Lubbock Cotton Club

The Cotton Club outlived the fire. Tommy and Charlene Condray Hancock, both Lubbock musicians, got the old sign from Ralph Lowe and reopened the club on the Slaton Highway in 1965; it burned in 1966 and reopened in 1967. In the late 1960s cowboys and the hippie crowd shared the floor with few fights, which regulars credited to Hancock. Joe Ely and C. B. Stubblefield bought the club in 1978 and booked rising acts such as Stevie Ray Vaughan before closing it in 1982. It reopened for concerts on October 31, 2009.

What the plaque says

Lubbock Cotton Club In 1938, Clyde Trusty opened a ballroom in a renovated army quonset hut at this site. The Lubbock Cotton Club hosted well-known orchestras and big bands popular at the time. The venue expanded the following year, with room for 1600 people on one of the largest dance floors in west Texas. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were among the first western swing bands to play the cotton club. In 1952, Ralph Lowe bought the business and brought in national acts including Elvis Presley, who met Buddy Holly during a 1955 show. African American musicians including Charles Brown also played here. In 1958 fire destroyed the club and Lowe sold the business. The cotton club continued in a new site until 1980 when it closed for good. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• American Windmill Museum — 2.7 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.
• Buddy Holly Center — 3.2 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 5.6 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 7.2 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.

More markers nearby

• Paul Whitfield Horn — 1.2 mi
• Bradford Knapp — 1.3 mi
• Willie Lusk Jr. — 1.9 mi
• Mary & Mac Private School — 2.0 mi