For the Record
Rats and the middle seats of full flights. Those are my biggest fears besides death. So when I entered the abandoned building from an unlocked door and saw the colony-size bag of rodent poison on the floor, I lurched back. Rats! But I didn’t drive six hours to be turned away by the threat of hideous, long-tailed disease carriers (though I have driven six hours because neither window or aisle were available). Without fear, I stepped into the shards of sunlight coming through the broken windows.
The building had most recently been used to store dog food for the Howard County Humane Society, which attracted the vermin. What drew me, though, was the small wooden clump of a stage where Corsicana native Lefty Frizzell invented a new, syllable-stretching way to sing country music in the late 1940s. As the former Ace of Clubs, this decrepit structure at 2605 W. Highway 80 in Big Spring is a shrine of Texas music, as important to the development of the honky-tonk sound as Liverpool’s Cavern Club was to the British Invasion. George Jones, Willie Nelson, and Merle Haggard are among the many legends who have acknowledged a debt to Frizzell’s jazz-like phrasing. I stood there, in that place where it all started, for a long time, letting the space inhabit me as much as I did it.
Long-dormant clubs used to be dead to me. I wanted to be where the action was, where the music roared and the spirits flowed. Before
