Honky tonk

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A vintage belt buckle from Gilley's, a large honky tonk featured in the movie Urban Cowboy.For the Canadian television series, see Honky Tonk (television series).
A honky tonk is a type of bar with musical entertainment common in the Southwestern and Southern United States, also called honkatonks, honkey-tonks, tonks or tunks. The term has also been attached to various styles of 20th-century American music. As of 2007, honky tonk seems to be the most recognized and mainstream subgenre of country music.

Honky tonk music
The first genre of music to be commonly known as honky tonk music was a style of piano playing related to ragtime, but emphasizing rhythm more than melody or harmony, since the style evolved in response to an environment where the pianos were often poorly cared for, tending to be out of tune and having some nonfunctioning keys. (Hence an out-of-tune upright piano is sometimes called a honky-tonk piano, e.g. in the General MIDI set of standard electronic music sounds.)

Such honky tonk music was an important influence on the formation of the boogie woogie piano style, as indicated by Jelly Roll Morton's 1938 record "Honky Tonk Music" (recalling the music of his youth, see quotation below), and Meade "Lux" Lewis's big hit "Honky Tonk Train Blues" which Lewis recorded many times from 1927 into the 1950s and was covered by many other musicians from the 1930s on, including Oscar Peterson and Keith Emerson.

The 12-bar blues instrumental "Honky Tonk" by the Bill Doggett Combo with a sinuous saxophone line and driving, slow beat, was an early rock and roll hit. New Orleans native Antoine "Fats" Domino was another legendary honky tonk piano man, whose "Blueberry Hill" (originally recorded by singing cowboy Gene Autry) and "Walkin' to New Orleans" became hits on the popular music charts.

During the pre-World War II years, the music industry began to refer to the Honky Tonk music being played from Texas and Oklahoma to the West Coast as Hillbilly music. More recently it has come to refer primarily to the primary sound in country music, which developed in Nashville as Western Swing became accepted there. Originally, it featured the guitar, fiddle, string bass and steel guitar (an importation from Hawaiian folk music), and is one of the early sources of electric guitar in country music. The vocals were originally rough and nasal, like singer-songwriters Floyd Tillman and Hank Williams, but later developed a clear and sharp sound with singers like George Jones. Lyrics tended to focus on working-class life, with frequently tragic themes of lost love, adultery, loneliness, alcoholism, and self-pity. Ted Daffin's "Born To Lose" is the prototype song.

During World War II, honky tonk country was popularized by Ernest Tubb ("I'm Walking The Floor Over You") who took the sound to Nashville, where he was the first musician to play electric guitar on Grand Ole Opry. In the 1950s, though, honky tonk entered its golden age with the massive popularity of Webb Pierce, Hank Locklin, Lefty Frizzell, George Jones and Hank Williams. In the mid to late 1950s, rockabilly, which melded honky tonk country to rock and roll, and the slick country music of the Nashville sound ended honky tonk's initial period of dominance.

In the 1970s, outlaw country music was the most popular genre, and its brand of rough honky tonk gradually influenced the rock-influenced alternative country in the 1990s. During the 1980s, a revival of slicker honky tonk took over the charts. Beginning with Dwight Yoakam and George Strait in the middle of the decade, a more pop-oriented version of honky tonk became massively popular. It crossed over into the mainstream in the early 1990s with singers like Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and Clint Black. Later in the 90s, country music became more pop-oriented and even farther removed from its rough roots with the mainstream success of slickly produced female singers like Shania Twain and Faith Hill.