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Out There I Have to Smile

Illustration by Ashanti Fortson

Heather Lanier | Longreads | March 2021 | 16 minutes (4,473 words)

 
A few years ago on a gorgeous June day, I found myself in a windowless bathroom with forget-me-not wallpaper, my butt on a toilet, without any good reason to be there. It was a standard mothering move. Beyond the door, I could hear my two small kids laughing and eating cereal, so I stayed in this little space, smartphone in hand. In an hour, I was headed to a bowling alley with my kids, both of whom could now walk through a doorway on their own. And this was a brilliant new development, not just for the 2-year-old who’d learned to walk at the standard age, but for the 4-year-old, Fiona, who’d spent the past three and a half years in physical therapy striving toward this lofty goal. Forty-five percent of people with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome walk, said the report when I first got her diagnosis. Her ability to walk meant I no longer had to consider wheelchair or stroller accessibility. Her ability to walk independently meant she could navigate the tight turns around a bowling ball return without having to steer a clunky walker. So I was taking my kids bowling, as soon as I stopped pretend-peeing and reading on my phone.

I was reading a friend’s blog post about a recent appointment with her counselor. As soon as she mentioned her son, who has the same chromosomal syndrome as my daughter, she began to cry. 

The therapist asked, “Why do you always cry when you talk about him in here?” 

In here was the therapist’s office, maybe a subdued room with sage walls and elephant statuettes. Out there, my friend pushed her 4-year-old son in a wheelchair. 

My friend looked up at the ceiling a moment and thought. Why do I always cry when I talk about him in here? The answer hit her, and she sobbed. She managed this sentence, eked out between heaving breaths: “Because … out there … when I’m talking … about him … I have to smile.”

I put my hand over my mouth. The windowless bathroom. The forget-me-not wallpaper. I burst into tears. 

* * *

For bodies that don’t fit into a certain mold, for bodies we call disabled, out there can be a treacherous space. Out there has steps where you need a ramp. Out there has strobe lighting that could make you seize. Out there writes stories over your body (she’s sad, broken, wrong) when you just need toilet paper. 

For parents of kids with disabled bodies, out there can be exhausting. It maintains chipper myths about babies that your child breaks. What’s with that feeding tube? It tosses questions at your feet like it’s throwing you something between flowers and rotten fruit. Why’s she so small? What happened? What’s wrong? You answer with a smile, or you answer with fatigue, or you turn your head because none of your business

Out there is risky. Your son might sit in a classroom led by a teacher who doesn’t believe he can learn. Or your daughter might need medical care from a doctor who thinks she’s a tragedy. 

Out there is inconvenient. The doorway isn’t wide enough for your adaptive stroller. The wood chips of the town’s only playground are terrible for wheelchairs. The librarian concludes public story time with a craft that requires scissors, and you must now serve as your child’s occupational therapist, back hunched, palms sweaty, enabling the arduous work of cutting paper.

Out there is not exactly designed for your kind. 

* I use both person-first and identity-first language in this essay. As a nondisabled person, I don’t have a right to claim an identity for someone, so I err on the side of identity-first language until I know a person’s preference — and my daughter hasn’t indicated one. I also use identity-first language to stand with disability activists who argue that linguistic acrobatics to avoid the word “disabled” are a manifestation of our culture’s ableism. We do not say, for instance, “I am a person with femaleness.” #saytheword

As a white, straight, cisgender, non-disabled woman, I must imagine how this sentiment holds true for other bodies. My experience as a caregiver to a kid with disabilities* has put me in the closest relationship to this truth. Out there is not designed for many. 

Which is why in here spaces are so delightful. And it’s why, especially in early parenting, I often lingered in them for longer than I needed. Idling in the bathroom. Struggling to leave the house. In here applies little pressure. In here asks no questions. In here often lets you and your kin be as you are.

