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Arkey's Silver Dollar Bar

Newton, Arkey's

Bandera, Texas

Click on image for larger view

It's 11:30 p.m. Friday night at Arkey Blue's Silver Dollar Bar, a beer joint in the basement space at 308 Main Street. During rodeo or deer hunting season, this place is standing room only, packed with cowboys both real and imagined and the women who love them regardless. But tonight, in late June, the honky-tonk is half-empty. Only a few couples shuffle lazily across the sawdust-covered concrete slab that serves as a dance floor. Even the Dolly Parton pinball machine is free.

Arkey Blue bought the bar in 1968. He and his Blue Cowboys have been performing here ever since. They play traditional, straight-ahead country, without apology and often boozy, which is just how Hank and Lefty did it.

Arkey stands center stage, against a backdrop of Texana bric-a-brac that includes a Confederate flag, a life-size cutout of Elvis Presley and several black velvet nudes. He moans about a missing milk cow, about missing you-know-what. "I ain't had no milk and butter since my cow's been gone," he sings.

At the bar, a handsome man named R.C. fills his glass with Jack Daniels. "I was a champion bull rider," he says, holding out his disjointed right hand to prove that it was crushed by a thousand-pound bull.

"I've been shot twice, stabbed twice and had my jaw broken in a barroom brawl," he continues. "But I've had a great life."

He knocks back his whiskey, eyeballs the band, and nearly chuckles as he reaches for the bottle again. "Yes, I've known tragedy," he says. "I don't believe in Sundays. But I believe in the man upstairs."

Born in Los Angeles and raised in New York, photographer Rachel Newton first became interested in honky-tonks during her seven-year tenure with the Fort Worth-Dallas Ballet, where she learned to dance the two-step en pointe for a performance with the Dixie Chicks. Rachel holds her bachelor's in architecture from Pratt Institute, where she also concentrated on photography. She recently completed a photo essay on New York City's Fulton Street Fish Market, which is set to move from its historic location by the end of the year.

Writer-producer Mitch Baranowski is a fourth-generation Texan who, during this project, located the former site of Brazos River Hall, where his cotton-farming grandparents worked dances during the forties. With degrees in journalism and radio-television-film from the University of Texas, Mitch has written about music for Atomic, No Depression and Spirit, while recent TV projects have found him trailing street musicians, tracing the roots of break dancing and learning the moves of extreme inline skaters.

The husband-wife team recently collaborated on a photo-text essay about Texas honky-tonks for Texas Folklife Resources, an Austin-based organization dedicated to celebrating and perpetuating the living, traditional arts and culture of the Lone Star State. Entitled Honky-Tonkin' - A Journey Through Dim Lights, Thick Smoke, and Loud, Loud Music, the exhibit will be on view from September 5 to December 24, 2002. Mitch and Rachel live in Brooklyn and are working to expand this exhibit into book form.

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