Vintage St. Pete: The song of Joyland

Photo: Terry Premru.

You couldn’t miss the sign.

Sixty feet high, it spelled out the word JOYLAND in blinking pink, green and yellow capital letters. Between 1959 until 2003, anyone in the vicinity of 11225 U.S. 19, day or night, saw it standing there like a neon lighthouse, attached to a giant colored arrow that pointed across a parking lot to a nondescript ranch-style building.

Today the building, within the Pinellas Park city limits, is home to the Autism Inspired Academy. The sign is long gone.

No. 11225 been a number of things over the decades, but nothing with the rich history – or legend – of Joyland.

Country music fans from all over western Florida came to dance there, 19,000 square feet with a polished wood dance floor. It was the first bay area nightclub – don’t call it a roadhouse, a honky tonk or a juke joint – to put country artists on the bandstand, three nights a week. Sometimes more.

Many veteran country stars stood on Joyland’s revolving stage, as the decades passed and the trends came and went, from the “Countrypolitan” Nashville Sound to Urban Cowboy, to line dancing and boot-scootin’ boogie.

Country fans – middle-aged businessmen in suits, teen-agers in skintight stretch slacks, matrons in cocktail dresses, young men in elaborate cowboy-like outfits – react to the music with near Beatle-like enthusiasm. But, when a headliner like Bradenton’s Bill Floyd is relating a melodic tale of heartbreak, the crowd is quiet with more than one lower lip caught between clenched teeth.

St. Petersburg Times/Oct. 25, 1964

Bill Floyd and the Countrymen were Joyland’s house band for the first decade. Floyd had the morning DJ shift on Tampa’s WYOU-AM, and sold ads for the station in the afternoon. And every Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday night he sang songs of heartbreak and happiness at Joyland. Many of which he wrote himself.

Every time a name act appeared, Bill Floyd and the Countrymen opened the show.

George Jones was the first such star to perform at Joyland, over four days in February, 1965.

Joyland averaged one “star appearance” every month, although many of the headliners were regional performers, or minor players that nobody’d heard of, optimistically billed as “Direct From the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.”

There were heady days, however. In the 1960s alone Joyland bought in Ray Price, Webb Pierce (with Waylon Jennings on the bill), Mel Tillis, Faron Young, Ferlin Husky, Conway Twitty, Ernest Tubb, Tex Ritter, Bobby Bare, Pete Drake, Jimmy Newman, Little Jimmy Dickens, Claude Gray, George Morgan, Carl Smith, Dave Dudley, the Osborne Brothers, Roy Drusky, Tommy Cash and Johnny Paycheck. The Blue Boys, who’d been the stage band for the late Jim Reeves, recorded a live album at Joyland in 1966.

On May 4, 1968, Willie Nelson made what was likely his first appearance in Tampa Bay. At Joyland.

(Nelson was still years away from changing his appearance and, more importantly, his music. His most recent album, Texas in My Soul, hadn’t made a dent in the national charts.)

The beginning

In 1959, paving contractor Marion D. Blackburn paid $73,000 for 15 scrubby wild acres alongside U.S. 19, just north of the St. Petersburg city limits and adjacent to the 10 acres he already owned. With an investment of $500,000, Blackburn developed and built the area’s first permanent amusement park. Joyland.

“There are enough youth and teen-agers here now with no place to go to have fun,” he told the St. Petersburg Times. “Of course, anyone – of all ages – can have fun in a nice park.”

That enormous sign was there from the get-go, a towering, multi-color neon kiddy come-on.

Joyland Park boasted a 55-foot Ferris wheel, a small stop-and-go roller coaster called the “Wild Mouse,” a train, a “crazy house,” a boat canal, a ghost town, an archery range, a miniature golf course and more. Blackburn put up a “Big Top” tent with a roller rink inside.

WTVT-Channel 13 personality Paul Reynolds hosted Saturday afternoon “Teen Age Platter Parties” in the tent, and sometimes there’d be live local or regional bands for dancing.

According to the Times, more than 2,000 screaming teens jammed the “dancing pavilion” (aka the tent) Aug. 22, 1960 to see and hear “twangy” guitar player Duane Eddy, who’d scored a number of instrumental hits including “Rebel Rouser.”

Bobby Rydell, Johnny and the Hurricanes and Jimmy Clanton performed on subsequent Saturdays.

A 14-year-old Gulfport girl and a 9-year-old boy from Clearwater won, respectively, a Shetland pony and a Mexican burro. The contest: Guess the animals’ weights.

She named the pony she won Cutie. He said his burro’s name was to be Blaze.  

Early in 1961, Blackburn’s contractors started making noise about unpaid bills.

On Feb. 9, Blackburn was discovered dead in the family garage; both of his car doors were open, and the engine was off, but it was determined that he’d died from carbon monoxide poisoning. The Pinellas County Medical Examiner ruled it an accidental death.

The day Blackburn died, a lawsuit had been filed against him in the amount of $11,000.

A receiver was appointed to protect the interests of some 90 creditors, and the park was quietly closed June 5. The rides were sold at public auction, and the weeds grew high.

The site’s first date with country & western music (as it was called in those days) was Aug. 6, 1964. “I’m not too crazy about the music,” said the new owner, building contractor Bob Swetland, “but it sort of grows on you, I guess.”

Swetland had visited a country music club in Orlando, the Rainbow Ranch, and saw for himself it was a moneymaker. “So I built this place.”

He built the first iteration of the dance hall. The revolving circular stage was powered by a homemade contraption Swetland made from a WWII machine gun mount.

