The Longhorn Ballroom: Bob Wills, Jack Ruby, and the Sex Pistols

In nineteen fifty, a Dallas millionaire named O. L. Nelms built a honky-tonk at two sixteen Corinth Street and handed the keys to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.

They called it Bob Wills' Ranch House. Two years later, a Chicago-born nightclub promoter named Jack Ruby signed a lease on the place and renamed it Sadie Hawkins. Ruby was a decade away from shooting Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Police Department basement.

Dewey Groom, who bought the property in nineteen sixty-seven, renamed it the Longhorn Ballroom, booking acts through the decades. In nineteen seventy-eight the Sex Pistols played the Longhorn during their only American tour. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places, listed in twenty twenty-four, and it reopened as a live venue in twenty twenty-three.