Deep Ellum Blues

• Main Author: Kevin Pask
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Emory Center for Digital Scholarship 2007-10-01
• Series: Southern Spaces
• Subjects: African American Studies; Business and Commerce; Music; Residential; Urban and Suburban Studies; African American Art
• Online Access: https://southernspaces.org/node/42633

"Deep Ellum Blues" expands upon the author’s narrative of growing up in suburban Dallas, Texas, to explore the relationship between the city’s Sunbelt sprawl and the fate of historical African American neighborhoods, particularly Deep Ellum and North Dallas’ Freedmantown. Deep Ellum, along with its legendary music scene built by the likes of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, Lead Belly, and Bill Neely, all but disappeared with the construction of Central Expressway in the 1950s. It has since returned as a largely white center for alternative culture. Freedmantown has re-emerged as the gentrified "State-Thomas." These neighborhoods register the city’s changing racial geography and obliteration of history.