\u2014I\u2019ll call it the honky-tonk scene\u2014primarily exists within the walls of three well-known venues; from north to south, they are the White Horse, Sagebrush, and Sam\u2019s Town Point. There\u2019s the traditional dance hall scene, which persists at the Broken Spoke and at historic Hill Country spots, such as Gruene Hall<\/a>, in New Braunfels. The third is the country-nightclub scene. It\u2019s headquartered at Maverick\u2019s Dance Hall, which has two locations just outside Austin, in Pflugerville to the north and in Buda to the south.<\/p>\n

The music, the people, and the dancing vary from one scene to the next. At dance halls, which are typically larger than honky-tonks, dancers perform a traditional progressive two-step in a counterclockwise lap around the floor. Partners maintain stiff postures and either face each other in a closed position with the lead moving forward and the follow moving backward, or advance in a promenade side by side, moving forward together with hands over shoulders. The dance is a rhythmic walk that follows a quick-quick-slow-slow cadence. Dance hall regulars tend to be older folks who dress modestly. Bands play covers of familiar songs. For the most part, it\u2019s not a singles scene. Married couples are there to dance with each other rather than with multiple partners.<\/p>\n

\"photo\"photoThe White Horse\u2019s dance floor is packed on Tuesday nights.Photograph by Chad Wadsworth<\/p>\n

The country nightclubs have large dance floors, too, but they\u2019re modern, glossy, and illuminated by disco lights. Dancers there move counterclockwise, but they\u2019re usually younger, in their twenties and thirties, and looking for romance. Unlike in dance halls and honky-tonks, a DJ provides the music, blasting popular country, hip-hop, and, every 45 minutes or so, a couple of line dancing songs. At Maverick\u2019s, the two-stepping can be acrobatic. The nights I went there to dance, I witnessed leads\u2014all of them men, a lot of them bulky from lifting weights or, judging by their square-toed
boots and starched jeans, working on a ranch\u2014twist, turn, and lift their follows in spectacular displays of athleticism. I saw women tossed into the air or rapidly dipped to the point of almost performing backflips.<\/p>\n

That style isn\u2019t for everyone. Megan Newman, a 38-year-old honky-tonk regular, has danced at Maverick\u2019s a couple of times. \u201cGuys there don\u2019t take feedback. I feel way more comfortable telling someone at the honky-tonks, \u2018Here\u2019s what I want,\u2019\u200a\u201d she told me. \u201cIt kind of drives me insane watching the Maverick\u2019s people dance. It\u2019s like, \u2018How many moves can I shove into this one dance while I do everything to break my partner\u2019s arm?\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Newman, I prefer honky-tonks, where the dancing is gentler, looser, and, I must say, sexier. Dancers are packed together on the small floors, forcing them to move in place. Knees are bent and hips move freely. There\u2019s still a two-step cadence, but the spins, tucks, and waist wraps are derived from swing. Bands mostly play original songs or put their own twists on classics. The scene attracts a younger, more urban crowd, too, though of a different type than those at the nightclubs. The guys tend to be skinnier and have more facial hair. They dress in hipster Western wear\u2014think vintage tees tucked into jeans or corduroys\u2014and the scuffs on their pointed boots are more likely from shuffling across a dance floor than working outside. There\u2019s an air of freedom in how the women dress, speak, and move. I find it beautiful.<\/p>\n

My interest in the origin of the scene that I\u2019d fallen for\u2014the one I\u2019d been dancing in, populated by hipsters, queer people, and the women I find attractive\u2014sent me to Lockhart<\/a>, where I spoke with Denis O\u2019Donnell, cofounder of the White Horse and Sagebrush. I met the 47-year-old businessman at the bar of the establishment he named after his grandfather, O\u2019Donnell\u2019s Cafe & Pub, on the town\u2019s courthouse square. Like others I spoke to, he was adamant about where young people started putting a new spin on the two-stepping tradition: the Hole in the Wall, a small Austin dive where he once worked as a manager and booker.<\/p>\n

