Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas

Chapter 9. Alex Moore: Dallas Piano Blues

Alex Moore Dallas Piano Blues t he wide success and influence of Texas blues guitar styles has tended to obscure the importance of the piano. Yet blues historian Paul Oliver has written that Dallas produced a very distinctive style of piano blues, featuring lyrics full of allusions to the city and the trains that constantly passed through it: No other blues school, with the possible exception of Chicago, gives us such a picture of the urban life that inspired it. It could, of course, be coldly descriptive , sensational, or even sentimental, but the special quality of the Dallas tradition is its poetry. Here the piano is used as a complementary poetic instrument , setting off the words and the mood of the blues instead of challenging it with pyrotechnic displays.1 Oliver’s thesis is backed up by anecdotal evidence and discographies of the 1920s and ’30s, which suggest that there probably were as many blues pianists as guitarists in Dallas. Like their guitarist counterparts, blues pianists were usually solo performers, whose virtuosity and idiosyncratic styles made it difficult for other musicians to work with them. Blues piano, however , proved to be much less viable in the “race” marketplace than downhome guitar blues, and no pianist attained the fame of a Lemon Jefferson. Consequently, there is less documentation of blues pianists. Much of what is known preserved to the greatest extent in the performance style of Alex Moore, whose career in Dallas spanned nearly seven decades. Moore was born in North Dallas in 1899 and lived in the city until his death in 1989. He may not have been the best of the local piano men, but he certainly had the greatest longevity and was the best documented. In his youth, he was one of many who played at Saturday-night suppers and house-rent parties and in chock houses and cafés. As Moore said, in C h A p t e r 9 129 the 1920s “there was a piano in every shack in Deep Ellum, Elm Thicket [a black neighborhood near Love Field airport], and Froggy Bottom [near downtown Dallas and the Trinity River].”2 The settings in which Moore played reflect the origins of the music he performed. In the sawmill and turpentine camps of the late nineteenth and Alexander H. Moore, in Dallas, 1938. Courtesy of Documentary Arts. Alex Moore 130 C h A p t e r 9 early twentieth centuries, black laborers lived apart from women in crude quarters and had little in the way of recreation. But the companies did provide entertainment by setting up “barrelhouses,” shacks where liquor was served over a bar that typically consisted of a plank set on barrels. Here the workers could listen to music played on battered upright pianos by traveling musicians, who developed a style sometimes called “fast Texas” or “fast Western” piano. However, within this general approach, which came to be known as “barrelhouse music,” there were distinct regional variations even within the state of Texas. And as we have seen in the music of Arizona Dranes, it could be performed in both spiritual and secular settings. Blues historians distinguish between the piano styles found in different areas of the state: the “Santa Fe group,” who worked in Fort Bend County, the Thomas family from Houston (which included the legendary Sippie Wallace), the musicians centered around Galveston, and those in Dallas and North Texas. Within those areas, the blues pianists demonstrated certain similarities in style and approach that reflected the environments in which they worked, their friendships and associations with other pianists, and, in some instances, their isolation.3 Dallas pianists of the twenties included Neal Roberts, Willie Tyson, Lovey Bookman, and Frank Ridge. Some of these musicians never recorded, and their names were kept alive only in the memory of survivors such as Moore, who passed them along to interviewers. Those who did record often sang the blues or accompanied women blues singers of the “classic” variety, the slow or medium-tempo music interacting in call and response with the vocal. Other instruments were seldom involved in these recordings, though Coley Jones did play guitar on some of Bill Day’s sessions. In “Frisco Blues,” Roberts uses gently rolling bass figures to evoke the distant train rhythms of the Saint Louis–San Francisco line without resorting to mimicry. Similarly, Tyson in “Sun Beam” re-created the sounds of the passenger train of...