Turkey, Texas

Everything Turkey is known for

14 songs mention this city 2 artists from here

Music in Turkey

Songs About Turkey

Somewhere Between Texas and Tennessee
Melissa Carper
51%
"and you were playin' Turkey"
Bob Wills Is Still The King
Asleep at the Wheel
50%
"Bob Wills is still the king"
Bob Wills is Still the King
Waylon Jennings
50%
"Bob Wills is still the king"
A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World
Merle Haggard
50%
"Best damn fiddle player in the world"
bubbles in my beer
bob wills
45%
faded love
bob wills
45%
roly-poly
bob wills
45%
steel guitar rag
bob wills
21%
That’s Country Bro
Toby Keith
7%
"Bob Wills"
A Real Country Song
Dale Watson
6%
"Let Bob Wills take me home"
I Like Texas
Pat Green
4%
"And I heard ol Bob Wills say"
Texans and Okies
Hank Thompson
4%
"And Bob Wills a-playing those great western songs"
Work Was Through (feat. Aaron Watson)
Shane Smith & the Saints
4%
"Where Bob Wills is still the king"
West Texas Cloud Appreciation Society
Palmer Anthony
3%
"Wills in your waltzes"

Artists From Turkey

B
Bob Wills
country
B
Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys
country

Musical Heritage

Bob Wills Day RoadyGoat

1971

Turkey, Texas — Hall County, up in the Panhandle — is where Bob Wills grew up, and every last Saturday in April the town gives him back the favor. It's called Bob Wills Day, and it's Western swing the way he'd want it: fiddler contests, dances, bands playing the songs. Here's the part that gets me — they started throwing it in 1971, while the man was still alive. He got four more years; he passed in Fort Worth in 1975, seventy years old. So this wasn't a memorial dreamed up after the fact. It was his hometown telling him to his face what he meant. COVID knocked out 2020 and 2021, and that's the only time it's ever missed. Number fifty-four rolls around next April.

RoadyGoat →

Hotel Turkey RoadyGoat

1927

Right here in Turkey, the Hotel Turkey has kept its doors open since 1927 — built as a stop for the railroad, and it still tips its hat to that. Fourteen rooms, rocking chairs on the front porch, beer and wine out on the back patio. But the reason to come is the music: every Friday and Saturday night, somebody's playing. Over the years that's meant Willis Alan Ramsey, Jamie Lin Wilson, William Clark Green, Ross Cooper — real songwriters, way out here. They even cut a live album off a Ross Cooper show, and film performance videos across the street at a place called the Boot Shop. Carley du Menil, who moved to Turkey in 2018, runs it now with Pat and Tina Carson. A century-old railroad hotel, still throwing shows two nights a week.

RoadyGoat →

Town of Turkey RoadyGoat

Out in the Panhandle, about a hundred miles northeast of Lubbock, sits the town of Turkey — Hall County. It started life in the early 1890s as Turkey Roost, named for the wild turkeys all over the area, and got shortened to just Turkey in 1893 when the post office opened. It incorporated in 1926; the railroad showed up two years after that. The 2020 count put three hundred and seventeen people here. You turn off State Highway 86 on the east side, right at the Allsup's. Nearest Walmart's an hour away in Plainview. And you can drive Main Street end to end in about ninety seconds at the speed limit. But this little town claims Bob Wills as its own — and that's a whole lot of Texas music packed into ninety seconds of Main Street.

RoadyGoat →

Where Western Swing Was Raised RoadyGoat

The name over the door may say Turkey, but to music lovers this little town means one thing: Bob Wills, the King of Western Swing. James Robert Wills was born in nineteen oh-five near Kosse, Texas, but he grew up right here in Turkey, the oldest of ten children on a cotton farm, learning fiddle from a family of frontier fiddlers. He left home at sixteen and worked as everything from a barber to a preacher while playing dance halls at night. In nineteen thirty-four he formed Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, and he built a whole new sound by blending big-band jazz, breakdown fiddle, blues, and border rhythms into music built for dancing. His song New San Antonio Rose sold a million copies. Every last Saturday of April, the town throws Bob Wills Day, a celebration of Western swing that has drawn crowds in the thousands to a town of only a few hundred people. So this stretch of the Panhandle gave its name to a bird and its heart to a fiddler. Turkey, Texas: named for the roost, remembered for the rhythm.

