15 January 19-25, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents STILL SWINGING Deep Ellum celebrates 150 years as the heart of Dallas music. BY DANNY GALLAGHER A ll musicians remember their first time in Deep Ellum. Doni Blair, the bassist for the Toadies, started performing around Dallas in another band, Hagfish, with his brother Zach. The two would go down to Deep Ellum on the week- ends to get away from the redneck rock of his hometown of Sherman. “We would go to Deep Ellum and look at all the stuff and say we belong here,” Blair says. “We wanted to be where all the excite- ment was.” Poppy Xander of the Helium Queens says she was in her early teens when a friend’s mom brought them to the neighborhood for some kind of faith-based show. For Xander, that made Deep Ellum feel like a place where every kind of music could belong. “It was definitely an all-ages thing,” Xan- der says. “She dropped us off there and it had like frozen pizzas and shit you could buy and there was live music playing with a rec room. It was like a rec center, but in Deep Ellum. I remember driving down there, her mom cussing everyone out with the win- dows down. It was nuts. I always tried to be there as much as possible after that.” Funk rocker and DJ Ducado VeGA has become so synonymous with Deep Ellum that he was recently chosen as one of 10 winners of the Deep Ellum 100. The project awarded Deep Ellum artists with small grants and a spot on The Sound of Deep El- lum, a second volume of sorts following an 1987 release of the same name placarding the neighborhood’s varied musical output. VeGA says his first experience in the his- toric cultural hub took him to the Galaxy Club, where he served as the hype man for Joe “Big Spook” Martinez. “It was an amazing experience because Deep Ellum has such a rich history, and I heard a lot of people talking about doing shows down there,” VeGA says. “My experi- ence was amazing, and I was honored just to be part of something down there. It was a lot of fun, and I was looking forward to really doing some other things musically down there.” This year marks Deep Ellum’s 150th an- niversary, a milestone being recognized and celebrated by the city of Dallas and groups such as the nonprofit Deep Ellum Founda- tion. In the past five years alone, the neighbor- hood has endured urban upheaval and ram- pant gentrification, but Deep Ellum’s sesquicentennial celebrates its role beyond being a live music destination. Deep Ellum is a community built on pushing the city’s artistic, social and cultural boundaries. It reels people in with a prism of possibilities, whether it’s the promise of a good story to keep for later or a late night with good music. But it’s also a confluence of conversations that may never converge any- where else. “It’s a community and place where cre- atives have come for over 100 years to take risks and make their own space,” says Steph- anie Hudiberg, the executive director of the Deep Ellum Foundation. “I get so many peo- ple who just want to be part of the neighbor- hood because they feel like they can be themselves.” Unlike other music hotspots in major cit- ies, Deep Ellum isn’t confined to one style or flavor when it comes to art, music and cul- ture. It’s a collage of tastes, faces and people that conjures the sound of hip-hop, blues, jazz, punk-rock and every type of genre in between. “It’s kind of like some places have the lo- cal coffee shop or local bar but there’s a whole neighborhood here and on any given day or moment, you’ll see someone you know or hear music playing,” Xander says. “When I hear from people who moved to other places, that isn’t necessarily embed- ded in the fabric of a town or a city.” The exact date of Deep Ellum’s founding isn’t known, though it’s widely accepted that it was established in 1873. Many facts about Deep Ellum’s history remain a mystery, and few people know that better than Alan Govenar, the president of Documentary Arts. He has researched and chronicled the neighborhood’s history in numerous films and books including Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas and Deep Ellum and Central Track: Where the Black and White Worlds of Dallas Converged, which he wrote with jour- nalist Jay Brakefield. Govenar says Deep Ellum’s story starts with the roads that led there, starting in 1872 when the first railroad came through Dallas with the Houston and Texas Central lines. These rails provided an access to the city that fueled Deep Ellum’s expansion with a steady stream of people for years to come. The city of Dallas still lived under the long shadow of systemic segregation, but Deep Ellum would become “the most vibrant melting pot of peo- ple and culture, business and music any- where in Dallas,” Govenar says. “Dallas became a magnet for people look- ing for opportunities,” Govenar Mike Brooks >> p16 ▼ Music Deep Ellum has always been a place of music. A throng of musicians and revelers celebrate a recent Mardi Gras in Deep Ellum.