To understand how the Hole came to be so influential in today\u2019s two-stepping craze, let\u2019s take a quick jaunt through Austin\u2019s country music history, starting in 1970, when the Armadillo World Headquarters<\/a> opened. It was from this venue that Willie, Waylon, and other \u201coutlaws\u201d staged a revolt against the so-called Nashville sound, the glossy pop-adjacent music that had dominated airwaves for decades. The outlaws\u2019 grittier music famously brought together two otherwise disparate tribes: the rednecks and the hippies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

By the early eighties, the Armadillo had closed, the hippies were old news, and punk was on the rise in Austin. Meanwhile, the wave of music sparked by the movie Urban Cowboy made traditional country feel old-fashioned by comparison. It was around this time that the Hole, which opened in 1974, started coming into its own and became known as a joint where anyone could play, no matter the genre.<\/p>\n

\"closeup Dancers performing a side dip. Photograph by Chad Wadsworth \"photo Cowboy boot\u2013clad patrons outside the White Horse. Photograph by Chad Wadsworth <\/p>\n

Jeff Hughes, front man of the honky-tonk band Chaparral, hung out there in the eighties as a twentysomething who mostly rocked out at punk shows. He hardly imagined he\u2019d ever start a country group. But that changed when he saw a performance at the Hole by local rockabilly act Teddy and the Tall Tops.<\/p>\n

Hughes recalled bartenders clearing tables and stacking chairs so that people could two-step in the space in front of the bar when they played. \u201cIt was definitely an alternative crowd. We were of a generation that wasn\u2019t going to the Broken Spoke,\u201d he told me. \u201cThere weren\u2019t normies or typical cowboys there.\u201d Hughes credits dancing to the Tall Tops with cementing his love of classic country and eventually starting Chaparral, in 1987. There wasn\u2019t a honky-tonk scene yet\u2014there weren\u2019t legions of dancers or dozens of bands catering to them like there are today\u2014but looking back on it, Hughes thinks of those nights at the Hole as the protozoa that would eventually, after a long, sometimes halting process, evolve into what exists now.<\/p>\n

But today\u2019s honky-tonk scene was shaped by a singular phenomenon that began in the early nineties. \u201cSomething happened that changed country music forever and for the f\u2014ing worst,\u201d O\u2019Donnell said. \u201cGarth Brooks.\u201d The superstar\u2019s crossover success\u2014Brooks became the best-selling solo artist in American history\u2014ignited a new pop-country explosion that divided country fans, some of whom eventually migrated to different spaces to dance.<\/p>\n

\"white\"whiteLive music at the White Horse.Photograph by Chad Wadsworth<\/p>\n

Pop country wasn\u2019t new, but the nineties were a golden age for the lacquered sound that flowed out of Nashville in Brooks\u2019s wake. O\u2019Donnell bemoaned how a genre that had \u201calways been about the human condition\u201d and focused on themes like \u201cbeing broke, going to prison, murder\u201d was pushed aside in favor of a less poetic, more marketable pop sound. The typical Hole in the Wall crowd \u201cdidn\u2019t like that s\u2014,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd you can\u2019t dance to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Generations later, the post-Brooks style is alive and well at Austin\u2019s country nightclubs. \u201cWhat\u2019s really weird is that the rural parts of Texas really attached to that music,\u201d O\u2019Donnell said, adding that the crowd at Maverick\u2019s is made up of \u201cthe descendants of the original honky-tonk people, the rednecks in the forties and fifties who listened to Hank Williams.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet it\u2019s easier to imagine a Hank fan from that era feeling more at ease two-stepping to what I\u2019ll call new-roots music in the dark at Sagebrush or Sam\u2019s Town Point rather than under the disco lights of a nightclub. Honky-tonk bands regularly play innovative covers of Hank\u2019s music; you won\u2019t likely hear a DJ queue up \u201cLong Gone Lonesome Blues\u201d at Maverick\u2019s.<\/p>\n

That sign at White Horse doesn\u2019t signal a prohibition. There\u2019s nothing to prohibit; no musician booked there plays line dancing songs. It\u2019s a heads-up.<\/p>\n

While Nashville chass\u00e9d into the new millennium, the Hole in the Wall incubated bands interested in two things: tinkering with roots music and getting butts out of seats.<\/p>\n