RoadyGoat →

History of Turkey

Turkey, TX RoadyGoat

Turkey, Texas, has a rich history tied to its most famous resident, Bob Wills, the founder of western swing music. The Bob Wills Festival, held annually since 1972, honors his legacy with western swing and country music performances. In 2011, PETA petitioned the town to temporarily change its name to 'Tofurky.' The first Phillips 66 service station in Texas opened in Turkey in 1928 and was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 2019. The Hotel Turkey, built in 1927, hosts musicians for the festival and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.

Turkey, TX RoadyGoat

The Hotel Turkey, built in 1927, is a landmark in Turkey. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991 and traditionally hosts musicians who come to Turkey for the annual Bob Wills Festival. The Bob Wills Museum is also located in Turkey, in the old elementary school.

RoadyGoat →

Turkey, TX RoadyGoat

Turkey is located in southwestern Hall County, with Texas State Highway 70 running through the east side of the city as 9th Street, leading north 42 miles to Clarendon and south 28 miles to Matador. Texas State Highway 86 runs through the center of Turkey as Main Street, leading east 30 miles to Estelline and west 53 miles to Tulia.

RoadyGoat →

1928 Phillips 66 Service Station

1928

The community of Turkey, settled in the 1890s, went through a period of rapid economic growth in the mid-1920s. The city benefited from its location on branches of two early automobile roads: the regional Ozark Trail and the coast-to-coast Bankhead Highway. Turkey was also served by the Fort Worth and Denver South Plains Railway, which connected developing agricultural areas of the Panhandle and South Plains. Turkey incorporated in 1926 and by 1927 had an estimated 600 residents. By 1929, the city had two banks and about 1,000 residents. Along with the arrival of the railroad, the availability of gasoline for automobiles and farm equipment contributed to Turkey’s impressive growth. The Phillips Petroleum Company, incorporated in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1917, established its first refinery near Borger in 1927 and opened its first gasoline service station in Wichita, Kansas, later that same year. Phillips invested heavily in infrastructure in Turkey, with a railroad loading dock, bulk terminal buildings, fuel depot and several storage tanks. The culmination of their investment in Turkey was a new Phillips 66 service station which opened on Main Street on July 27, 1928, their first such facility in Texas. The station offered employment, served as a community gathering place, and provided essential automotive services for travelers and the bustling community. Early Phillips 66 service stations were typically located in residential areas, and their designs attempted to blend in with surrounding homes. The Turkey service station is a virtually intact example of the Tudor Revival style, with brick construction, a high-pitched roof, arched doorway, front gable, chimney with letter “P” and “Phillips 66” glass half-globes. It is an important site in the state’s history of settlement, transportation and architecture. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2019

Historical Marker →

Medicine Shows

1870

A number of Texas musicians received some of their earliest professional experience playing for the old-time traveling medicine shows, a popular form of American entertainment from roughly the 1870s to the television age. The list includes such artists as Bob Wills , Gene Autry , T-Bone Walker , Charline Arthur , Prince Albert Hunt , Cliff Bruner , and Cowboy Slim Rinehart . The shows were sometimes as small as a lone pitchman and a banjo player or guitarist. In a 1929 Saturday Evening Post reminiscence, medicine showman Nevada Ned Oliver wrote that the larger shows presented "full evenings of drama, vaudeville, musical comedy, Wild West shows, minstrels, magic, burlesque, dog and pony circuses, not to mention Punch and Judy, pantomime, movies, menageries, bands, parades, and pie-eating contests." According to Oliver Barnes, son of a champion fiddler/banjoist and medicine showman named Frank Barnes, a twenty-two-year-old Bob Wills bested Barnes in an impromptu fiddling contest in Wills's hometown of Turkey, Texas, before briefly joining the show on the road at $25 a week. At fifteen years of age Aaron Thibeaux "T-Bone" Walker got a job playing music for one Doc Breeding when the doctor came through Walker's neighborhood in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas and sold his Big B Tonic (also called B and B Tonic), a concoction Walker later described as "black and evil-tasting." A shy fifteen-year-old named Orvon Autry joined the Fields Brothers Medicine Show when it played his hometown of Tioga, Texas, in 1923. In the 1930s, after morphing into the singing cowboy movie star Gene Autry, the Tiogan performed in fictional medicine shows in several of his Hollywood film roles. The father of fifteen-year-old Charline Arthur had to sign a legal release in order to let the future rockabilly queen travel with the Ray Smith Medicine Show when it came through Paris, Texas. Arthur's younger sister recalled decades later that Charline "looked like a star" on the tiny med-show stage. The Smith show was one of many selling the popular, alcohol-powered tonic Hadacol. Though the repertoire of most early touring medicine shows reflected music currently or recently popular back East, regional fare eventually found its way into medicine show playlists. When New Mexico cowboy musicologist N. Howard "Jack" Thorp made a song-collecting trip through Texas in 1889, he performed some of the tunes he discovered (some of which would later become Western classics) with a medicine show in Waco. As Thorp recalled in his book, Pardner of the Wind , he was carrying his banjo into a downtown Waco chili joint when a man grabbed his arm and explained that "Professor Scott, the Wizard Oil King, needed a man like me. His banjo-picker was drunk, and his show was due to open on the public square in a few minutes." The long-haired, long-winded professor "wore a scarlet coat and a huge sombrero," wrote Thorp. "Occasionally he would fondle a pet Gila monster that he carried around...and explain that among other mysterious powers he had a strange influence over dumb animals." Thorp played between medicine pitches and other bits, receiving $5 for a two-hour show. And he collected lyrics to the song "Buckskin Joe" from the fast-talking professor, who "recited this barroom surprise story with oratorical flourishes that would have astonished Shakespeare." Fiddle music was especially popular with Texas medicine show audiences. Eck Robertson , who grew up near Amarillo, and his occasional musical partner Henry Gilliland , the two fiddlers who, together, waxed the first commercial country recordings in New York in 1922, took to the medicine show circuit to refine their artistry on the instrument that some called the "Devil's Box." Robertson, who later had a long career as the colorful "Cowboy Fiddler," left his Panhandle home at age sixteen to tour the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) and developed his natural talent as a showman with pitches and trick fiddling. Henry Gilliland playe

