ELKS DANCE | Anyone who knows me knows I’ve always had a fondness for old newspapers. In our house, that usually means my husband is watching Newsmax while I’m quietly reading my way through papers from the late 1800s and early 1900s.
While going through those archives recently, I came across a small notice that pulled me right into the summer of 1920. It didn’t look like much at first glance, but it opened up a vivid scene in my mind—lanterns swaying in the warm night air, laughter drifting across a field in Atoka, and Saxby’s Band setting the rhythm for a Moonlight Picnic and Dance.
At first, that June gathering feels like a moment all its own—a single evening of music and summer light. But the more I read, the more I realized it was part of something larger already unfolding in Tipton County that year. The appetite for live music, dancing, and gathering together didn’t begin with that picnic. It was already there, building and moving through the community.
A few months earlier, in the middle of winter, another notice appeared in the February 26, 1920 issue of The Covington Leader. It was short—easy to pass over—but it painted a very different kind of scene. Not lanterns in a field, but music spilling out from inside a crowded hall.
The notice read:
“The Elk hall Friday night was the scene of a delightful dance given by the members of the order for their friends. Quite a number of visitors were present from nearby towns – Brownsville, Mason, Dyersburg, Ripley, Union City, Henning and Memphis. About 30 couples enjoyed dancing until a late hour. The music was furnished by an orchestra of seven pieces – Johnson’s Jazz Band, of Memphis.”
There’s a lot tucked into those few lines.
Elk Hall that night wasn’t just a neighborhood gathering place—it was a meeting point for all of West Tennessee. People came in from Brownsville, Mason, Dyersburg, Ripley, Union City, Henning, and Memphis. In 1920, that wasn’t a casual trip. It meant planning, travel, and intention. Some likely arrived by train, others by early automobiles working their way down winter roads. Either way, people made the effort to be there.
Inside, about thirty couples filled the hall. You can almost picture the details: heavy coats draped over chairs, the hum of conversation rising and falling, familiar faces greeting one another across the room, and the quiet anticipation that settles in just before the music begins.
And then it did.
Seven musicians from Memphis—Johnson’s Jazz Band—brought the sound of a changing America into the room. Jazz, still relatively new and still carrying that edge of excitement and rebellion, was spreading quickly in those years. And hearing it live in Covington must have felt both modern and electric.
The horns would have cut through the winter air with warmth. The rhythm would have taken hold of the room. One by one, couples would have stepped onto the floor, moving through the Foxtrot or the One-Step, letting the music carry them until the hours grew late and the outside world felt far away.
For a while, Elk Hall wasn’t just a building in a small Tennessee town. It was its own world.
When I think about that winter dance alongside the moonlight picnic that came later that summer, they start to feel like two expressions of the same thing. One held indoors against the cold, the other spread out under the open sky—but both shaped by the same desire: to gather, to listen, to move, and to share time with one another.
There were no screens, no streaming music, no quick distractions waiting in another room. If you wanted music, you went where it was being played. If you wanted company, you showed up. And if you wanted a night to remember, you stayed until the last song ended.
More than a century has passed since Johnson’s Jazz Band packed up their instruments and those thirty couples made their way home into the cold February night. Elk Hall has likely changed, and the names of most who were there have faded into history.
But the feeling of it hasn’t disappeared.
Because even now, the reasons people gather haven’t really changed. We still look for a good rhythm, a room—or a field—full of familiar faces, and a few hours where the world feels a little lighter than it did when we arrived.
Elks Dance 1920