I recently visited the Hole with Tate Mayeux. He\u2019s 37, one half of the singer-songwriter duo Mayeux & Broussard<\/a>, and, as I\u2019ve heard him described, \u201cthe mayor of Austin country music.\u201d With shaggy curls, jeans, and boots, he\u2019s the picture of a cosmic cowboy. He gestured around the bar. \u201cThis is where what we now call the dance scene began.\u201d He came in from San Marcos to Austin in the mid-aughts \u201cso I could see Mike and the Moonpies and the Carper Family,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was the very first time I saw what I consider the dancing crowd. It wasn\u2019t Meemaw and Pops at the Broken Spoke. The present-day honky-tonk scene started with what we called drag rats, the guys and girls with rattails who worked as pedicab drivers.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Donnell was booking shows at the Hole by then and noticed a community of regulars beginning to coalesce around local acts like the Moonpies, Jonathan Terrell, and Shakey Graves<\/a>, who played a millennial take on traditional music. \u201cThey didn\u2019t quite fit with other country venues. They weren\u2019t getting gigs at the Spoke,\u201d O\u2019Donnell said. What they were getting was a loyal following. It started small, he recalled, with maybe a dozen dancers. But it grew over a few years to maybe a hundred or so. \u201cIt became this hot, sweaty, exciting scene. Everybody knew the words to their songs. Their original songs. They\u2019re shouting it right back at the band while they shuffle and spin.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"photo Sagebrush, in South Austin. Photograph by Chad Wadsworth \"sagebrush Cooling off during two-step lessons at Sagebrush. Photograph by Chad Wadsworth <\/p>\n

O\u2019Donnell sensed an opportunity, and he and some partners opened the White Horse in December 2011. \u201cThe first night, the Dallas singer-songwriter Roger Wallace was playing, and we\u2019re jammed full of people,\u201d O\u2019Donnell recalled. \u201cThere\u2019s kids in the skinny-rocker jeans and punk rockers and black Mot\u00f6rhead shirts and jean jackets, and everybody\u2019s two-stepping.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once Sagebrush opened, in 2020, honky-tonkers had two homes in Austin just miles from each other, making it easy to\u2014if I may coin a phrase\u2014honky-hop. It\u2019s commonplace among the obsessed to start the night in one of the joints with a 9 p.m. band and perform a last dip to the midnight headliner at the other.<\/p>\n

But the scene became a damn scene thanks to a sweet-natured Austin native named Vanessa Vaught, founder of Double or Nothing Two-Step<\/a>, the city\u2019s most popular provider of country-dance lessons. Vaught had been dancing since she was young but began teaching after hanging out at White Horse in its early years. \u201cWe\u2019d go over there, and it looked really cool to me how these people were dancing,\u201d she said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t the traditional Texas two-step.\u201d They were dancing in place, swaying closely, rhythmically combining spins and wraps and dips.<\/p>\n

During the pandemic, Vaught secured a residency at Sagebrush before it reopened, and she began producing Instagram reels that featured
step-by-step instructions for new spin-and-dip combinations. When the shutdowns lifted, \u201cwe were the first ones out of the gate,\u201d she said. Eighty people came to her first lesson, in March 2021.<\/p>\n

Vaught also started posting daily lineups for honky-tonks so that regulars could follow bands around town. The feed became essential for the community. And her company became not just the center of the scene but its growth engine. By providing lessons at venues before bands played, she gave newbies a chance to show up alone, meet other beginners, and then cut a rug to live music all in one night. Vaught estimates that over the past four years between forty and fifty thousand people have taken a Double or Nothing lesson.<\/p>\n

By organizing an army of cover-paying obsessives, Vaught has juiced a live-music economy that supports local artists like Hayden Butler, a 35-year-old Austin native who\u2019s gone from experimenting with small acoustic sets to booking the coveted 8 and 10 p.m. slots at honky-tonks around town. \u201cPlaying country-dance music pays my rent,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

To the memory and knowledge of every longtime Austin musician and dancer I\u2019ve asked, there have never been more dancers and dancing opportunities in the city\u2019s history. With Austin and its honky-tonks in the spotlight, musicians like singer-songwriter Paige Plaisance are gaining wider exposure and getting new shots at touring. She was recently invited to perform at Gottscheer Hall, in Queens, New York, where dancers told her that they\u2019d seen her in Austin. \u201cThey were like, \u2018We saw you play at White Horse, and we came to your show,\u2019\u200a\u201d she told me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"photo\"photoDouble or Nothing Two-Step founder Vanessa Vaught giving lessons on a recent Friday night.Photograph by Chad Wadsworth<\/p>\n

