Kevin Pask, Deep Ellum Blues

Driving through other parts of the city of Dallas itself produced another and more unsettling effect: neighborhoods that were certainly not rural, but just as certainly not the grittier world of Shaft that I saw in the movies or on television. Instead, what I saw in the poorest black neighborhoods were usually shotgun shacks, often with trees in the front and backyard gardens, sometimes even a chicken or two, along with the odd public housing project, small and squat, built around a desolate courtyard. Somewhat more urban was the neighborhood just north of downtown Dallas that, I found out only much later, had once been another Freedmantown. Hall Street around State and Thomas Streets had once been the heart of the North Dallas Freedmantown, populated by black servants (there were prosperous white homes on Thomas), merchants, and professionals. By the 1930s and 40s, the area was also a center of entertainment, filled with black nightclubs including the Empire Room, where Ray Charles frequently performed early in his career, and the Powell Hotel and Court, where Duke Ellington stayed when in town. I think that I only drove through the center of this neighborhood once, in the early 1970s, when my family was probably trying to get to something like the newly developed Quadrangle, an elegant new shopping development just a few blocks away in the Oak Lawn district. Perhaps a wrong turn was taken, and we approached Oak Lawn along the unaccustomed route of Hall Street, which looked devastated in this neighborhood — one or two stores hunched forlornly among vacant lots.

Just a mile or so to the south and east of this neighborhood, I saw the black neighborhoods around Fair Park, neighborhoods which I understood to be South Dallas (i.e. black Dallas), two or three times a year: on a trip to the Texas State Fair in October, a Dallas Cowboys (when they still played at the Cotton Bowl) or SMU Mustangs game, or one of the museums in Fair Park. On one such trip in the early 1970s, for reasons that I can no longer remember and probably never understood, I was bundled off to the Fair Park Bandshell for a weekend afternoon to watch the Grateful Dead or perhaps a band doing some Grateful Dead covers. (It's possible that my mother, who was at that time slightly hippie and listened to Joan Baez, thought this would be culturally improving in some fashion, which it probably was.) It's hard for me to believe that it was the Grateful Dead themselves since there were only a few dozen people in attendance, and I can find no reference to their ever having played at the Fair Park Bandshell around 1970 or 1971, when I saw this concert. The band, whatever it was, certainly played the Dead's "Casey Jones" because the shockingly exciting lyrics, "Driving that train, high on cocaine / Casey Jones you'd better watch your speed," have for me remained ever since attached to that time and place.

I have no clear recollection of any other songs played that afternoon. I would like to believe that the band was the Grateful Dead and that they played "Deep Elem Blues," a staple of their performances (never recorded in studio), only because they would have been as close to the neighborhood of Deep Ellum as they ever performed. (My Deadhead friend, John Berto, tells me that there is no record of band ever playing the song in the state of Texas, much less Dallas.) Deep Ellum was on the east fringes of downtown Dallas, the "deep" or far side of Elm Street, between the Central Expressway and Fair Park. We passed through Deep Ellum several times without ever knowing its name; nor would the name have been particularly meaningful to me if I had known. In the 1960s and 1970s, the area seemed to have no name or history.

Another member of the family, Isaac "Rocky" Goldstein, later gained brief fame by selling David Hinckley the gun used to shoot Ronald Reagan. I know this fact about Rocky Goldstein only because he was also a source for Alan B. Govenar and Jay F. Brakefield's book, Deep Ellum and Central Track: Where the Black and White Worlds of Dallas Converged, which provides a goldmine of information about the place, including the role of small-scale Jewish merchants in the neighborhood.2 Govenar and Brakefield's book recreates the neighborhood in its heyday, when it was one of the major entertainment districts of the black South and proving grounds for the Texas blues. Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lead Belly, Blind Willie Johnson, Mance Lipscomb, Alex Moore, and T-Bone Walker all spent formative years there, and Moore lived long enough (1989) to become a source for the history of the area.