New York’s Country Renaissance: On the Dance Floor at ‘Honky Tonkin’ in Queens’

E
liza Thorn had a simple request.

“Y’all gotta come dance with us, goddammit!” she implored the capacity crowd at New York’s Gottscheer Hall.

Almost immediately, the hardwood dance floor in front of Thorn’s stage filled with two-steppers. Some were transplants from parts of the U.S. where country music is the main attraction. Some were NYU kids drawn to the camp and irony of getting to wear fringe and cowboy boots for a night out. It didn’t matter to Thorn, who had just been called back for an encore after her 90-minute set. Nor did it matter to the fans swinging one another around the floor to the two-four beat of Thorn’s band. They were all just happy to be at a hoedown — in New York City.

Welcome to Honky Tonkin’ in Queens, the monthly dance party held at a German beer hall on the Queens/Brooklyn border.

The brainchild of Charles Watlington and Jonny Nichols — known, respectively, as DJ Moonshine and DJ Prison Rodeo — Honky Tonkin’ in Queens is an event tailor-made for this moment in country music. While steel guitars and fiddles have regained a foothold in the genre, and old-school venues such as Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, and Robert’s Western World in Nashville have made ostrich boots and bolo ties cool again, Honky Tonkin’ in Queens gives residents of the country’s most urban city an outlet to get duded up and cut a rug.

“We want people to dance,” Watlington says. “We wanted them to dance at the very first show, and it happened. I was blown away by the crowd that first night, and they weren’t even as good at it as they are now. Come out here now, and you can tell that people have been practicing, taking lessons. This is a monthly routine for them.”

The summer night that Thorn played, the bill also included Timbo, known for his honky-tonk sets throughout Nashville, and Tyler Childers’ backing band the Food Stamps, who perform on their own under the name El Dorado. Previous performers have included Tyler Halverson, Jonathan Terrell, and Kelsey Waldon. Aaron McDonnell and Cory Cross both played before sold-out crowds, then returned in June to anchor a Honky Tonkin’-branded riverboat cruise. When Charley Crockett dropped his album $10 Cowboy last spring, the release party was held at Honky Tonkin’ in Queens.

This month features two installments of the dance-party-slash-concert, beginning Friday with Texas songwriter Summer Dean and Nashville’s Hannah Juanita. On Oct. 24, 49 Winchester, one of the hottest bands on the country circuit, play alongside Canadian troubadour Corb Lund.

“You wouldn’t think a Texan like me could feel comfy in Queens, New York. But somehow at Honky Tonkin’ in Queens, I feel right at home,” says Dean, who first played the party in 2023. “These two New Yorkers open up an old German hall and throw in a Texas honky-tonk band, a sold-out crowd, a crowded dance floor, and maybe even a mariachi band for some spice, and somehow end up with one of the most fun shows of the year.”

When lining up a show, organizers are adamant that star power matters less than putting boots on the dance floor. Watlington and Nichols intentionally book artists representing Texas and Nashville, and try to appeal to the vibes of both scenes. “In Texas, they never line dance,” Watlington says, “but in Nashville, that’s all they do.” It makes for a rather straightforward approach to booking the lineup, and Watlington and Nichols say the fans have trusted their judgement. “If we like it, they’ll like it,” Watlington says.

The Virginia-born Watlington and the Massachusetts native Nichols, who speaks with a heavy Boston accent, took separate paths to New York, but struck up a friendship when each began drawing crowds on their own for their country DJ sets. Today, they are likelier to DJ as a duo than separately, selecting music exclusively from a stack of vinyl records they cart around behind them.

With few exceptions, New York hasn’t traditionally been home to a vibrant country scene. Its most recent country music radio station, NASH FM, launched in 2013 but went off the air in 2021. A country festival, FarmBorough on Randall’s Island, came and went in 2015. And venues that often hosted country shows, like Rockwood Music Hall, shuttered during the pandemic. Others, like Hill Country, a Texas barbecue joint in Manhattan, pivoted to booking less original music and more cover bands.

That country music void in the city helped spawn a new country renaissance, led in part by the scene at Skinny Dennis, a Williamsburg dive bar with a small corner stage (in an ironic twist, the Nashville-inspired bar will open a location in East Nashville this year), and Honky Tonkin’ in Queens. Major artists have taken note too: This past spring, Zach Bryan headlined multiple nights at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, and Tyler Childers did the same at Madison Square Garden.

DJs Moonshine and Prison Rodeo had the prescience to see it coming, even if the artists themselves did not.

“What happened was, these country artists did not want to come to New York to play. The country scene here was non-existent,” Nichols says. “But after Covid? Forget about it. People were starting to really like it.”

“After Covid happened, people wanted a dance party,” Watlington adds. “They wanted to mingle like they never have before.”

What would become Honky Tonkin’ in Queens was first held in February 2023 and featured a Brooklyn band called North of Amarillo. To promote the show, Watlington, who has a background in graphic design, printed old-style flyers that he and Nichols distributed at their DJ sets. Then, in a masterstroke of stacking the deck, they picked the best dancers at their shows and put them on the guest list.

Word of mouth and a basic social media push started a buzz that snowballed quickly. The second version of Honky Tonkin’ in Queens was held two months later — with Nashville songwriter Joshua Quimby headlining — and sold out in a matter of days.

Earlier this year, the two landed DJ spots at the Stagecoach festival in California. When a Brooklyn outpost of Los Angeles’ over-the-top-country bar Desert 5 Spot opened this summer, Watlington and Nichols were booked to DJ the private opening ahead of Nikki Lane’s performance. The duo puts roughly 400 tickets on sale for Honky Tonkin’ in Queens each month and rarely go longer than a few weeks until it sells out.

Part of that success lies in the appeal of Gottscheer Hall itself. The venue’s location on a residential block in Ridgewood, Queens — still less than a mile from a dense strip of trendy bars and restaurants in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood — is unassuming. There are no velvet ropes or VIP lines outside. When it’s not being used as a honky-tonk, its front room operates as a German bar that serves brats, kielbasa, and pierogies along with lager. The large back room, the setting for Honky Tonkin’ in Queens, is usually closed off and reserved for special events. The hall was founded in 1924 by Gottscheer immigrants — hailing from a centuries-old German enclave in what is now Slovenia — as one of a group of similar social centers. Gottscheer Hall’s combination of history and ambience matched the vibe that Watlington and Nichols were in search of — they just didn’t know it at the time.

“We live in Ridgewood,” Watlington says. “We’d come here all the time to eat or drink. But, we never went in the back. Then I went to an Oktoberfest event there, and I seen the dance floor. Johnny and I went to lunch one day, and I said, ‘There’s a dance floor!’ We went back there brainstorming, and there was a party going on. It may as well have had a gold fucking light shining back there calling us.”

Watlington and Nichols now lay claim to one of the more curious of New York nights out. With all the costumes, country dance moves, and an unmistakable twang in the air, it’s easy for fans to imagine they’ve been transported to Music City or even the Lone Star State.

But Watlington makes sure they don’t forget exactly where they’re honky-tonkin’. “I named it,” he says. “I wanted to represent Queens with it really badly.”