In preschool, my daughter Fiona walked stiltedly. Her gait was not the smooth coordination of typical preschoolers. She slapped her right foot down, and her left foot followed pigeon-toed, afterthought more than intention. She sometimes held her arms out, and because she was nonverbal, she said, “Ahh, ahh,” plowing toward whatever caught her eye. When we were out there, people sometimes looked at her because she was adorable and magnetic and thrilled by life. And sometimes people followed her with a calibrating gaze. I could tell that they weren’t admiring the cuteness of youth but instead trying to answer the question, What’s wrong? 

“You’re lucky,” a pediatrician said to me during a routine checkup. “At least you know what’s wrong. Some parents don’t even know that.” He looked up from my kid, his eyes sharp with intensity, and nodded. “You know what I mean?” But it wasn’t a question. 

Nothing is wrong with my girl, I wanted to say.

No, of course not, the doctor might have corrected. Inside he’d likely think, Yes, of course there’s something wrong, and then he’d recite the long list of diagnoses in her medical file: epilepsy, hypotonia, hydronephrosis, scoliosis, developmental delay….

Things her medical file has never listed: loves coloring, loves cheese, rocks a Converse sneaker, appreciates jalapeños, finds the beat, will increase speed tenfold for a turn at the swing.

Wrong can slide too quickly into another concept: tragic. There’s a prevalent Hollywood cliché (which bears no resemblance to real-life statistics) that disabled people wish to die. I didn’t need a child with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome to spot this cliché; I’d noticed it years before I had Fiona. Million Dollar Baby: a female boxer triumphs in fight after fight only to break her neck, end up quadriplegic, and ask her coach to help her kill herself; he obliges. Me Before You: a grumpy guy in a wheelchair is hell-bent on committing suicide, then falls in love with his caregiver who tries to show him that life is worth living. He kills himself anyway, because, well, you know, wheelchairs. The films are dramatic expressions of the old, ableist assertion that I’d rather die than live like that. 

What I didn’t realize until having Fiona is that if a person is intellectually disabled, a parent’s feelings often become a barometer for their kid’s worth. What my friend and I have known, without ever knowing we’ve known, is that our culture judges the worth of our kids by judging our contentment. I hadn’t named this until I sat in the bathroom and read my friend’s blog post on my phone, but along with all the obstacles to surmount or circumnavigate or abandon, out there obliges us to offer our cheer. Are we happy? If so, then maybe the lives of our children aren’t tragic. Out there I have to smile. 

* * *

In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman tells the story of Hmong child Lia Lee, who has severe epilepsy. It’s a highly lauded book, and for good reason. But midway through, Lia suffers a massive seizure, nearly two hours long, and goes from a happy, hyperactive child to a  mostly unresponsive quadriplegic. “Vegetative state,” the doctors said, and I cringed, eager for Fadiman to take the phrase to task. Because Fadiman had thus far done a beautiful job revealing the cultural biases of both the Hmong family and their Western doctors, I figured she’d unveil the ableism inherent in ever likening a human to a carrot or a beet. I thought of Martin Pistorius, who spent 12 years in an unmoving body that doctors assumed was also “as good as not there, a vegetable,” but as he says years later in his TED talk, “I was aware of everything.” 

Fadiman fails here. She doubles down on the doctors’ sentiment, offering this description of patients in so-called “vegetative states”: “pasty-skinned carcasses with slack mouths, hair like straw, bodies that smelled of urine even after they were bathed.” Carcasses. The word cuts. It describes shells in which humans once lived. It should not be used to describe actual humans, still living. Fadiman agrees with the family when they think Lia’s soul is gone.

At this point in the story, Fadiman pivots to the mother, oh the mother, and how she adapts to her child’s altered life. Fadiman paints some beautiful portraits. The mother lovingly washes her daughter once or twice a day. The mother wears her daughter in a hand-embroidered cloth carrier. The mother feeds her daughter spoonful after spoonful of rice and then kisses her rice-covered face. “Sometimes I thought: this is not so terrible,” writes Fadiman. Mid-page, I thought Fadiman might lean toward valuing Lia’s new, altered life. Admittedly, she’d do so through the trope of Lia’s gifts to nondisabled people. Look at how much love she brings her family. But gift is certainly better than carcass. 

