Nightlife

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Deep Ellum Blues

George W. Cook Dallas/Texas Image Collection

As Dallas emerged as the largest inland cotton market in the world, the area around the Houston and Texas Central Railway began to attract laborers from the surrounding countryside. Many were African-Americans, and in the segregated, often racially violent city, they found refuge along the so-called Central Track, setting up businesses, shops, theaters, and clubs that would become the heart of Dallas’ cultural heritage.

Those country-born migrant workers included bluesmen Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie Johnson, folk and blues pioneer Huddie William “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, blues pianist Alex Moore, and Charlie Parker mentor Henry Franklin “Buster” Smith. Robert Johnson came through Dallas to record his famous sessions at nearby 508 Park. In those early days, it was not uncommon to see a young T-Bone Walker leading Blind Lemon up and down Central Track and dancing for spare change on the streets.

If you want to see the real heart of Deep Ellum, you’ll have to stand under I-345, the elevated highway that was built straight through the freedmen’s towns of North Dallas, Stringtown, and Deep Ellum, demolishing institutions like the Harlem Theatre and Gypsy Tea Room.

George W. Cook Dakkas/Texas Image Collection

Elm Street’s Tinsel Town

In 1905, a 26-year-old St. Louis transplant named Karl Hoblitzelle opened a vaudeville stage located at the corner of Commerce and St. Paul streets called the Majestic. By 1921, Hoblitzelle’s Majestic would move to Elm Street and become a movie house. It joined a glut of theaters popping up along Elm—spectacularly lit and ornate movie palaces with names like the Capitol, the Rialto, the Washington, and the Capri. The Queen, for example, was decked out in nude statuary and plaster reliefs depicting historical queens and boasted a “glass-and-silver screen.” By the 1940s, Elm Street boasted more movie theaters than any other street in the country save Broadway.

Hoblitzelle expanded his Interstate Amusement Company, which started as a vaudeville booking agency, into a movie theater and distribution powerhouse, introducing innovations like air conditioning. He also became a leading civic figure, serving on numerous philanthropic boards and helping to establish the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. As for the theaters, sadly, only his Majestic has survived.

Dallas Was on Ray Charles’ Mind

When asked why he moved to Dallas in 1955, Ray Charles said he wanted to settle down with his new family and live in a central location that accommodated his heavy touring schedule. But Dallas in the mid-1950s was also a hotbed of R&B music. It was in South Dallas, while living in a small bungalow on Eugene Street, that Charles began to hone his sound, playing venues like the Empire Room and the Powell Hotel, which anchored the African-American entertainment scene in a harshly segregated city.

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The Sounds of Two Cities

Strictly enforced Jim Crow laws ensured the emergence of two distinct cultural worlds. In the 1930s, D.F. Powell opened the elegant brick Powell Hotel at 3115 State St. It was the first African-American-owned hotel in Dallas and one of the few places African-Americans could stay. Joe Louis, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Fats Waller all stayed there. William Sidney Pittman, who designed Knights of Pythias Hall in Deep Ellum, lived there until his death in 1958.

In 1942, the Rose Ballroom opened nearby at the corner of Hall and Ross, when Central Expressway did not yet subdivide the neighborhood. Blues guitarist Freddie King’s daughter Wanda called the small venue “simply a little black club, a joint,” but it hosted a who’s who of local and touring talent: T-Bone Walker, Big Joe Turner, Pee Wee Crayton, Henry Franklin “Buster” Smith, Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, and more. Operating until 1975, it was known intermittently as the Rose Room, Empire Room, and Ascot Room. When white audiences wanted to see acts at the club, they would have to wait for “whites-only nights,” since mixing the races would have only invited a police raid.

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Dallas’ Other Blues Legend

Zuzu Bollin was lost, found, and now he’s lost again. The bluesman, who grew up in Frisco next door to a juke joint, recorded two 78s in the 1950s, including the jump blues classic “Why Don’t You Eat Where You Slept Last Night” (featuring future Ray Charles sideman David “Fathead” Newman on sax). But the rise of rock and roll slowed his career and the merger of the black musicians’ union with the all-white Local 147 all but killed it. He spent the ’60s, ’70s, and most of the ’80s broke and in obscurity, until Chuck Nevitt, founder of the Dallas Blues Society, found him and released Zuzu Bollin: Texas Bluesman, in 1989. Bollin was able to tour Europe and play Holland’s big-deal Blues Estafette before he died of cancer in 1990. His name has faded away again since then, overshadowed by T-Bone Walker and Blind Lemon Jefferson. But he deserves mention in their company.

Dallas Public Library

The Granddaddy of Dallas Gentlemen’s Clubs

C.A. “Pappy” Dolsen opened his first club, La Boheme, in 1924. In the 1930s, he went into business with notorious gambler and bootlegger Benny Binion. It was after the war, however, when Pappy opened the grande dame of Dallas burlesque joints, Pappy’s Showland, which was located on the other side of the Commerce Street Bridge in West Dallas.

It was not enough to call Pappy’s Showland a strip club. Burlesque dancers shared the stage with singers, tap dancers, boxers, full orchestras, and some of the most popular entertainers of the day. Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra played Pappy’s, as did Bob Hope. And Pappy’s deep connections with politicians—and the local underworld—enabled him to stay open long past when liquor laws allowed. But that all came to an end when Oak Cliff and West Dallas banned alcohol sales in the mid-1950s. Pappy’s Showland closed up shop.

That didn’t stop its namesake. The charismatic showman, who once called Jack Ruby a “double-crosser” and boasted to Texas Monthly that he could tell how much a dancer would make after watching her for one minute, continued to manage dancers well into the 1970s. He chewed cigars with his tobacco-stained teeth and kept track of his talent in a little black book, booking strippers at four clubs and operating out of a little bungalow near Dallas Love Field.

The King of Small Time

National Archives, JFK

Before his date with Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby lorded over a considerable subsection of Dallas nightlife. He owned the Vegas Club on Oak Lawn Avenue, Hernando’s Hideaway on Greenville Avenue, the Silver Spur on Ervay Street in the Cedars, and Bob Wills’ Ranch House, which was later renamed the Longhorn Ballroom. The center of his small empire was the Carousel Club, which served up strippers, champagne, and pizza, and was located adjacent to Abe Weinstein’s Colony Club on Commerce Street, across from the Adolphus Hotel.

All these stages gave Ruby considerable influence over the careers of musicians who passed through his clubs. David “Fathead” Newman—Ray Charles’ saxophone player and a regular performer at the Vegas Club and Silver Spur—said Ruby wouldn’t allow African-American musicians to look at his white female dancers. Bluesman Zuzu Bollin said a spat with Ruby over booking fees resulted in the club owner pulling Bollin’s records off local radio. But there was one performer Ruby couldn’t nab. After headlining the Big D Jamboree at the Sportatorium, a twentysomething Elvis Presley opted to play an afterparty at the Round-Up, another Cedars club just up the block from Ruby’s Silver Spur.