The Cowboys' Christmas Ball

Gentlemen check their hats at the Texas Cowboys’ Christmas Ball, and ladies wear dresses. Those are the rules at Pioneer Hall in Anson, Texas, for three nights on the weekend before Christmas, and some who come go further and dress in period clothing. The floor goes to the grand march, the waltz, the cotton-eye joe, the polka, the Virginia reel and the schottische. Before the dancing starts, a soloist sings the ballad the whole thing rests on.

The Star Hotel

The ballad goes back to a dance at the Star Hotel in Anson in the 1880s, and the details have blurred. Writers most often give 1885 or 1887. The owner’s name turns up as both Rhodes and Rhoads. One account calls the night a wedding party; another says it was a yearly Christmas dance, held to thank the ranchers and cowboys who gave the hotel their trade.

The music is on record: a bass viol, a tambourine and two fiddles. So is one guest. William Lawrence Chittenden, a writer known as Larry, watched the cowboys and their ladies dance the square, the schottische, the heel-and-toe polka, the waltz and the Virginia reel.

His poem, “The Cowboys’ Christmas Ball,” first ran in the Anson Texas Western on June 19, 1890. The Star Hotel had burned earlier that year. The poem went into his Ranch Verses in 1893 and into John A. Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1916, so the dance kept finding readers after its floor was gone.

The revival

In 1934 Leonora Barrett, an Anson teacher and folklorist, brought the dance back with Hybernia Grace, starting in the high school gymnasium. The group took it on the road, to the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas in 1936 and the National Folk Festival in Chicago in 1937, invited there because they performed dances no other group at the festival did. In 1938 they went to Washington and danced on the White House lawn.

Pioneer Hall went up in Anson’s City Park between 1938 and 1940 with help from the WPA: native stone, 71 feet wide and 121 feet long, its barrel roof hidden behind a stone front. The ball has run three nights since 1940, and in December 2014 it marked its eightieth consecutive year.

The solo dates from 1946, when Gordon Graham set the poem to music and sang it at the ball. Michael Martin Murphey recorded the song in 1985 and was still playing the ball in the 2020s. Officials hold that music and song must conform to the tradition.

The ordinance

As late as 1987, by the account on the city’s own history page, Anson still had a no-dancing law on its books, lifted only for the Christmas dance. An effort that year changed it to allow supervised dancing.

The ball went on as before. On the weekend before Christmas the hats go to the check, and the grand march forms on the floor of the stone hall.

Photos: Larry D. Moore (CC BY 4.0)