Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas

Introduction

Deep Ellum Fact and Fiction D eep Ellum has been mythologized beyond recognition. Misconceptions about Deep Ellum abound, principally as a consequence of the lack of solid historical research. The WPA Dallas Guide and History, for instance, refers to Deep Ellum as the “survival of the Freedman’s Town settlement of former slaves” and confuses the date of the Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863, with the date that Texas slaves learned of their freedom, June 19, 1865.1 Little documentation is provided in the WPA Guide, a valuable but flawed document researched and written by the Federal Writers’ Project. Completed in 1940, the WPA Guide was not published in book form until more than fifty years later, though many researchers read it in manuscript form at the Dallas Public Library. Among those researchers was the widely respected Dallas historian A. C. Greene, who said, “Dallas became a mecca for former slaves, and several Freedmen’s Towns, as the black communities were known, sprang up on its outskirts. One black community, called Deep Ellum because it was located along the farthest extension of Elm Street, created a separate universe and ultimately contributed more famous artists to folklore and music than did white Dallas.”2 Likewise, William L. McDonald stated, “The freedman towns that evolved in Dallas County just after the [Civil] war included . . . the Deep Ellum district, which reached its zenith in the 1920s and 1930s.”3 Retired Southern Methodist University professor Darwin Payne wrote, “‘Deep Ellum,’ that part of Elm Street just east of Central Avenue, had originated after the Civil War as a ‘Freedmanstown.’ Construction of the H&TC Railroad depot nearby had encouraged its growth and permanence.”4 Indeed, several freed-slave communities were established in and around Dallas after the Civil War. The one called Freedmantown was a short distance north of Deep Ellum, in the historic area of the city once called Statei n t r o D u c t i o n 2 i n t r o D u c t i o n Thomas and now the Uptown neighborhood. This community extended to the eastern edge of Deep Ellum, near present-day Baylor University Medical Center. But Deep Ellum itself does not seem to have been a freedmantown. Indeed, there could hardly have been a settlement called Deep Ellum immediately after the Civil War because the area was still wooded. In the early 1870s, with the coming of the railroads, the woods were cleared, and the major east-west streets—Elm, Main, and Commerce—were extended. The area has long been associated with music. This has considerable legitimacy , as we shall see, but this reputation has in many ways been obscured and distorted. Larry Willoughby reported that: the hidden and forbidden clubs and speakeasies along the northern part of Elm Street were the center of the blues and jazz action. The area was seething with music—jazz combos, jump bands, bebop and boogie-woogie pianists, blues and jazz vocalists, and street-corner guitarists. It was a magnet for musicians of every racial and cultural background, and therefore, symbolically and in vivid musical reality, Deep Ellum was the most visible example of the interaction of cultures that defines Texas music.5 Elm Street theaters at night, 1925. Photograph by Frank Rogers. Courtesy of the Texas/ Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library. 3 Deep Ellum Willoughby had the broad outlines right, but he succumbed to the temptation to exaggerate and romanticize the musical activity, not to mention significantly confusing several eras. Bebop didn’t take hold until the 1940s, long after Dallas’s black nightlife scene had moved away from Elm Street, for instance, and few nonblack musicians played in Deep Ellum because of the segregation of the time. For that matter, nightclubs in the modern sense didn’t really exist in the twenties and thirties, when there was nightlife on Elm Street and in nearby portions of Central Track. Entertainment was presented outdoors on the streets and in parks, dance halls, theaters, and cafés, as well as in “chock houses” and “soft-drink stands” where bootleg alcohol was served. Writer Dave Oliphant described Deep Ellum as a red-light district and repeated an interviewer’s misquotation of Buster Smith: “Ella B. Moore’s theater” became “the L. B. Mose theater” because of Smith’s Texas accent.6 The neighborhood has inspired other florid prose, such as this description from columnist...