In June of 1937, a young African American blues musician named Robert Johnson came to Dallas for a pair of recording sessions. Today, this man is widely regarded as one of the greatest blues musicians in history. When Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones first heard Johnson’s records, he thought he was hearing two guitar players, and it took him a while to realize it was one guy doing it all by himself. Of Robert Johnson, Eric Clapton said, “His music is like my oldest friend, always in the back of my head, and on the horizon. It is the finest music I have ever heard. I have always trusted its purity, and I always will.”
While his legacy is evident, Johnson is otherwise a famously enigmatic historical figure. There are few solid facts that are known about him today – we know that he was from Mississippi; that he recorded his songs in San Antonio and Dallas; that he died tragically at a young age; and then of course, the music that he left behind. At the time of his visit to Dallas, he had a minor regional hit, Terraplane Blues, which was recorded in San Antonio in late 1936, and sold approximately 5,000 copies.
It’s a known fact that Johnson’s recording sessions in Dallas took place at 508 Park Avenue on June 19 and 20, 1937. Being from Dallas, I am curious about what he might have encountered when he was here. Because you see, in 1937, Dallas was a city on the upswing, as dynamic as any other in the country.
Pause for a moment to consider the date of June 19 – which in Texas, is Juneteenth, the annual celebration of African American emancipation. This wasn’t just any Juneteenth; in 1937, the celebration fell on a Saturday, during the run of the Pan American Exposition at Fair Park.
The Pan American Exposition was a multi-month event, featuring exhibits and shows from participants spanning the Americas. Director General Frank L. McNeny proclaimed, “The Pan American Exposition is an international fair. It is non-political, non-sectarian and non-racial.” He assured African Americans that they were welcome to attend any day during the entire run of the Exposition.
To celebrate Emancipation Day, a number of special events were planned in Fair Park and across the city. Renowned tap dancer, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, was the headliner in Fair Park. During the afternoon, free shows, parades and an Emancipation Day address were staged in front of the Hall of State. Following that evening was a show by Bojangles at the Band Shell, and then a Cabaret & Dance at the Live Stock Arena. All events were free with the exception of the Cabaret & Dance, which included an admission charge of 50 cents.
The Daily Times Herald proclaimed that the events of the day would precipitate the largest movement of African Americans ever staged in the United States. Special trains were chartered to carry passengers to the festival in Dallas; the Texas & Pacific from Shreveport and Texarkana; the Southern Pacific out of Houston, Beaumont and Ennis; and the Katy out of Austin, Temple and Waco. Also reported by the Times Herald, throngs of African Americans attended the celebration, and by Noon on June 19, the Fair Grounds had been turned in to a “veritable Harlem, with gaiety, laughter and music.” An estimated 50,000 African Americans came to Dallas via rail for the celebrations.
During that weekend, nightclubs and house parties in old North Dallas and Deep Ellum were undoubtedly bustling as well. Robert Johnson was an accomplished travelling musician – he knew how to land gigs and make money when he was on the road. Later interviews with some of Johnson’s acquaintances indicate that he had a magnetic presence when performing, a loud singing voice and could readily vary his repertoire to the audience’s preferences. Johnson’s friend, Johnny Shines, was quoted in Elijah Wald’s book, Escaping the Delta, as saying, “He did anything he heard over the radio. When I say anything, I mean anything – popular songs, ballads, blues, anything. It didn’t make him no difference what it was. If he liked it, he did it.” Although evidence that he performed or participated in events while in town continues to elude us, Johnson certainly had opportunities and time on his hands - he only recorded 3 songs on June 19.
Three Emancipation Day parades were also staged in different areas of the city, each of which funneled in to area parks for picnics and speeches. The first parade of the day started at the corner of Good Latimer and Gaston Avenue and ran up to Griggs Park. Board Director of the National NAACP, Richard D. Evans of Waco, delivered an address at Griggs Park, where he said, “He who would be free must make a contribution to the cost of freedom.”
The parade to Griggs Park was routed along the eastern edge of today’s Arts District, where one solid fact about Robert Johnson has arisen. The local African American newspaper from that era, the Dallas Express, published a Society and Clubs section on a weekly basis, which included notes from the Moorland YMCA on Flora Street. The Express routinely listed the names of people who stayed at the Moorland during the prior week. In the June 26 issue, Johnson is listed among the names who lodged at the Moorland during the Emancipation Day celebration.
