Introduction: Hank Williams belongs to a sub-genre of country music called honky tonk. Read about it below and focus on where the term honky tonk may originate. Plus focus on defining what honky tonk is as a style of musical performance. Think in terms of instrumentation, musical approach, how it fits into the history of country music, and so forth.

Honky-tonk

Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville, Tennessee is a honky-tonk.

A honky-tonk or honky tonk (also called a honkatonk, honkey-tonk, or tonk) is a type of bar that provides country music for entertainment to its patrons. Bars of this kind are common in the Southern and Southwestern regions of the United States, where country music is most popular. Many country music legends, such as Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline, and Ernest Tubb began their careers as amateur musicians in honky-tonks. The term "honky-tonk" has also been applied to various styles of 20th-century American music.

The origin of the term honky-tonk is unknown.^[1] Honky tonks were rough establishments, with country music in the Deep South and Southwest, that served alcoholic beverages to a working class clientele. Honky tonks sometimes also offered dancing to piano players or small bands, and were sometimes also centers of prostitution. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon writes that the honky-tonk was "the first urban manifestation of the jook", and that "the name itself became synonymous with a style of music. Honky tonk originally referred to bawdy variety shows in the West (Oklahoma and Indian Territories and Texas) and to the theaters housing them. The distinction between honky tonks, saloons and dancehalls was often blurred, especially in cowtowns, mining districts, military forts and oilfields of the West.

The first music genre 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; 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. This honky tonk music was an important influence on the formation of the boogie-woogie piano style. During the pre–World War II years, the music industry began to refer to honky tonk music being played from Texas and Oklahoma to the West Coast as hillbilly music. In the 1950s, honky tonk entered its golden age, with the massive popularity of Webb Pierce, Hank Locklin, Lefty Frizzell, Faron Young, George Jones, and Hank Williams. In the mid- to late-1950s, rockabilly (which melded honky tonk country to rhythm and blues) and the slick country music of the Nashville sound ended honky tonk's initial period of dominance. During the 1980s, a revival of slicker honky tonk took over the charts, beginning with Dwight Yoakam (and his cover of Johnny Horton's "Honky Tonk Man"), and George Strait in the middle of the decade. This more pop-oriented version of honky tonk crossed over into the mainstream in the early 1990s, with singers such as Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and Clint Black.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Honky Tonk (disambiguation).

Honky Tonk Country: Late 1940s - Mid 1950s

Honky tonk music represented a radical break from the course of traditional country music. Whereas traditional country music, evolved in the Appalachians, was a strongly religious, family-based, rural music, honky tonk was made by Southerners living in cities, was lyrically detailing the pleasures and miseries of urban life (many of the clichés we now think about when we think about country music - songs about women leaving and drowning your sorrows in alcohol - got their start in honky tonk) and was performed in "honky tonks", bars that offered live entertainment for people to dance to and drink and get rid of their frustrations during the weekend. Furthermore, it was the first country music genre to start using electricity, namely through the amplified steel guitar. (Drums and straight-ahead electric guitar were still a while away.)

Although the elements it brought to country never really left and it has remained part of its backbone, the genre itself was swallowed up in the late 1950s and early 1960s by a Nashville-led new brand of country-pop. Fiddles and singing about getting drunk and all those rough edges were out, pop orchestration, background singers, strings and love songs were in. The new artists of this watered-down country format included people like Marty Robbins, Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline.

The classic honky tonk artists of the late 1940s and early 1950s included Lefty Frizzell, Ray Price, Hank Snow, Kitty Wells, Faron Young, the young George Jones, and towering above them all, Hank Williams.

Ever since the demise of honky tonk, there have been recurrent left-field movements in country music that have aimed to break Nashville's homogenizing hold on country music, and all of these (1960s' Bakersfield revolution led by Merle Haggard, the 1970s' Outlaw movement represented by Willie Nelson among others, the 1980s' New Traditionalist movement represented by people like Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakam fighting against the Barbara Mandrell and Alabama-dominated Nashville middle-of-the-road country-pop, the 1990s' alternative country scene rebelling against Garth Brooks' so-called "new country") have sought in some ways to restore an authenticity that honky tonk incarnated.

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