San Marcos: Cheatham Street Warehouse

The Cheatham Street Warehouse in San Marcos is where the King of Country almost became a cattle-pen designer instead. By the late 1970s, George Strait and the Ace in the Hole Band had been working this modest honky-tonk — and dozens like it across Central Texas — for years. Kent Finlay, the venue’s visionary owner and one of the great unsung figures of Texas music, had driven Strait to Nashville multiple times to pitch him to the major labels. Every label passed. Strait, worn down, gave his band notice he was leaving music to take a job designing cattle pens. It was his wife Norma who talked him into one more year.

That year was 1981. MCA Records signed Strait to a one-song deal — if the single did well, they’d consider an album. “Unwound” climbed to number six on the country charts. The album followed. The rest is the kind of history measured in number ones: 44 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, more than any artist in any genre. But the machine that built that career was oiled in rooms just like Cheatham Street. Night after night, Strait and the Ace in the Hole played for two-steppers and beer drinkers who just wanted a good Friday night. They got a graduate seminar in what Texas country music actually is.

The warehouse still stands at 119 Cheatham Street in San Marcos. It’s still hosting live music, still carrying that old-wood smell of a Texas dance hall where something important happened. It did.

The Texas State University campus nearby reminds you of where Strait started; Cheatham Street reminds you of what it cost him to keep going. Without Norma’s one-more-year, and without this room, there might never have been an “Amarillo by Morning.”