Answer:
Honky-tonk comes from a type of establishment of the time, that served alcoholic beverages and provided country music to the working class, where the honky-tonk genre comes as a "more danceable" version of a "blues" with a faster tempo.
The concept of a traditional instrumentalist trying to emulate new sounds does not have nothing to see with this, but the concept of taking something that already exists and "modifying" it to reach new audiences does.