Instead, Fadiman pivots: “But whenever I began to be lulled by this relatively rosy picture, I was drawn up short by an explosion of rage from [the father] or, more frequently, by a sudden seepage of grief from [the mother].” The parents’ feelings tip the scales. Fadiman can’t see the value of Lia’s life if it brings not just love but suffering, if caring for Lia is not just a tender and physical act of love, but also a grief-stricken, arduous job.

Out there we all have to smile. 

* * *

Happiness is an encouraged performance in America whether you’re disabled or not. By analyzing photographs, Stanford psychology professor Jeanne Tsai found that U.S. leaders are over six times more likely to display “open, toothy smiles” than Chinese leaders. This same smile, what Tsai calls “the sign of American happiness,” also appears more frequently in American children’s stories and women’s magazines than in East Asian counterparts. “A lot of immigrants have talked to me about how exhausting it is being in the United States,” she told NPR reporter Maiken Scott of The Pulse, “because you have to smile all the time.” 

But the stakes of that performance are higher for disabled people and their caregivers. Princeton ethicist Peter Singer has kept his job even after arguing that parents of disabled babies should have the right to kill their kids. Because people with disabilities cause too much suffering, he says. 

The birth of a child is usually a happy event for the parents. …  It is different when the infant is born with a serious disability. Birth abnormalities … turn the normally joyful event of birth into a threat to the happiness of the parents and of any other children they may have.

Parents may, with good reason, regret that a disabled child was ever born. In those circumstances, the effect that the death of the child will have on its parents can be a reason for, rather than against, killing it.

Singer, whose book Practical Ethics is in its third edition, at one point suggests that his argument about murdering babies applies to disabilities that make a child’s life “so bleak” that it’s “not worth living.” (How would anyone determine a life “not worth living”? And who gets to decide such a thing?) But then he argues that hemophiliacs too could be justifiably killed in infancy because a woman will only have so many children, and the hemophiliac child might prevent her from having another, healthier baby. “It is … plausible to suppose that the prospects of a happy life are better for a normal child” than for a hemophiliac, he writes. 

I think of my college roommate, a gregarious extroverted gay man who competitively roller skated and also had hemophilia. While he blasted Latin pop through our kitchen and danced with joie de vivre and sang into a spatula, I, the “normal” non-hemophiliac person, brooded in my room to the tune of melancholy female artists like Tori Amos, while writing poems about romantic angst. Certainly, disability doesn’t determine happiness. 

What I didn’t realize until having Fiona is that if a person is intellectually disabled, a parent’s feelings often become a barometer for their kid’s worth.

But the bigger issue is this: Why should a person’s happiness — or lack thereof — be used in proving their right to live? And it’s not just Singer who delivers this message. Here’s disabled writer Nancy Mairs on the subject, from “On Being a Cripple”: “In our society, anyone who deviates from the norm had better find some way to compensate. Like fat people, who are expected to be jolly, cripples must bear their lot meekly and cheerfully. A grumpy cripple isn’t playing by the rules. Early on I vowed that, if I had to have MS, by God I was going to do it well. This is a class act, ladies and gentlemen. No tears, no recriminations, no faint-heartedness.” 

You’ll hear parents of kids with disabilities negotiate this pressure to be happy all the time when they describe their children. “He has Down syndrome, and he’s nonverbal,” a father will say, “but he’s happy!” Or a mother will say, “She has cerebral palsy, and she doesn’t walk, but she’s brought us so much joy!” We can’t fault the parents. They add this caveat of happiness because they know it carries necessary currency. 

But this can be exhausting. It turns happiness into a rhetorical strategy, and makes the faces of disabled people and their caregivers a walking argument that should never have to exist in the first place. 


