Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas

Chapter 10. Buster Smith: Dallas Jazz Goes to Kansas City and New York

Buster Smith Dallas Jazz Goes to Kansas City and New York D allas did not play as clear or dramatic a part in the development of jazz as in blues. There is no single towering figure who was the obvious Dallas jazz counterpart to Blind Lemon Jefferson. Yet in the mid- to late 1920s, in the words of jazz historian Ross Russell, Dallas was “the most important band town in Texas.”1 The city and the region produced a number of musicians who went on to play vital roles in swing and bebop: saxophonists Budd Johnson, Herschel Evans, Buddy Tate, and Henry “Buster” Smith; trombonist Jack Teagarden; and electric guitar pioneer Charlie Christian, who was born in Bonham, in northeast Texas, and grew up in Oklahoma but spent a great deal of time in Dallas. Buster Smith, though he recorded little under his own name and never achieved national recognition, was the most significant of these: Russell called him “a Dallas man with roots in the urban blues, pioneer of the early barrelhouse bands in the city, self-taught musician unblooded in musical schools, master of an empirical method on alto saxophone, and major saxophone stylist.”2 Smith was born in 1904 on a cotton farm in Ellis County, south of Dallas. This was Texas’s blues country, the east-central area that produced Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie Johnson and, a bit later, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Albert Collins, and Johnny Copeland. As Smith said later, “The blues was all around when I was growing up.” As a child, Smith played an old organ at home, but his first serious musical experience came when he was about eighteen, after his family had moved to Collin County, north of Dallas. He saw a $3.50 clarinet in a store in town and got permission from his mother to buy it if he picked 400 pounds of cotton daily for several days. A few months later, when the family moved to Dallas, he had become fairly proficient on the instrument.3 In Dallas, Smith found a vital music scene. “On Central Track, you could C h A p t e r 10 C H A P T E R 142 at times hear four different interpretations of the blues,” Booker Pittman wrote of his boyhood. “They would drift from some of these fellows from Memphis, Georgia, Alabama, with their banjos and guitars, each telling a different story.”4 A similar account came from Margaret Wright, a white woman, who recalled a childhood trip to Deep Ellum with her mother in 1924: I was born in Dallas, and as a small child, I can remember an occasion when my mother took me walking down Elm Street, across Central Tracks, and on to wherever an errand carried her. My mother was a tall, stately woman and was always treated with the utmost respect, no matter what the surroundings. On this day, I remember holding tightly to her hand. I was really frightened. There was certainly no need to be, but I was out of familiar surroundings. As we walked down the street near the Central Tracks, loud music could be heard up and down the streets. Black musicians seemed to be in every store and “joint.” Blues and jazz players were everywhere. At that time, I had never seen so many black people. One thing I distinctly remember, every black man who was on the sidewalk, stepped back, took off his hat, and bowed slightly when my mother passed.5 In addition to street singers such as Jefferson, who performed alone, there were groups such as Coley Jones’s Dallas String Band, which became well The Tip Top tailor shop and dance hall, ca. early 1920s. Courtesy of the Dallas Morning News. 143 Buster Smith known around the city by playing at community picnics, dances, and shows for both white and black audiences and by serenading on the streets in front of Ella B. Moore’s theaters. The band had varying personnel and configurations that sometimes inlcuded one or two violins, two guitars, mandolin, string bass, clarinet, and trumpet. The bass player for Coley Jones was Marco Washington, who also led a string band that included his wife and stepson, Aaron “T-Bone” Walker, as a child musician and dancer. The family played on the streets for money on weekends, employing string bass, guitars, fiddles, mandolins, and homemade instruments. Sometimes Jesse Hooker...