I counted 13 cowboy hats hiding out in the darkened alley of a bar called the Chateau in Ft. Pierre on New Year’s Eve. Whether or not these cowboy hats were on the heads of legitimate “cowboys” is another question. I’ve heard from multiple credible sources that “real” cowboys (which means ranchers, I suppose, but I really have no idea…) do not wear 10-gallon anything. They wear baseball caps. Bee-keeper’s nets. Sombreros. Heck, anything but cowboy hats. Please. You’ve now been informed. Don’t make that mistake again. Anyway, that was only the second-greatest sight of New Years 2010, which I’ve been informed through other highly intelligible sources should be prefaced with a “twenty” not the cumbersome “two-thousand” that belabored our tongues the first ten years of this godforsaken century.
The greatest sight of the night was found in the upstairs dancehall of the Pierre VFW. You better believe it. Behind those smoke-stained, windowless, venerable walls lined with photos of past grandmasters and auxiliary presidents was a room packed to the gizzards with hot-to-trot octogenerians and other people who remember when Hank Williams didn’t need numbers after his name to be distinguished from family members. The room was abuzz with women in holiday sweaters of various red shades, men choosing full denim over cowboy hats camped out on foldout tables drinking out of plastic cups (we were East River, duh. . .) , and there, aghast, there on the dimly-lit stage, a real, live, country band.
The lady taking tickets at the door (only a $4 cover: reasonable) informed us the band was just finishing up their break. I contemplated whether this was the right crowd to make the obligatory “union break” joke then reconsidered.
“So what are they playing?” I asked her.
“Oh really good stuff,” she grinned as she stuffed my cash in her green tote.
Whew. I was worried this was one of those bands that only catered in terrible music. Before grabbing seats, we high-tailed it to the bar: my card has never been studied so closely. Then there was a moment’s hesitation: would the band draw out a crowd to the polished dancefloor?
In hindsight, I do not know why I really expected the dancefloor to remain empty. All I can do is blame it on my upbringing in Minnesota, where it is not rare for the genteel, but cyanide-tongued MinnesOHtans to sit back at street dances and make supercilious remarks about “Oh, Henry’s really busting a move ain’t he?” But, I’d forgotten, I was in a part of the country where people actually sought to make their pulse beat. This was the land of Welk. And yes, many in the crowd could’ve passed for women Welk may have had his eye on back in the day.
But they could still dance. At the Pierre VFW, as the band struck up its first chord, something full of grainbelt-twang, the foldup chairs emptied (with the exception of a few men in Canadian tuxedos and women strapped to oxygen tanks) and the dancefloor rotated like a carousel at the fair with men and women, two-by-two, shuffling and twirling to two-steps and cowboy waltzes.
My point in sharing this observation—particularly in a column that is supposed to be about music, or rural music, or maybe even South Dakota music—is to say that in my experience (and I have very little research to substantiate this), there is something entirely healthy in a culture that still dances. There is a country band playing down the street tonight from my apartment. I don’t even need to go. I know there will be much drinking, but little dancing (which, is in itself, a testament to how much these people do not want to dance).
Often, when people say the “local scene is dead,” they’re usually probably looking in the wrong spot. Just like when Paula Cole lamented the loss of cowboys. She obviously wasn’t talking about Ft. Pierre. But, such a gross generalization wouldn’t have likely been heard by the regulars gathered at the Chateau on New Year’s Eve. I overheard two men (one in a tidy pair of overalls and a Nebraska football hat) utter the following gorgeous observation about the songs coming out of the jukebox:
“Well, that’s my dollar’s worth of Cash. You know it’s just going to be some terrible “boom boom” music the rest of the night. Put in another dollar’s worth of Hank, buddy.”
The revolution will not acknowledge the work of Hank II.
Cousin Christopher writes stories about rural culture and music.
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