Replacing the original sign with something equally as imposing, Swetland explained, would set him back $9,000. So he kept it, and his country music club would henceforth be known as Joyland.

Bill Floyd and his band, which included his brother Harold on lead guitar, also performed regularly at Tampa’s short-lived Imperial Ballroom. Many of the headliners who played Joyland also visited the Imperial.

Floyd’s son Hank and his sisters were young in the ‘60s; it seemed like Dad was gone from the house just about every night.

After the big shows, the stars sometime came over to the Floyds’ place in Tampa to kick back. “I remember a story about Johnny Paycheck one time walking in the front door,” Hank Floyd says. “I was probably 9 or 10 years old. And the first thing I said to him was ‘Why are you so little?’ And my father wanted to crawl under a rock.”

(Paycheck, born Donald Lytle, stood 5-foot-5.)

Keeping George Jones – who appeared at both Joyland and the Imperial – away from liquor was a full-time job. “My mother told me that he would get pretty on’ry. And that he would hide it everywhere. He would hide it in his guitar case.”

Bill Floyd performed for hundreds of people as Buck Owens’ support act at the Florida State Fair, bringing down the house with his Elvis Presley impression. Del Reeves recorded his song “Three Time Loser.” He cut his first album, This is Bill Floyd, in 1968. He even had a weekly TV show, broadcast live from the studios of WLCY.

But Floyd never, as Owens sang in “Act Naturally,” hit the big time.

“He could never let go of the Tampa/St. Pete area and move to Nashville,” his son believes. “That’s probably what kept him from becoming a member of the Grand Ole Opry. He would go up for a couple months at a time and then come back.”

Bill Floyd died in January 2024. He was 88.

St. Petersburg Times entertainment editor Dave Scheiber and wife Janie say hello to Billy Ray Cyrus at Joyland, June 3, 1992. Photo provided.

The middle

The 1970s brought Jerry Lee Lewis, Linda Martell, Jean Shepard, Freddie Hart and others, but the (eventual) new owners all but turned off the tap on major shows. Joyland continued as a country music dance center and social hall. It was a respectable place: The $1.50 nightly admission seemed to keep hard-drinking, trouble-making types out.

There were always changes:

Pro wrestling started up on Monday night; the stage became a makeshift ring. Liquor was sold in paper cups so outraged fans would stop throwing their glasses at the bad guys.

A go-kart track was added.

Walter Preston and his wife Betty took ownership in 1986, a few years before the stretch of U.S. 19 that included Joyland was annexed by Pinellas Park.

One-nighter concerts continued, but at a much slower pace. Freddy Fender, Vern Gosdin, Mel McDaniel and Moe Bandy were among those who plied their trade at Joyland in the ‘80s, but old-school country music simply wasn’t cool any more.

So the Prestons added a roller hockey rink out back. And brought in mixed martial arts competitions. And boxing matches.

They replaced the ancient revolving stage with a standard model.

The couple struck gold in 1992 by booking singing phenom Billy Ray Cyrus, just as his song “Achy Breaky Heart” was dominating country radio. The June 3 concert set a record for the ballroom’s biggest crowd, more than 1,000 people.

“The cigarette smoke was so thick that by 9 o’clock all the hat-wearing, striped-shirting, Garth-copying, Brooks Brothering cowboys were starting to run together like a bad dye job,” reviewer Jennifer Tucker wrote in the Tampa Tribune.

When line dancing became all the rage, Joyland was the center of it all in Pinellas County. The Prestons hired professionals to teach the latest steps, before the evening band came on and everyone could show off in front of a crowd.

The country resurgence of the 1990s brought Aaron Tippin, Exile, the Desert Rose Band, Confederate Railroad, Earl Thomas Conley and others to Joyland for concert appearances.

But it wasn’t to last.

Arline Winerman taught line dancing at Joyland for six years. 2023 photo by Lara Cerri/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Press.

The end

Walter Preston took to billing 11225 as “The Joyland Entertainment Complex.”

He wanted to expand his empire, but might have spread himself too thin in the process. The Wild West Club (aka Joyland II) made its Tampa debut in 1989, followed by “Joyland III” in the Pasco County town of Hudson and “Joyland IV” in Bradenton.

The Hudson edition opened, was nearly destroyed by fire, re-opened and failed. All within two years.

Business dried up at the Wild West Club, and it too was sold off.

After the original Joyland introduced a full-service restaurant and then the Crystal Playhouse Dinner Theatre, the roof caved in.

Figuratively speaking.

In 2000, as the dinner theater was being set up, Pinellas Park officials shut Joyland down after discovering “so many “life-threatening” fire and building code violations that the structure had become “unfit for human habitation.” The work was apparently being done without proper permits, or a contractor.

Walter Preston had been warned about similar short-cuts and shortcomings in the early 1990s. “Walter has a unique way of approaching construction,” assistant city manager Mike Gustafson told a reporter.

Once the issues were resolved, the dinner theater opened. Two days after the grand opening, heavy winds caused the top half of the 49-year-old sign – the letters J O Y L – to crack and topple over onto the asphalt. 

The dinner theater was not a success. The barn-sized, enclosed roller hockey rink with no air conditioning became the center of controversy when Preston locked out a team from St. Pete Catholic High School – just before they arrived to practice – because the league’s manager was behind on his rent payments.

Faced with competition from newer, more technologically-savvy competitors, Preston sold Joyland to the Pinellas Park Baptist Temple in 2003.

Today, there are Joyland country music venues in Sarasota and Bradenton. There is no connection to the original Pinellas County venue, other than the name.

Photo: Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Press.