At honky-tonks that have sprouted in cities across the country, bookers hoping to draw crowds are \u201cdefinitely looking to Austin,\u201d said Aaron McDonnell, a popular honky-tonk singer who\u2019s performed in Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle for audiences that included people who first saw him in Austin.<\/p>\n

There are honky-tonks all over Texas, but the Austin scene is unique. San Antonio has the Lonesome Rose, in the Tobin Hill neighborhood, but it\u2019s open for dancing only a few nights a week. Houston also has dance halls and honky-tonks\u2014Tuesdays at the Big Top Lounge, in Montrose, attract a group of regulars\u2014but they\u2019re spread out across the city, which makes it tough to honky-hop. Likewise in Dallas and Fort Worth: There are honky-tonks but not an organized group of locals who reliably fill the floors.<\/p>\n

Hearing about the throngs of two-steppers who are creating opportunities for musicians has O\u2019Donnell thinking of grand possibilities. \u201cThe dancers in Austin may very well save country music from the three-decade onslaught of Nashville pop and bro country,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople want to dance to our music. I\u2019m hoping this passion for dancing and real music can teach America a way to party and love each other.\u201d What a powerful antidote to our lonely, alienated times that would be.<\/p>\n

On a cold Tuesday night in February 2024, I was going, as usual, to White Horse. I\u2019d come a long way since my first visit. I wore my boots and a pearl-snap shirt with sleeves short enough to show off a new tattoo. A couple of months earlier, on a late-night drive back to Georgetown, I\u2019d realized that Austin was my home after all. I belonged to a community that was part of its fabric. Living outside it had become a barrier to turning acquaintances into friendships\u2014and to love too. Around the same time that I moved back, I realized that I was ready for a new relationship. I knew where I\u2019d eventually find it. Two-stepping proved a better filter than any dating app could provide. I was sure a woman I could love would show up at a honky-tonk.<\/p>\n

I saw her as soon as I walked in: a chestnut-haired, green-eyed beauty in boots, jean shorts, and a black one-shoulder top. I asked her to dance. She told me her name was Aly. My life was about to change again.<\/p>\n

\"closeup Dancers scooting on Sagebrush\u2019s vintage oak dance floor. Photograph by Chad Wadsworth \"selfie Author Josh Alvarez and his wife, Aly Nielsen. Courtesy of Josh Alvarez <\/p>\n

Left: Dancers scooting on Sagebrush\u2019s vintage oak dance floor. Photograph by Chad Wadsworth <\/p>\n

Top: Author Josh Alvarez and his wife, Aly Nielsen. Courtesy of Josh Alvarez <\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure that Texas is my home now, and it\u2019s thanks to dancing. But I\u2019m not going out honky-tonking as much as I used to. I no longer call myself a regular. Aly and I got together not long after our first twirl, and many of our dates involved two-stepping. But my six nights a week gradually dwindled as we brought our lives together. Last spring I asked her to marry me on her back porch, which I\u2019d converted into a candlelit \u201cmini-tonk\u201d for us to dance on.<\/p>\n

We planned on enjoying our engagement for a year before running off somewhere to exchange vows. But two months later we found out we were going to be parents. The past year has been a blur. We eloped to Europe in June, and then a rapid series of celebrations, showers, and doctor\u2019s appointments followed. We still carved out time to go dancing as Aly\u2019s belly grew. We welcomed our daughter on New Year\u2019s Eve, and displayed on a floating shelf near her crib is a tiny pair of white leather boots, hers to wear when it\u2019s time for us to teach her to dance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On a recent Tuesday, Aly and I went back to where it all began\u2014for me and for us. I looked around the dance floor, but I didn\u2019t recognize anyone. Maybe the regulars I knew had migrated to a different night or other honky-tonks. Or maybe I was among a new cohort whose turn it was to surrender to joy, to love, to keeping this thing alive. To feeling, as I did, that they are exactly where they\u2019re supposed to be.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in the August 2026 issue of\u00a0Texas Monthly with the headline \u201cHead Over Heels.\u201d\u00a0Subscribe today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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