History of Deep Ellum

The blues emerged in the 1890s to express the hardships of newly freed Black Americans. With the growth of the nascent recording industry in the 1920s, blues musicians from around the South flocked to Deep Ellum hoping to be discovered. In Deep Ellum, downhome blues during this period was performed largely by men informally and on the street. The Ella B. Moore Theater on North Central Avenue presented some of the greatest female blues artists of the day.

The emergence of jazz paralleled the growth of blues in Deep Ellum. While early jazz musicians may have come from East Texas, others were from New Orleans and other areas of the African American diaspora in the South.

African American religious music had a profound interaction with the development of blues, jazz, and popular music, from rhythm & blues and rock ‘n’ roll to doo woo, soul, rap, and hip hop. Deep Ellum’s greatest exponents of what has been called “holy blues” were Blind Willie Johnson, Washington Phillips, and Arizona Dranes.

The distinctive sound of Western swing derives from the cross-fertilization of White and Black musical traditions and reflects the influence of popular culture, including Mexican American norteño and Czech and Bohemian polka.

From its beginnings as a railroad crossing in the 1870s to today, Deep Ellum has been an incubator for business and commerce, from the City Hotel, opened in 1892 at 2528 Elm Street, to The Pittman Hotel, opened in 2020 at 2551 Elm Street. With the elevation of North Central Expressway, the 2400 and 2300 blocks of Elm Street were razed. Since 2015, there has been tremendous commercial, office, and residential growth.

For more than a century, Deep Ellum has been a center of creative activity, attracting the attention of artists, writers, musicians, restaurateurs, designers, architects, among others. The 1920s and 1930s are generally considered the first heyday of Deep Ellum. With the onslaught of the Great Depression and in the aftermath of World War II, the cultural life of Deep Ellum declined. In the 1980s and 1990s, Deep Ellum transformed with the opening of music venues, galleries, and theaters that continues today.