DOUBLE BAYOU DANCE HALL. Double Bayou Dance Hall, located in the small black community of Double Bayou in Chambers County, sixty miles east of Houston, was established in the late 1920s. It was damaged by a storm in the early 1940s and reestablished at its present site in 1946 by returning World War II serviceman Manuel Rivers Jr. and his wife, Ella.
The hall served as a gathering place during the week and a dance hall on the weekends. The Riverses operated the dance hall until Manuel's death in 1983, whereupon their nephew, blues guitarist Floyd "Texas Pete" Mayes, inherited the property. The current dance hall was built atop cedar logs and constructed of wood with hogwire for walls; it had a tin roof. Tar paper–covered walls and a low-clearance ceiling were later added. Capacity is 125 people.
From 1946 to the mid-1950s, Double Bayou Dance Hall was home to a thriving live-music scene that operated on the outer edge of the "chitlin circuit." Major touring acts traveling to Houston, including T-Bone Walkerqv and Big Joe Turner, would on occasion make impromptu stops at Double Bayou on a Thursday night. More frequent appearances were made by Amos Milburn, Percy Mayfield, Gatemouth Brown, Sam Lightnin' Hopkinsqv, Albert Collins, Johnny Copeland, Texas Johnny Brown, Joe Hughes, Barbara Lynn, and Clifton Chenier.
Pete Mayes and the Texas Houserockers played their first professional gig at Double Bayou Dance Hall in 1954, and served thereafter as the house band into the early 1960s. Weekly offerings of live music began to fade at the Double Bayou in the '60s, in part because Mayes began traveling extensively. Nevertheless, the hall remained open as a local gathering spot and watering hole. Pete Mayes and his band routinely performed a Christmas Day matinee from 1955 through the early 2000s. Starting in 1991, they played for scheduled tour groups from Houston and on other major holidays. In May 2003 Mayes and his band recorded a live album at the old hall and eventually released the CD Pete Mayes and the Texas Houserockers LIVE! At Double Bayou Dance Hall. In 2008 Double Bayou Dance Hall was among the many Texas dance halls recognized as "endangered" by Preservation Texas.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Aaron Howard, "Pete Mayes' Double Bayou Dance Hall," Living Blues, July–August 1994. Houston Chronicle, June 11, 1995. Roger Wood, Down in Houston: Bayou City Blues (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).