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* * *

During Fiona’s second year, I started a blog called Star in Her Eye. I wrote it because my child’s eyes were bursting with divine luminescence, and yet an unsmiling pediatrician called her a “bad seed.” I wrote the blog because parents at playdates were talking about babyproofing their outlets, and I was talking about the interesting sculptures at the cardiac unit of the children’s hospital. I wrote it because my girl was coming up with ingenious ways to communicate despite her verbal limitations, and yet because she didn’t babble, an early interventionist declared her “at zero.” I was in a very different field of parenting than the baby books described, and I needed to find my people. I also needed to write about ableism — how I was encountering it, how I was exhuming it from myself. A deep and abiding ethics guided my decisions about what to write and how, but I always wore the weight of my words. Tell too much of a certain kind of a truth, and I could risk further deepening the pervasive story that kids like mine were the B word: burden. 

In December 2015, three years into the blog, the disability-themed online venue The Mighty published a satirical article called “Introducing: Meltdown Bingo.” In it, an autistic parent of an autistic child used a bingo card meme to make light of her son’s meltdowns. Readers were rightfully outraged, blasting the article for objectifying a kid’s suffering. (It was eventually taken down.) Critics also noted The Mighty’s slant toward publishing, as blogger Savannah Logsdon-Breakstone put it, “warrior mommy blogger content … focused on bemoaning how hard it is to parent a child with a disability. … This is a dangerous narrative.”  

The outrage fueled important conversations about disability representation (#CrippingTheMighty). But articles also popped up admonishing parents for writing about their kids at all. In an article published soon after, the advocacy website Ollibean suggested that parents should not write about their children if they aren’t able to offer consent, a principle that would eradicate the stories of certain intellectually disabled people, pushing them and their caregivers — disproportionately women — to the unwritten, invisible margins. During the years that I wrote the blog, Fiona could not offer me consent, and one of the things I often wrote about was our very efforts to help her communicate so she could loudly disagree with me. But that took time — many years with therapists and a speech device.

The challenges of parenting a disabled child — “the prejudice and ableism, fighting systems for an equal education, equal and accessible medical care, accessibility, insurance coverage for a new wheelchair or communication device,” the Ollibean article noted — are injustices built into a system that needs to change. This is 100% true. But the quote fell under the subheading, “It’s Not Your Disabled Child, It’s the System.” In other words, parenting a kid with disabilities isn’t ever hard because of the inherent difficulties of a disability. 

It was not hard, for instance, taking my infant daughter to a swallow study (to make sure she wasn’t dying from her own spit) and two kidney reflux exams (to make sure these vital organs weren’t at immediate risk of failure). It was not hard spending four years helping her learn to walk, or three years helping her tiny, fine-motor-limited fingers navigate a robust communication device so she could tell us what she wanted to eat. Likewise, it was not hard when my husband and I hovered over her body as she jerked in convulsions, her eyes pried open by erratic brain synapses, and it was not hard to check the clock while we did this. More than five minutes, and a seizure can cause brain damage. 

Of course it was hard. Or, it was not hard because hard is the word we use to describe cellophane-wrapped candy, while this is blade-sharp, a knife slicing through the gut. 

But if we can’t say it was hard, then how can we affect any change that would help people in power understand what kind of support we might need?

And yet, if I do say it was hard, then I am fueling, as Logsdon-Breakstone put it, “a dangerous narrative.” I’m risking the chance that people will see my kid, my glorious beautiful curly-haired feisty stubborn rascal of a kid, and think, That mom’s unhappy; that kid’s life is tragic

Tell too much of a certain kind of a truth, and I could risk further deepening the pervasive story that kids like mine were the B word: burden.

My facial expressions out there are territory over which ideologies are fighting. My emotions out there have rhetorical power. And I will use everything I have to argue that my kid’s life has equal value to anyone else’s.

