The adventures and various works of a photographer, road tripper, former patron of the local arts, aspiring app developer, and late night coffee drinker and conversationalist.
Blind Lemon circa 1926
During a recent trip to Houston, I made a detour off the interstate and headed toward the town of Wortham, Texas. This detour wasn't taken to skirt the endless traffic bottlenecks or the constantly recurring speed traps along I-45 between Ennis and Houston; it was to pay my respects to a true icon of Texas music. Hailing from Coutchman, Texas (now a ghost town) as the child of sharecroppers, Lemon Henry "Blind Lemon" Jefferson, along with Lead Belly and T-Bone Walker, was one of the pioneering forces in the development of the original Deep Ellum music scene during the 1920s and '30s. Beginning as a street musician in East Texas towns and later ending up in Dallas by (probably) 1917, Jefferson would go on to graduate from street busker to eventual successful recording artist courtesy of a contract with Paramount Records. Along with the aforementioned Lead Belly, Walker, and others, he became one of the progenitors of a long tradition of highly influential Texas musicians who put us on the map beginning in the late 1910s and continuing through to modern times.
While working to compile photographic images for my DFW in vintage photos post a few months ago, I managed to get my hands on an old postcard for the city of Plano. If you didn't know, finding and acquiring historic images of the city of Dallas proper is not especially difficult; all you really need is a bit of vigilance and a healthy dose of patience while keeping an eye out at antique stores, estate sales, and online auctions. Just give it some time, and the photos will turn up. Finding interesting period photos of the suburban areas, though, can be considerably more difficult. So it was with some delight that I acquired this particular real photo postcard. And, unlike other similarly aged RPPCs that I've found, this one came with a mystery attached: where was the Plano Dam?
Plano Waterworks, circa 1907
