Platform Dances Old Tradition
In Panhandle’s Lipscomb County

"San Angelo, Texas, is the place I want to go,
Where the Concho River wends its way
And the wild bluebonnets grow." 
— from the song "San Angelo, Texas", courtesy of Gil Prather

LIPSCOMB, Texas — "That's a song we learned from a friend of ours named Gil Prather," says Lanny Fiel of the Ranch Dance Fiddle Band. "He's an old rodeo cowboy."

Fiel is in Lipscomb to play for the season opening of the community dance platform. Each year for the past six years, dances have been held here on the third Saturday of June, July, August and September, recalling days gone by.

The tradition here, a stone's throw from the Oklahoma state line at the northeastern tip of the Texas Panhandle, dates back more than a century.

The first wooden platform dance in Lipscomb County was reported in 1885, when Thomas Haines brought lumber in from Dodge City, Kan., to use for flooring in his sod house on the barren Texas plains. While he was gone, his son, Albert "Tude" Haines, was born, the first white settler born in the county.

Haines was anxious to start flooring the home for his family, but cowboys from the nearby Box T Ranch talked him into laying the lumber out on the ground for a dance first.

Since the Texas Panhandle at that time was short on women, the cowboys talked Haines' young daughter, Emma, into filling out a square. She didn't have any shoes, and fearing she would get splinters in her feet from the new boards, she borrowed a pair of brogans from a neighbor boy.

Though awkward in her borrowed shoes, Emma was reportedly the belle of the ball.

Today's wooden dance platform, an open-air dance floor with benches around the edge, stands next to Debbie Opdyke's art gallery, across the street from the Lipscomb County Courthouse. Opdyke and her partner Jan Luna take care of it and operate it, along with organizing the dinners that go with each performance, including barbecue beef, goat, turkey and wurst.

"We try to cook the things that would have been cooked back in the time period of the dance platforms," says Opdyke.

"We try to get local beef from someone we know," Opdyke says. "One of our biggest dances is when we serve goat, cabrito. We put it down on the pit with chiles and onions. Jan makes the cobbler in Dutch ovens in the campfires. She uses fruit that we pick locally — sand plums and cherries, apricots when we can get them."

The dance platform was built in 1995, after Pauline Eggleston Moore, an early Lipscomb County settler, told Opdyke about the dances they used to have in the county.

"She came here in 1906 in a covered wagon," Opdyke says of Moore. "She lived in a dugout that was down on Little Robe Creek, down by Commission Creek."

Moore told Opdyke stories of dancing on the old platforms.

"First of all, they danced in dugouts," Opdyke says. "She said there were so many kids within riding distance, there'd be 30 kids that would come to a dance. She always wanted to dance in heels, but she tied them on the back of her horse. She couldn't ride in them."

Moore went to her first permanent platform dance in 1916. She met her husband at a platform dance.

"Primarily, the platform dances were just like what we have here," Opdyke says, "but they were laid down for an occasion, the Fourth of July or May Day, then taken back up. They'd use the lumber for flooring or to build houses or whatever. That's why there aren't any dance platforms left. The lumber was used for different purposes."

Once barns were built with the lumber, they would hold barn dances.

Opdyke says the barn dances offered more protection from the weather, as she looks up at threatening clouds on the northern horizon.

Doug Ricketts, an Angus breeder turned custom furniture artist who lives just south of town, designed the current platform.

"We told him what Pauline said about the story," Opdyke says, "and she said 'Oh, and Honey, put backs on those seats, too. It gets mighty uncomfortable.'"

To raise money to build the platform, they sold seats around the edge to the local ranchers, three feet of the bench for $100.

"We gave them title to their seat, an ASSignment, we said, and they could oust anyone out of their pew for their lifetime," Opdyke says.

Brass plaques were mounted on the backs of the benches, noting who owned what stretch of bench.

"In April of 1996, we had them come and brand their seats," Opdyke says. "They brought out all the old ranch brands, the different ones that bought a seat, and branded their seats."

In May 1996, they held their first dance.

"We weren't really sure what to make this," Opdyke says. "We did everything. We even had a mirror ball out here. That didn't work. We had Flamenco dancers and guitarists. That didn't work."

But the ranchers and their wives wanted to do the old dances.

"They wanted to do the old two-steps, the waltzes, Put Your Little Foot," Opdyke says. "They know these dances."

In addition to the platform, they had another treasure — Frankie McWhorter.

McWhorter manages one of the Abraham ranches nearby, which is part of the old Box T, but he is also a fiddle player, having played with Bob Wills' Texas Playboys in his younger days. Although he had a successful career in Western Swing, McWhorter grew up learning the oldtime fiddle tunes played at dances on local ranches.

"The first year we ran it, one dance we had a 'Your Favorite Song' dance," Opdyke says. "We had 12 people show up. Jan danced with her dog that night."

Opdyke was devastated.

"The second year, when our first 100 people showed up, Frankie and I were walking back from the dance platform, and he put his arm around me and he said, 'See, I told you they needed it. They just didn't know it,'" she says. "Now, we don't worry if someone will come. We worry if they'll all come."