So I’ve smiled. Especially in those early years, I smiled at the nurse who called my kid’s name in the waiting room. I smiled as she led us to a room for X-rays. How cute, she said to my 38-inch 5-year-old in purple hospital jammies. I smiled after I unfolded Fiona’s walker with a loud click at the library, eliciting stares, and I smiled while the teacher talked me through Fiona’s low report card scores. 

It wasn’t a conscious thing, the smiling, until I read my friend’s story while sitting in the forget-me-not-wallpapered bathroom. But when happiness becomes a rhetorical move, it’s a lot less fun than regular happiness. “The freedom to be happy,” writes Sara Ahmed in The Promise of Happiness, “restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy.”

* * *

In “Special Olympics and the Burden of Happiness,” Lawrence Downes of the New York Times argues that Special Olympics doesn’t give itself the freedom to be unhappy either. Downes describes the hours-long medal ceremony at the 2015 World Games as a “cascade of triumphant moments” and a “carefully thought-out strategy” where music swells and the crowd cheers as athletes receive their awards. According to Downes, the organization intentionally uses joy as a rhetorical strategy to advocate for the healthcare, education, and other rights of people with intellectual disabilities. The article acknowledges the global plight of people with intellectual disabilities, many of whom are denied an education, sequestered in institutions, and suffer abuse and neglect. If Special Olympics is trying for a revolution of sorts, “its revolution is televised, happily,” writes Downes, “on ESPN.”

But Downes subtly critiques the efficacy of this strategy, calling Special Olympics “an organization so good at making its athletes and the public happy, so bursting with good will and smiles, that nobody has to take it seriously. It has waged a nearly 50-year battle for inclusion and acceptance for people with intellectual disabilities, and people still think it’s a track meet.”

In March 2009, President Obama told Jay Leno of The Tonight Show about his recent bowling score of 129. “It was like Special Olympics or something,” he said with a laugh. Before the show even aired, he was on the phone, apologizing to chairman Timothy Shriver. According to Shriver, Obama invited the athletes to the White House to school him in the sport and “help him improve his score.” If the silence in news reports is any indication, the match never happened.

* * *

Our bowling match did happen. I eventually wiped my tears and left the in here space of the forget-me-not bathroom. I drove my kids to the bowling alley, parked the car in a blue-painted spot, and hung the handicapped placard on the rearview mirror. One by one, I hauled my kids out of their car seats. I held their hands as we crossed the parking lot. I opened the glass door for them, and in they walked. Right through the door.

When we got into the lobby, my heart sank: The lanes about 50 meters ahead were dark like a nightclub. Red and blue and yellow laser beams flashed across the floor, the ball returns, the scoreboards, and the seats. Pop music blasted from above.

From the shoe rental desk, my friend Kristy, Fiona’s godmother, came to us with a worried expression. “I’m sorry,” she shouted over the music. “They just turned them on.”

I exhaled. Kristy had called in advance to be sure, and the guy on the other end had said no, they didn’t do laser bowling during the day. 

I paused, standing near the entrance, trying to figure out what to do. “It’s not like she’s had seizures from strobe lights before,” I said, recalling the EEG where a technician flashed a light in Fiona’s face and measured her brain waves. “It’s just … it’s a risk.” Further inside, I watched the laser lights spin around, casting erratic, broken-up rainbows. New seizure triggers can emerge without warning in people with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome.

We rented our shoes and paid for a lane. The red and blue and yellow beams swirled around us. Miley Cyrus blared. “You wanna go first?” Kristy shouted two feet from my face. Any farther and I wouldn’t have heard her. Her teeth glowed white from the blacklight. I went after Fiona, who was toddling down the lane, ready to walk its length. The bottoms of her Converse sneakers glowed. 