When it opened in 1930, the Moorland YMCA instantly became a hub of African American life in Dallas. In an era when visitor lodging was difficult to find for African Americans, the Moorland was a tightly-packaged, multi-use facility that was equipped with 37 sleeping rooms, and a total of 52 beds. Fortunately, the Moorland survived the wrecking ball on the outer edge of the Dallas Arts District, and today houses the renowned Dallas Black Dance Theatre.
The Express article lists Johnson as “Robt. Johnson, Robinsville.” Actually, Johnson was from Robinsonville, Mississippi. Could the alternate spelling of Robinsonville mean that this is a different Robert Johnson? Almost certainly, no. Week over week, misspelled words were very common in these listings, and there is no obvious occurrence of a city or town with the exact spelling of “Robinsville” across the United States. Even more convincing is that within the same guest listing, another person staying at the Moorland during that week was Harold Holiday of Sugarland. Harold Holiday, whose stage name was Black Boy Shine, was a barrelhouse pianist and vocalist, who was also brought in during that week for his own recording sessions at 508 Park Avenue.
When you think about it, that Johnson was staying at the Moorland YMCA actually makes sense. And while there, he wasn’t only in midst of Emancipation Day celebrations; he was also in direct proximity of a milestone event in Texas civil rights history, when the Moorland hosted a conference of NAACP branches on June 18 and 19.
Prior to this event, the NAACP in Texas was not organized at a statewide level, but rather consisted of dispersed local branches in cities and towns across the state. The purpose of the conference was to “attack statewide problems from statewide angles.” At this conference in Dallas, a permanent organization of Texas branches of the NAACP was formed, with Attorney Richard D. Evans of Waco elected as President, A. Maceo Smith of Dallas as Secretary, and Mrs. P.R. Lubin of Houston as Treasurer.
The newly-formed Texas NAACP conference produced a slate of resolutions, including calls for the full and free exercising of voting rights in public elections, creation of a State University for African Americans and passage of a scholarship bill. Of particular note was a hot civil rights topic of that era, a resolution supporting passage of the Wagner-Van Nuys Anti-lynching Bill in the U.S. Senate.
In April of 1937, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Gavagan Anti-lynching Bill by a wide margin, after public opinion had finally turned against the practice of mob lynchings. In a follow-up to that, the Wagner-Van Nuys bill in the U.S. Senate was shamefully filibustered during late 1937 and early 1938, ultimately killing the entire legislative effort. In a futile effort to defeat the filibuster, Eleanor Roosevelt famously sat in silent protest in the Senate gallery. In 2005, the U.S. Senate formally issued an apology for this indefensible failure to act and save lives.
During his visit to Dallas, Johnson was in close proximity to many civil rights legends of that era, including A. Maceo Smith, Roscoe Dunjee, Maynard Jackson Sr., Cliff Richardson and probably both Juanita Craft and Juanita Jackson Mitchell. The aforementioned Richard Evans, who also lodged at the Moorland alongside Johnson, was one of the first African American members of the National Bar Association. In 1924, he argued the case of Love v. Griffith before the U.S. Supreme Court, a case that sought to eliminate all-white electoral primaries.
Meanwhile, at 508 Park Avenue, the legendary producer who oversaw the Johnson recording sessions, Donald F. Law, recalled that these were hot summer days, and the studio space was unairconditioned. While the windows were closed to reduce street noise, fans were blowing over ice to keep the heat in check. Many of the men worked through the sessions shirtless.
Johnson’s songs recorded in Dallas were covered by many artists, including The Rolling Stones (Love in Vain), Led Zeppelin (Travelling Riverside Blues), Eric Clapton (Stones In My Passway), Cream (From Four Until Late) and Fleetwood Mac (Hellhound On My Trail). I can only imagine that Johnson would be stunned that decades after his death, his songs would continue to deeply affect people, and live on in the music of others.
That said, the thing about music is that when you listen to it, you tend to judge it at face value, according to your own musical preferences. If your ears are tuned to modern music, you may not be able to go back many decades in to the past and appreciate Johnson’s music. The first trick to understanding what was going on is to not judge music you hear because it’s old or strays outside of your own musical preferences. During those years, there was a definite connective tissue between developing genres of music in and around Dallas. If you are willing to listen to music more broadly and allow your imagination to drift back to the era in which it was created, you can hear the influences bouncing back and forth as the music progresses - along with the culture.
