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Preface
- Texas A&M University Press
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Preface B y the time we met at the funeral of blues pianist Alex Moore in 1989, Moore had finally received the recognition he deserved for his contributions to the Deep Ellum of his youth. Alan delivered a eulogy, and Jay was covering the event for the Dallas Morning News. That initial encounter led to a personal and professional relationship that has endured to the present day. As we talked and explored our common interests in folklore and music, particularly Texas blues, we returned again and again to Deep Ellum, the fabled Dallas district that lay between the offices of the Morning News and the East Dallas neighborhood where Alan had established his nonprofit Documentary Arts. Alan had been researching Deep Ellum since he moved to Dallas in 1980. In 1981 he organized the Downtown Dallas Traditional Music Festival, and for that event he featured Moore, then eighty years old, and country blues guitarist and singer Bill Neely, as well as a group he assembled and called Dallas Jazz Greats, which included Buster Smith, Herbie Cowens, Boston Smith, Benny “Chops” Arredondo, and James Clay. The success of this festival led to others, and in 1983 Alan launched the Dallas Folk Festival on City Hall Plaza and wrote articles for the Dallas Times Herald and Parkway magazine on the musicians he presented. In addition, Alan began the development of Traditional Music in Texas, a thirty-nine-part radio series that he produced for broadcast on KERA 90.1 in Dallas. In 1984 he received a commission from the Dallas Museum of Art for Living Texas Blues, a project that involved writing a short book, producing an anthology cassette, and directing three short films, Deep Ellum Blues, Battle of the Guitars, and Cigarette Blues. In 1986 Alan released through Documentary Arts another anthology cassette, called Deep Ellum Blues, which contained many of his field and festival recordings of musicians who had started their careers during the heyday of Deep Ellum in the 1920s and 1930s and were viii p r e fA c e still performing in the 1980s. That same year, Alan researched and produced the third Dallas Folk Festival, which attracted more than eighty thousand people to City Hall Plaza. This was followed by Dallas Folk Festivals in 1988 and 1991. While these festivals focused broadly on different styles of traditional music around Texas, the core local emphasis was the musical legacy of Deep Ellum; he changed the name of the Dallas Jazz Greats to the Heat Waves of Swing in honor of one of Buster Smith’s greatest bands, which sometimes included T-Bone Walker. Over the years, Alan added musicians such as David “Fathead” Newman, who had gotten their start with Buster Smith when they were in high school in Dallas. Alan also featured the Light Crust Doughboys and worked with Marvin “Smokey” Montgomery in much the same way he did with Smith, encouraging him to include as many veterans of the band as possible. In 1988 Alan’s book Meeting the Blues: The Rise of the Texas Sound was published, and he recognized the need to do more. Impressed with Jay’s skills as a researcher and his coverage of the Alex Moore funeral, Alan approached him with the idea of collaborating on a book on Deep Ellum. Time was growing short to conduct more in-depth interviews with those who recalled the area from the 1920s through the 1950s, when it died or at least went into a deep sleep until it was reborn in the 1980s as a hangout for artists and musicians and a launching pad for a new generation of bands such as New Bohemians and the Butthole Surfers. When we commenced work in 1991, the first step was to identify those primary human sources and to find and interview them as soon as possible. Some of these we either knew or knew of; others, we found as we went along. One led to another. Each interview subject was asked whether he or she knew of others to talk to, and many did. These conversations with history were rich, rewarding, and often surprising. We talked to musicians who had started their careers during the heyday of Deep Ellum and returned to perform there in the 1980s, including Bill Neely, Buster Smith, Herbie Cowens, Jesse Thomas, Sammy Price, Eddie Durham, Marvin “Smokey” Montgomery, and Jim Boyd. We drew on interviews we had done before, sometimes years before, and, when possible, conducted follow-up interviews...