drwilson

I'm probably going to be telling my age here, but I myself remember a lot of those old C/W Clubs. I was the original manager of a club on old Hempstead Hwy. called The Crystal Chandelier Dancehall and Saloon. We had many of the old C/W stars perform there (Kelly Schoppa, The Texas Heartbreakers, John Anderson, Lee Greenwood, John Wesley Ryles, Johnny Rodriquez, Mundo Earwood, Charley Pride and many, many more) We were open at the same time as Cotton Eye Joe's on Gessner and the original Wild West on the corner of Long Point and Gessner. There was also a club on Kuykendahl named The Grand Finale and the manager there Donnie Wayne was a very good friend of mine. I frequented many of those old clubs back in the day. I also worked at Fools' Gold on Westheimer after they moved out past Dairy Ashford. The old club that someone was referring to about having to take your hat off was Tin Hall in Cypress. They recently started having live music there again at least once a month. My most memorable story from being in the business was I think in December of 1980, I was doing business with a booking agent named Jay Collier, and he called me one day to tell me that there was someone that I really needed to go listen to. Jay said that this guy is a singing cowboy, he said he will be participating in a rodeo at Simonton and after the rodeo he will go on stage and perform. Well, I went and Lo and Behold this singing cowboy was George Strait. He had a rope burn on his hand after participating in the team roping event and he only performed a couple of songs. One of them being "Amarillo By Morning" and since I had Kelly Schoppa at my club (Crystal Chandelier) quite often I was very familiar with the song. I spoke with George and one of his managers after the performance and decided that since he wasn't that well known in the HOuston area, it probably wasn't a very good business decision to hire him. So I didn't. And man what a bad decision that turned out to be. Just 3 months later he was called in to replace Eddie Rabbit at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and the rest is History.