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.
1998 Misfits show flyer
If it looks like it should be a barn from the outside, it's probably because it WAS... or it basically was, at one time. It was an urban barn whose inside was given over to western swing and dance and to a honky-tonk inspired atmosphere. Over a total of about seventeen years, 2727 Canton Street in Deep Ellum paraded through a whole series of different owners and target clientele, being known successively as Tommy's Heads Up Saloon, Tommy's Deep Ellum, The Institute, and The Venue, before finally settling in as Deep Ellum Live, the name it is most remembered by today. The list of acts to have taken the stage over its storied history reads like a "who's who" of the 1980s and 1990s local and national music scenes. But in 2004, Deep Ellum Live closed its doors for good and lay mostly dormant for over a decade, finally being resurrected from the dead by an entrepreneurial couple as part of their personal Deep Ellum reclamation project. What is the story behind this iconic fixture of the Dallas music scene?
Continue reading "Ghosts of DFW music history: Deep Ellum Live"
