April 30, 2009 - Just as honky tonks have not always been with us, neither has the term "honky tonk" itself. The term is believed to have originated around East Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma in the early part of the 20th Century.
First used to describe rowdy rural bars and later the music that came from their jukeboxes, the phrase was first used musically in a 1916 song called "Honky Tonky." The song "Everything is Hunky Dory Down in Honky Tonk Town" was featured in the 1918 Tin Pan Alley musical "Everything."
In country music, the honky tonk culture developed in the bars of East Texas oil boomtowns. Al Dexter (born Albert Clarence Poindexter in Jacksonville in 1902) ran a Turnertown honky tonk called the Round-Up in the early 1930s, and wrote a song that is widely and wrongly credited with being the first song to use the term.
In fact, Dexter said in a 1975 interview with journalist Nick Tosches that he never heard of the term until his songwriting partner in the early days, James B. Paris, told him he had a title for a song that would "set the woods on fire."
The title he had in mind was "Honky Tonk Blues." Paris explained to Dexter that honky tonk was another name for the "beer joints up and down the road where the girls jump in cars and so on." Together, they wrote the song and copyrighted it in 1937. As Paris predicted, "Honky Tonk Blues" was a big hit for Dexter but it wasn't his biggest hit.
The song that punched Dexter's ticket into the Nashville Songwriter's Hall of Fame was the catchy classic "Pistol Packing Mama," which became one of the biggest hits of the World War II years.
Dexter first recorded "Pistol Packing Mama" in 1943 for Okeh Records. It was the biggest selling record of the year and the first country hit to also top the pop charts. Ironically, the song helped usher a pop influence Into country music that stood in direct contrast to the honky tonk sound that Dexter helped popularize. His version of "Pistol Packing Mama" sold three million copies and was also a big hit for Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, who sang it with The Andrews Sisters. The B-side of Dexter's record, "Rosalita," also hit number one.
There are a couple of versions of how Dexter came to write the song. One version has it that he got the idea for the song after Cherokee County sheriff Bill Brunt was killed in a shootout with a bootlegger. Brunt's wife, Mary Dear Brunt, was appointed to fill his term and the story goes that Dexter wrote the song about her. That's a good story, but not a true one, according to Dexter.
Dexter told Tosches that the idea for the song came from an incident involving a man who was "as cross-eyed as he could be" and a woman named Jo Ann who loved the little cross-eyed man but didn't know he was married.
One thing led to another and one night -- in a honky tonk -- Jo Ann came in and said the little cross-eyed man's wife was after her with a gun; that she had already been chased through briars, brambles and barbed-wire fences. Her scratched and bedraggled appearance gave the story some credence. The phrase "Lay that pistol down, babe, lay that pistol down" came to Dexter's mind and he wrote it down.
"Got a woman after you with a gun, you know, you can't outrun the darned thing, so you gotta beg her to lay it down," Dexter said. "So, I went out to the car and started writing these lyrics. I sang it over and over so I wouldn't forget it, and then I had my song."
Dexter cut his musical teeth playing square dances in East Texas during the boom days of the 1920s. He worked briefly as a house painter, but his band, the Texas Troopers, began recording for Okeh and Vocation records in the 1930s and 40s, when Dexter's popularity was at its peak.
Dexter had several other big hits in the 1940s, including "So Long, Pal," "Too Late To Worry, Too Blue to Cry," and "Guitar Polka." He received 12 gold records for million sellers from 1943 to 1948 and even won an Oscar for "Guitar Polka."
Later, Dexter opened his own club in Dallas and continued to perform there while also making a comfortable living from investments. He was inducted to the Nashville Songwriter's Hall of Fame in 1971, and died in Lewisville in 1984. The songs he wrote, especially "Pistol Packing Mama," live on.
