Tag Archives: Broken Spoke

The Geezinslaws

I have it on good authority that the Geezinslaws started their set Saturday night at the Broken Spoke honky tonk with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. Now I know that country music artists, with the exception, perhaps, of the Dixie Chicks, tend to be very patriotic. But this is the first time I have heard of one bringing out a flag and conducting a roomful of dancers in saying the pledge–before getting to numbers with lyrics such as "I gave her my ring, she gave me the finger." My source, who is from Fort Worth, was there after attending a crawfish boil. She said she was shocked, not by the lyrics, nor the pledge, but because the band didn’t have a fiddle. Fact that it was the night before Easter, when the crowd could be expected to be small, might have had something to do with it. But she said that if a band showed up at a Fort Worth tonk without a fiddle player, they’d have to go get one in a hurry.

New folk around the Spoke

Developers have been vying for the rutted, bumpy dirt lot around the Broken Spoke honky-tonk in South Austin for at least the last twenty years of its forty-three year existence. Now they’ve got it, but they swear the iconic dance hall that’s reverberated to the music of Bob Wills (he’s still the king) and the Texas Playboys and the Texas Troubadour Ernest Tubb will go on unmolested. We’ll just have to see about that.