The place was mostly vacant. Had anyone seen us in the dark, they would have seen two adults and two kids having a leisure afternoon. They would have seen the adults center a kiddie ramp at the top of the lane and help the kids push their balls down the ramp. They would have seen the balls make their slow-rolling treks toward the pins and knock a few down. Yay! the onlookers would have heard Kristy and me say as we clapped. The kids sometimes clapped too, and sometimes turned around unfazed, heading for another spot in the darkness.

These onlookers probably wouldn’t have seen my furrowed brow, or my eyes, straining in the dark, to assess whether my daughter was having myoclonic blinks or jerks. They wouldn’t have seen me silently curse this bowling lane for turning a fun outing into a shitty, stressful event. 

Neither would they have seen Fiona seize, because — thank God — she didn’t. And they probably would not have seen me smile much, either. But if I had smiled that day, it would have glowed bright as an incandescent bulb. 

* * *

In the summer of 2020, I published a memoir, Raising a Rare Girl. How could I write a book about Fiona that avoided the trap of the “my kid’s so happy” narrative? Because it turns out, my kid is happy — often exceedingly so. Fiona, now age 9, has way more joie de vivre than me. Though not yet a swimmer, she plows her body into ocean waves and screams with delight. She yawps for joy at the mention of Kit Kats. She is really, really stoked to go for walks around the block. She and my old college roommate would get along smashingly. And yet a story that emphasizes the “look, my kid is happy!” narrative would lodge her right into the very pressure Nancy Mairs identifies: “In our society, anyone who deviates from the norm had better find some way to compensate.” 

And how could I write a book that also avoided the “my kid is so hard” narrative? Because that’s true, too.

I tried to write a book that showed my daughter’s inherent value — and our culture’s denial of it — whether she was happy or not. I ended up writing a book about what it means to be human. “This belief in the virtue of the ‘happy’ and suffering-free life sterilizes and shrinks us,” I wrote toward the end, “minimizing what makes us most beautifully human: our tenderness, our vulnerability, the profundity of our capacity for heartache, the risks of which deliver us into immense joy.” What I tried to do was show, honestly, the joy and the grief, the hard and the beautiful, and say: It all belongs. 

* * *

You ask: Am I happy? I say, sometimes less than before. Because she wakes six times a night. Because regular trips to pediatric specialists are no strolls through the park. Because special educators sometimes see her as broken, in need of fixing. Because her needs often exceed my energy. Because every time I’ve hovered above her convulsing body at night, counting the minutes, I might have gained something like courage or “life experience,” but I also felt gashed  in a bodily place that I can’t find, I can’t name. 

Because loving someone has never been so hard.

You ask: Am I happy? And I say, sometimes ten times more than before. Because her fine, blondish-brown hair brushes my cheek when we snuggle. Because her sapphire blue eyes seek out mine every day. Because at age 5, after three years of speech therapy, she at last made a hard C sound. Come, she said, and I did. Because when she was 4 and I asked which hat she wanted to wear, this one or that, she pointed and said “gamma!” (meaning “that one”) with such high-pitched glee that it felt like I held not a red wool ski cap but a lifetime supply of joy. Because the stress of a swallow study, the labor of an orthopedist’s appointment, and the fear of EEG results make the good news of a clear airway, an unchanged scoliosis curve, and an unworrying set of brain waves all the more glorious. 

Because loving someone has never been so hard.   

What I ask is that my answer doesn’t matter in determining her worth.

* * *

Heather Lanier’s memoir, Raising a Rare Girl, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Her recent essays appear in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and Off Assignment. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Rowan University. You can find her on Instagram at @heatherklanier

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Illustrator: Ashanti Fortson

Fact-checker: Nora Belblidia

Shelved: Yoko Ono

(Photo by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns — Getty Images)

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | January 2021 | 9 minutes (2,485 words)

Much is known about John Lennon’s self-described “Lost Weekend” — an 18-month separation from his wife Yoko Ono from the summer of 1973 to early 1975 — in which the former Beatle made records, produced records, drank, and took drugs to excess, and got kicked out of The Troubadour and various Los Angeles studios. Much less is known about how Ono spent her time back in New York.