Tsha Handbook →

Turkey - Bob Wills Hometown

1905

Turkey, Texas is the hometown of Bob Wills, the King of Western Swing, who grew up picking cotton on the surrounding plains before revolutionizing American music.

Hotel Turkey

1927

Built in 1927 to provide lodging for railroad travelers, salesmen, and ranchers who came to town on business, the Hotel Turkey also served as a symbol of the growth business leaders hoped would characterize the young railroad settlement. The hotel opened with 20 guest rooms and extra rooms for community functions. The 2-story structure features decorative brickwork and a porch with brick archways. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark-1985

Historical Marker →

Caprock Canyons State Park

1878

Home to the official Texas State Bison Herd, descendants of Charles Goodnight's original herd that saved the Southern Plains bison from extinction.

Natural Landmark → · 9.6 mi away

Things to Do in Turkey

historical 0.3 mi away
Bob Wills -- King of Western Swing

Turkey Texas gave the world Bob Wills the man who invented Western Swing by mixing fiddle breakdowns with big band jazz. He grew up picking cotton here and…
quirky 0.3 mi away
Bob Wills Statue

Turkey Texas has a population of about three hundred and one bronze statue of the king of Western Swing. James Robert Wills was born in 1905 in nearby Kosse…
quirky 0.6 mi away
The Return of the Bison

Caprock Canyons State Park near Turkey is home to the official Texas State Bison Herd descended from the remnants Charles Goodnight saved from extinction in…
nature 9.3 mi away
Caprock Canyons State Park

The Caprock Escarpment is where the flat Llano Estacado falls off into a thousand feet of red rock canyon country. The cliffs expose layers of Permian-age…
quirky 0.5 mi away
The Edge of the Caprock

Turkey sits right where the flat Panhandle plains drop off the Caprock Escarpment into the rugged breaks of the Red River basin. The geology changes so…
quirky 0.5 mi away
The Hotel Turkey Revival

The old Hotel Turkey was built in 1927 as a drummers' hotel for traveling salesmen working the Panhandle circuit. It sat empty and crumbling for decades until…
quirky 0.6 mi away
The Bob Wills Monument

Turkey erected a full-sized bronze statue of Bob Wills holding his fiddle on the spot where the old cotton gin used to stand. The town has fewer than four…
historical 12.7 mi away
The Quitaque Canyon Connection

The canyons between Turkey and Quitaque sheltered Comanche bands for centuries because the breaks were nearly impossible for the Army to navigate. Soldiers on…
day trip
Day Trip to Turkey 🦬 (FULL EPISODE) S7 E12

Featured on The Daytripper — a full-episode local travel guide.

Everything Near Turkey

67 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

Explore Turkey on the Map
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