In the late 20th century, Dallas was often accused of fixating on style over substance — a new-money city full of big hair and big buildings, trying to mask big insecurities in the wake of the Kennedy assassination.
But there was one musical exception: a tiny folk club, the Rubaiyat, sitting like an unpolished gem on McKinney Avenue starting in 1959.
The long-gone coffeehouse is getting some much-overdue love with a new exhibition at the Wittliff Collections, the arts museum/archive/research center at Texas State University in San Marcos.
“Though it was only about the size of a two-car garage, the Rubaiyat played a mighty role in the foundation of what we call Texas music, outlaw country and Americana music today,” says Hector Saldana, Texas music curator at the Wittliff.
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Indeed, the club was a proving ground for Texas legends like Jerry Jeff Walker, Townes Van Zandt and a rebellious young wailer from Port Arthur named Janis Joplin. Soon-to-be-famous Dallas musicians played there, too, like Ray Wylie Hubbard, future Monkee Michael Nesmith and Michael Martin Murphey, the man who popularized the term “cosmic cowboy.”
Other notables who graced the Rubaiyat’s tiny stage include a blond, baby-faced singer named Henry John Deutschendorf, who’d just rechristened himself John Denver. Johnny Cash and Harry Belafonte popped by the club and sang a few songs while they were in town.
The exhibition came about after the family of Rubaiyat founder Ron Shipman donated his archives to the Wittliff. Shipman — a talented singer who often performed at his club — died in May 2024 in Carrollton, at age 88.
Shipman’s time-capsule trove is extensive, ranging from his own diaries to rare photos, handbills, recordings and even a canceled $60 check to Hubbard in the days before his song “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother” became an outlaw classic.
In 1959, after Shipman failed to make it as a folk singer in California, he returned home to Dallas and rented the first Rubaiyat space, at 3133 McKinney Ave., for $45 a month.
Today, the street is part of bustling Uptown. Back then, McKinney Avenue was forlorn and funky, with the odd antique store and bookshop nestled amid aging wooden homes. The club — named after The Rubáiyát, a philosophical poem collection by Omar Khayyam — had a vaguely Middle Eastern feel, with Persian rugs and an imported espresso machine.
But it was hard to get too fancy in such cramped quarters. Its capacity was barely 30 people.
“It was small, but the nice thing was we could always tell people, ‘We played to a full house!’” says Baxter Taylor, 84, a regular performer at the Rubaiyat who still sings today at Café Bohemia in Plano. “You’d see people lined up trying to get in.”
Scoring a Dallas liquor license was a steep challenge in 1959. But the lack of booze and the all-ages atmosphere became “part of the charm,” Taylor says.
“It was a place where even young college students and high-schoolers could go. TV wasn‘t relevant to us then. We were all glad we had a place where we could go to sing and exercise our creative bits, as it were.”
The Dallas Morning News dubbed the Rubaiyat “Dallas’ answer to San Francisco ‘beatnik’ hangouts.” Years later, Murphey described the clientele more bluntly: “The extreme weirdo class.”
Rubaiyat patrons were shrouded in a haze of nicotine, but Taylor doesn‘t recall any would-be beatniks ever sparking up a joint in the club. “[Pot] was a lot more prevalent in California, where I‘d been, than in Dallas,” he says.
What he does remember is a lot of acts performing their own compositions — a rarity in the days before Bob Dylan made “singer-songwriter” the new standard.
“There was a great credence to making up your own songs instead of singing something ubiquitous, like ‘Tom Dooley’ by the Kingston Trio. It was important to make your own statement,” says Taylor, who went on to co-write “Marie Laveau,” a No. 1 country hit for Bobby Bare.
The Rubaiyat was so successful that Shipman opened a second location in late 1959, at 30 Highland Park Village. But a folk music joint didn‘t jibe with the Park Cities’ vibe, and the spot was short-lived.
In early 1965, the Dallas club moved a block away to a slightly bigger location at 3236 McKinney Ave. Jerry Jeff Walker, a young itinerant folkie, opened the new spot and tested out “Mr. Bojangles,” a future Top 10 hit, singing lyrics he had just scribbled on napkins.
At the Rubaiyat, napkins had an odd knack for becoming essential documents.
Dallas native Mickey Raphael — Willie Nelson’s longtime harmonica ace — once told The News about a life-changing moment in the alley outside the Rubaiyat in the late ‘60s. Not only did harmonica legend Don Brooks give 16-year-old Mickey an impromptu lesson, he jotted down detailed instructions on a club napkin, a small act Raphael described as a turning point in his career.
Shipman ran the Rubaiyat until June 1969, when he sold it to Bob Johnson, who moved it again, this time to Maple Avenue, next to the brand-new Dallas North Tollway.
It finally closed in the mid-’70s. A few years later, David Card filled the void by opening Poor David’s Pub, a club that’s kept folk music alive in Dallas for almost a half-century.
Today, local music lovers under 60 could be forgiven for not knowing the Rubaiyat ever existed. Unlike the flashy Starck Club from the ’80s, it was never the subject of a documentary or decadent myth-making.
The Wittliff exhibition makes a strong argument that the unpretentious little Rubaiyat deserves to be the stuff of legends, too.
“It was the first folk music coffeehouse in the state, and it became an incubator,” says Saldana, who co-curated the exhibition with Abigail Moon. “It was the birthplace of folk music in Texas.”
The Rubaiyat exhibition runs until February 2026 in the Wittliff Collections, in the Alkek Library at Texas State University, 501 University Drive, San Marcos. Open Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. Admission is free. thewittliffcollections.txst.edu.
Thor Christensen is a former pop music critic for The Dallas Morning News and The Milwaukee Journal whose work has appeared in The New York Times and several books. He’s interviewed two Beatles, a pair of Rolling Stones and hundreds of musicians from Beyoncé to Bono to David Bowie. He’s a Chicago native and a longtime resident of East Dallas.
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