Culture develops when a person in a community picks up a new trick from another person and evolves it. People begin competing to either make it better or are off in a dash to popularize it. Just when everything stabilizes, another person comes up with something new and the cycle starts again. Rinse and repeat. It’s an instinctive concept that applies to all aspects of human cultural development, especially music.
As great as Robert Johnson’s legacy became, his legend also tends to overshadow the broader cultural significance of 508 Park Avenue. Mentions of Johnson’s visit to Dallas often include an incidental comment that his recording sessions were scheduled alongside unnamed western swing bands. We should call out those names – on June 19, the Crystal Springs Ramblers also recorded at 508 Park, and on June 20, it was the Light Crust Doughboys. Since this is a story about the Dallas that Johnson bumped in to, let’s talk about western swing.
If all you know about western swing are some of the woefully passé cowboy outfits and Bob Wills’ famed, falsetto “ah-ha’s,” then you might take a deeper look. If you like mash-ups, if you appreciated the decades-long waves of experimentation in rock & roll music and beyond, western swing was the pre-historic 1930s version of all that - an “in-between” genre of music that blended elements of country, jazz and blues. Within the catalog of western swing music, there’s a wide range of musical styles, sometimes jazzy, other times bluesy, which included some ground-breaking new sounds.
The basic progression of western swing was that country string bands incorporated blues music in to their repertoires. Then, as jazz and swing ascended to become the most popular music of the day, western swing bands also incorporated horns. As horns came in to the picture, it became necessary to find a way to make the guitar louder – leading to electrification of the guitar.
People also began to realize that electrified guitars had the tonal range and versatility of a horn. Many of the earliest innovators of the electrified guitar also recorded in sessions at 508 Park Avenue, including Bob Dunn, Zeke Campbell, Leon McAuliffe, Eldon Shamblin, Bill Boyd, Jim Boyd and Julian Akins. Local radio stations saturated the airwaves with these new sounds. And most assuredly, other musicians were listening.
What followed was that western swing became a style of music that musicians outside the genre reacted to. Ernest Tubb famously added the electric guitar when he recorded Walking the Floor Over You in downtown Dallas because he needed his records to be louder; it was the only way to compete against the western swing records that were prevalent in dance hall jukeboxes. From that, honky tonk music was born.
Western swing was a style of music that flared up and all but disappeared by the time rock & roll came along. But, among other impacts, the electric guitar became a thing – and eventually, a really big thing. This has always been a region of guitar greats, including the first giants of the electric guitar, T-Bone Walker and Charlie Christian, who blazed the path for everyone else who followed.
The region around Dallas was propelled by a particular cultural mixture that existed in no other place– Southern, Western, Midwestern, Latin, German & Czech. Music that was previously elemental among distinct ethnic groups began to cross-pollinate, largely through the phenomena of broadcast radio, phonograph records and the jukebox.
The Mississippi Delta was famous for the blues, New Orleans for jazz. But within Texas, while populations remained geographically segregated, music seemed to defy inter-cultural barriers before it happened in many other places. Add to that the exceptional individual musical talent of artists from North Texas, which together yielded an astonishing range of musical firsts across all genres of American music. Story after story illustrates that it wasn’t just blues, or country, or western swing – it was tapestry of it all.
It was a guy named Robert Johnson, whose singular legacy ultimately prevented the demolition of 508 Park Avenue. We are fortunate that Johnson came through town to record his music, and that Dallas became part of his story. But there are many more stories to tell.
Dallas has an unfortunate history of ignoring its own sons’ and daughters’ cultural contributions to this world. We don’t know about it, we don’t understand its significance, we dismiss it, we fail to nurture it. Music not only represents one of our region’s greatest cultural exports, it also formed essential local connections – between peoples; between Dallas and its surrounding region; and like strands of evolving DNA over time, between generations. This is where Dallas can find a bit of its authentic soul, and those of us living here today should know about it and celebrate it.
In Robert Johnson’s Dallas, all rail lines, interurbans and roads led to Dallas, the shining capital city of this musically gifted region. And what was wrought by that music did indeed change the world.
By Larry W. Taylor ©2018. All rights reserved.
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