Laura Mae Socks photographed at Eastside Bowl
Just about anyone who’s two-stepped at Nashville’s Honky Tonk Tuesday Nights in the past decade is likely to have crossed paths with Laura Mae Socks.
Socks has been at the helm of the famed weekly dance night — now hosted at Eastside Bowl — since it first began at Inglewood’s American Legion Post 82 nearly 11 years ago. She spends every Tuesday evening leading a crowd of dancers in two-step dance lessons.
For Socks, the weekly lessons are also a bit of a matchmaking session as she pairs dancers together. She says there have been three marriages, many coupledoms and countless friendships that have been born from her lessons.
“I still get Christmas cards from groups of friends that were like, ‘I didn’t have any friends, then I came to your dance class, and now look at us,’” Socks says. “Or people that come like, ‘I don’t get any human touch. This is the place that I get it.’ And it’s all ages. I have 4-year-olds, and then I have 70-year-olds and anywhere in between.”
While she doesn’t have any formal dance training, Socks is also versed in Cajun and zydeco dance styles, which she picked up during her time living in Southwest Louisiana. She also knows Appalachian flatfooting, which stems from her roots in her home state of West Virginia.
Socks moved to Nashville in 2015, picking up a job at East Nashville’s Mas Tacos por Favor and focusing much of her time making country music — often performing at the early iterations of Honky Tonk Tuesday. She’s been a musician since the early 2000s, and has played with the Michael Nau-fronted band Page France, spending a year playing keys and percussion and singing harmonies.
Those in town who don’t know Socks as a performer might recognize her from another of her passions: astrology. She’s been reading astrological charts and working professionally in hypnotherapy and past-life regression since 2010, though she was first introduced to the practice when she was 13.
“This 18-year-old guy who was on mushrooms drew out my chart by hand and explained it all to me,” Socks says. “And I was obsessed from that moment on in 1993, and then I started studying it and have been obsessed ever since.”
Laura Mae Socks photographed at Eastside Bowl
She says public interest in astrology has soared in recent years, and that while she’s met with skepticism or nerves from some, her client base ranges from artists to CEOs.
“The way I use astrology is always in an empowering way,” she says. “I would never make it seem like a person doesn’t have free will. I believe that anyone has free will. This is the blueprint of who you are. You can renovate that blueprint, and a lot of times the chart you’re born with is like the scaffolding of who you are, but you’re going to grow and live.”
Through her varying fields of work, she sees a throughline — particularly with the vulnerability she witnesses in people through dance and astrology.
“It’s just fascinating to me to watch the dynamics of two people that are nonverbally communicating with their bodies,” she says of dance. “That’s also what it feels like reading an astrology chart, because you’re getting into the depths of the psychological needs of a person.”
Whether she’s reading someone’s astrological birth chart, teaching a couple to dance or strumming her guitar, Socks says she never likes to focus on just one interest.
“I just feel like all of the things that I do is me trying to make people feel witnessed and seen and loved and cared for, and it’s just a different modality,” she says.
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