Their invitation list has grown to 1623 over the years.

"That's just people who sign the guest book," Opdyke says.

They've had people come from as far away as Salt Lake City, Utah, and plan their vacations to coincide with the dances.

"We have gone strictly to the old ranch fiddle music," Opdyke says. "The mirror ball's out."

The lantern hangers all around the top of the dance platform are the old brands that were registered in the courthouse between 1886 and 1908. From them hang kerosene lanterns.

There's no alcohol, but old coffee pots hang over the campfire.

"People can pour their own coffee," Opdyke says. "We have two outhouses that meet state and federal requirements for outhouses."

Fiel, a trained musician, became involved when he was interviewing McWhorter for a book and recording McWhorter's music.

Originally from Lubbock, he moved to Nashville, Tenn., after graduating from high school in 1968. He was involved in the recording industry in Nashville for about three and a half years.

"When I was in high school," Fiel says, "I heard bands playing at school assemblies and thought that would be a cool thing to do. I got into the guitar and knew immediately that's what I wanted to do. I started playing professionally after about a year. I've been doing that ever since."

With a music degree from Texas Tech University, Fiel played viola with the Lubbock Symphony for some 15 years as well as with other symphonies in the state.

"I worked for the San Angelo Symphony one time, and one winter we played in their auditorium," Fiel says, "and they had an old radiator. It was whistling in E flat the whole time."

Fiel also taught music and had a radio program on public radio called "Roots Music."

"I interviewed people from different musical traditions," Fiel says. "I found them in West Texas."

When Fiel lived in Nashville, he says, he heard a lot of the oldtime musicians and became interested in traditional music.

"I started out playing Rock and Roll when I was 15, then I heard oldtime musicians play, and I got interested in that," he says. "I got sidetracked into orchestras for about 15 years and survived that."

He started playing by ear, then learned to read music, then went back to playing by instinct.

Fiel started recording traditional musicians in West Texas, including McWhorter, Buck Ramsey of Amarillo and Joe Stephenson, a fiddle player from McAdoo.

"The Stephenson family fiddled in that part of the country for four generations," Fiel says. "Actually, Joe was probably my big inspiration that led me into doing this. He told me stories about what it was like growing up and playing oldtime family dances with his parents."

Eventually, Fiel, who was teaching orchestra at the time, began playing old ranch tunes for his students.

"They were interested," Fiel says. "They liked them."

That's when he started teaching fiddle playing.

Fiel says he wanted to play in a band, but he'd given up honky-tonks and barroom performances.

"That's one reason I ended up in an orchestra," Fiel says. "I wanted to play music, but I didn't want to get shot or beat up. I was tired of drunks and dopeheads."

But when he started playing traditional music with his students, he thought he'd form a band and play just traditional western music.

The music predates honky-tonks and Western Swing, Fiel says.

"Frankie's the one that got me into the early, early tunes," Fiel says.

The result was the Ranch Dance Fiddle Band.

"A lot of the arrangements are from tunes I learned from Joe Stephenson," Fiel says. "Originally, I learned things from Joe and from Frankie, the people I had recorded initially."

Some of his arrangements are based on old recordings.

"As I made the recordings, I realized what a connection all this music had to Spanish traditions and New Orleans rhythm and blues, early jazz," Fiel says.

The tradition, he says, is the tradition of oral music passed down from father to son.

Initially, it didn't go very far, but with radio, people heard things from farther away.

"Out in West Texas," Fiel says, "I think the style of music is a combination of Scottish and Irish fiddle tunes, Eastern European music, Spanish music from Mexico, African traditions from New Orleans and the Deep South. In West Texas, I think there's a real distinctive style of music that evolved out here that led into Western Swing."

It was a different kind of music, Fiel says, that was a combination of all the different people who came to America.

"It was probably more concentrated in this area than in other parts of the United States," Fiel says. "Texas is such a crossroads."

Consequently, he says, the music evolved from a lot of different sources.

"It has the vitality of all kinds of people," he says.

He's trying to connect his students to that so they're aware of their history and the music where they're from.

Kids who play in orchestra, he says, study Beethoven and Mozart.

"That's music from far away," Fiel says. "This is the music from where they grew up. This is the stuff their grandfathers and grandmothers danced to."

He says the Ranch Dance Fiddle Band is what he decided he needed to be doing.

"What we do is more traditional western music," Fiel says. "Country music is an expression of rural life. Western music is life in the West, cowboy music. That's different than honky-tonk music, the music that came later. There's a huge tradition, a huge literature of cowboy songs out there. There are tons of old fiddle tunes. This stuff went on for decades."

With dance halls, drinking began to be emphasized, he says.

"Music is always an expression of how people live," Fiel says. "Listen to the lyrics nowadays. Look at the world we live in."

The old western music, he says, was about life on the ranch, a cowboy's life on the trail.

"Country music then was about life in the country," Fiel says. "That was a hard life. My mother grew up in that life. The people who went through that, we've forgotten about them."

He says music to him has lost a lot of the heart and feeling.

"I think that's important," Fiel says.