Coupland: Coupland Dancehall

Coupland is barely a dot on the map — an unincorporated crossroads in Williamson County founded in 1887 by Theodore Van Buren Coupland on land that once belonged to his uncle, U.S. Senator Morgan C. Hamilton. But for more than a century, the town’s identity has run through one building on Hoxie Street: a former drugstore and grocery that’s now one of the great old-school dance halls in the Texas Hill Country.

The building dates to 1904, when it opened as the Coupland Drug Company; by 1948 it was Albers Drugstore, where three doctors practiced medicine down the hall from a hand-cranked X-ray machine. Next door, the old Coupland Tavern building — a former hardware store — once housed the town newspaper and hosted quarterly “pun-offs.” Eventually the two buildings and the old Speckles Grocery were combined into a single 7,000-plus-square-foot dance hall, with a century-old bar salvaged from the Old Schulenburg Hotel and a second bar rescued from a Mississippi River boat.

The dance floor has drawn live music every weekend for decades and has doubled as a filming location for more than just concerts: scenes from the miniseries Lonesome Dove were shot there, and George Strait filmed his “Every Little Honky Tonk Bar” video on the same stage, with a cameo from Johnny Bush. Music videos for Stevie Ray Vaughan, Hayes Carll, Pat Green, and Kevin Fowler have all used the hall as a backdrop, and Asleep at the Wheel and Brennen Leigh have both filmed segments of “In Texas with a Band” there. A bed-and-breakfast occupies the old second-floor pharmacy space above the dance floor today.

I’ve been here ♪