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 Pop: 75
B
Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys
country Pop: 55

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.

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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

The Bird That Almost Vanished RoadyGoat

The town of Turkey is named for wild turkeys, and here is a fact that ought to stop you: those birds nearly disappeared from Texas entirely. Overhunting and the clearing of habitat in the late eighteen-hundreds pushed the wild turkey to the edge. By nineteen twenty, only around one hundred thousand were left in the whole state, and across the country the bird had been wiped out of eighteen of its native thirty-nine states. Texas fought back. A regulated hunting season began in eighteen ninety-seven, bag limits followed in nineteen oh-three, and game wardens multiplied. Then came the real turning point. Over the decades from nineteen twenty to the year two thousand, wildlife crews trapped and released roughly thirty-three thousand Rio Grande wild turkeys across Texas. It worked. By nineteen seventy the state held an estimated five hundred seventy-five thousand birds, and today the number sits somewhere between five and six hundred thousand. The wild turkey is often called one of the greatest wildlife comeback stories in America. The town kept the name. The creek kept the memory. And the birds, against long odds, came home.

RoadyGoat →

The Science of the Strut RoadyGoat

This town is named for the wild turkey, so let me tell you how one of nature's loudest performances actually works. In spring, a male turkey, called a tom, puts on a show to win a mate. He fans that big tail into a wheel, drags his wings along the ground, puffs out every feather, and lets loose the gobble, a rapid gurgling call a person can hear from a mile away. But the real signaling happens on his head. That fleshy flap over his beak is the snood. The loose skin under his chin is the wattle. The bumpy skin on his neck are the caruncles. During courtship they flood with blood and flush a vivid red and blue, powered by a surge of testosterone. And here is the clever part: scientists have found that hens actually favor toms with longer snoods, treating snood length as a quick read on good genes for her future chicks. So the strut is not just noise and color. It is a biological resume, delivered at full volume, in the same country where this town got its name.

RoadyGoat →

Eyes in the Back of Its Head RoadyGoat

Since this town carries the turkey's name, here is why hunters swear the bird can see them think. A wild turkey's eyesight is roughly three times sharper than a person with perfect twenty-twenty vision, and it sees in rich color, including some ultraviolet light that human eyes simply cannot detect. Because a turkey's eyes sit on the sides of its head and work independently, it takes in about two hundred seventy degrees at a glance, and with a small turn of the neck it can effectively scan a full circle around itself. So the old idea of sneaking up on a turkey is nearly hopeless. And do not let the waddle fool you. A wild turkey can sprint about twenty-five miles an hour on the ground and, despite weighing more than twenty pounds, burst into flight in short bursts at better than fifty miles an hour. Sharp eyes, fast feet, and a surprising set of wings. The birds that gave Turkey Creek and this town their name were built to survive, which makes their near-disappearance, and their comeback, all the more remarkable.

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.

Turkey, TX

1892

Turkey is at the intersection of State Highways 86 and 70, on the Burlington Northern line in the southwestern corner of Hall County. The community, probably first settled in the early 1890s, was initially called Turkey Roost, for the wild turkey roosts once found on nearby Turkey Creek. In 1892 a Methodist Episcopal congregation was organized at the home of W. M. Cooper. The town name was changed to Turkey in 1893, when a post office was established there in the dugout of Alfred P. Hall, the first postmaster. Later John M. Gist became the postmaster and served until 1895, when the post office was discontinued. In 1900 the Turkey post office was reopened, and by 1906 a school district had been established and a chapter of the Woodmen of the World had been organized. A town plat was officially recorded in 1907. By 1914 about 250 people were living in Turkey, which included a bank, a hotel, a general store, and two groceries. A newspaper, the Turkey Gobbler , began publishing in 1919. When Turkey incorporated in 1926, Jess Jenkin became the first mayor, and G. Katzkie and J. B. Miller were elected as aldermen. By 1927 the town had an estimated 600 residents, and that year a Missionary Baptist church was constructed. A fire department was organized in February 1928, after a disastrous fire destroyed most of the business district. The Fort Worth and Denver Railway built through the town later that year, and on November 20, the townspeople celebrated the arrival of the first locomotive. With the railroad, Turkey became an important shipping point for area farmers and ranchers, and by 1929 the town had two banks and about 1,000 residents. An Assembly of God church was built the next year. The Great Depression slowed growth during the 1930s. One bank closed in 1933, and the other in 1940; meanwhile, the population declined to about 975 by 1931 and to 930 by 1941. During the late 1940s or early 1950s the local economy revived, and by 1950 Turkey included fifty businesses and 998 residents. By 1955 about 1,005 people were living there, but the town began to decline again in the late 1950s. By 1958 only thirty-eight businesses were reported, and by 1961 the population of Turkey had dropped to 813. Only twenty businesses were operating in Turkey in 1972, when its population had fallen to 680. A 1981 map showed two schools and five churches in Turkey; in 1982 the town reported twenty-three businesses and 644 residents. By 1990, however, Turkey had only twelve businesses and 507 residents. In 2000 the population was 494.

Tsha Handbook →

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

57 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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