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Dancing At Ginny's

Click on image for larger view

We arrive early, at 8, to get seats at the bar near the old-timers. Johnny is gone. But Jake and Eddie are still there. So is Mike Heil, another regular. It gets crowded at Ginny's on Thursdays. That's when Dale Watson plays.

Dale is responsible for calling Ginny's the honkiest tonkiest beer joint in town. He wrote a song by that name, too. It goes:

I wish I had a dime for every time
Somebody cried a tear in their beer,
Or a penny for every smile that Ginny gave out
At the honkiest tonkiest beer joint in town.

Honky-tonk music is not very complicated. "It comes after you with the beat," Mike says. "You don't have to go to it."

Dale arrives shortly before 10. He overslept, he says. He heads behind the bar and pours himself a cup of coffee. The Lone Stars are ready to go, having set up in the back corner, and the bar is jammed now, mostly with white college kids. They have come to holler as Dale rips through his tales of stained sheets and gear-jammers with one-armed tans. They have come to show their support.

Less than a year ago Dale tried to commit suicide after his fiancée died in a car wreck. The furrows edging his eyes, his brow, run slightly deeper now.

He takes a seat on a stool, sets his coffee cup on the floor, picks up his coin-encrusted Tompkins guitar, plugs it into an amp and tips off the band with a nod.

A small group of vintage-clad dancers, the same ones who appear at each of Dale's shows, immediately packs what little space is left in front of him.

Our view is gone.

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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