In 1974, Ono recorded A Story at The Record Plant in New York. More than just another solo album, A Story was to be Ono’s first musical effort independent of her husband. Lennon produced or otherwise participated in all four of her previous recordings. Because of this, and the circumstances surrounding its creation, A Story is a statement of independence, a kind of personal manifesto. As a direct result of the couple’s reconciliation the following year, A Story was shelved at Ono’s direction. Most of its songs would resurface in later releases, sometimes in an entirely different emotional, as well as musical, context.

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Rush Drummer Neil Peart: Master Student

Neil Peart (Photo by Clayton Call/Redferns — Getty Images)

The band Rush has a huge fan base at home in Canada and around the world, but despite having a big appreciation for their musicianship, I’ve never counted myself among them. (Please don’t @ me.) In reading Brian Hiatt‘s moving Rolling Stone retrospective in which family, friends, and bandmates remember the late Neil Peart, Rush’s drummer, I learned a lot that deepened my respect for the band, and for Peart in particular. A year ago, Peart died from glioblastoma, the same form of brain cancer that took another important Canadian musician, Gord Downie.

While Peart was a prolific reader who used his tour downtime to “fill the gaps in his education,” what struck me most was the student mindset he brought to the drums, despite being widely recognized as a virtuoso.

Before band rehearsals for Rush tours, he’d practice on his own for weeks to ensure he could replicate his parts. His forearms bulged with muscle; his huge hands were calloused. But he was also the self-educated intellect behind Rush’s singularly cerebral and philosophical lyrics, and the author of numerous books, specializing in memoir intertwined with motorcycle travelogues, all of it rendered in luminous detail.

Peart took constant notes, kept journals, sent emails that were more like Victorian-era correspondence, wrote pieces for drum magazines, and posted essays and book reviews on his website. Despite ending his formal education at age 17, he never stopped working toward a lifelong goal of reading “every great book ever written.” He tended to use friends’ birthdays as an excuse to send “a whole fucking story about his own life,” as Rush singer-bassist Geddy Lee puts it, with a laugh.

In May 1994, at the Power Station recording studio in New York, Peart gathered together great rock and jazz drummers, from Steve Gadd to Matt Sorum to Max Roach, for a tribute album he was producing for the great swing drummer Buddy Rich. Peart noticed one of the players, Steve Smith, had improved strikingly since the last time he had seen him, and learned that he studied with the jazz guru Freddie Gruber. In the year of his 42nd birthday, while he was already widely considered to be the greatest rock drummer alive, Peart sought out Gruber and started taking drum lessons. “What is a master but a master student?” Peart told Rolling Stone in 2012.

He was convinced that years of playing along with sequencers for the more synth-y songs in Rush’s Eighties catalog had stiffened his drumming, and he wanted to loosen back up. (For all of his efforts and mastery, there were some areas even Neil Peart couldn’t conquer: “To be honest, I am not sure that Neil ever fully ‘got’ the jazz high-hat thing,” Peter Erskine, who took over as Peart’s teacher in the 2000s, wrote affectionately.)

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I Will Always Love You: A Dolly Parton Reading List

Dolly Parton attends the 61st Annual GRAMMY Awards at the Staples Center on February 10, 2019, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic via Getty Images)

Central Florida doesn’t do glamour. I know because I was born and raised in Lakeland, Florida, the birthplace of Publix supermarkets and where Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson, died in a nursing home. Growing up, my sister Abby and I had a never-named game where we’d see a figure skater, Vanna White, anyone, wearing a pretty dress on television, and then we’d passionately bicker over who got to have the rhinestoned, beaded, or sequined costume. We knew what glamour looked like, and we wanted it. By the time I’d graduated high school, I knew glamour in real life. I’d seen it in person three times.

My high school band competed in an annual competition up in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Each year, when the music part of the trip was over, we’d go to Dolly Parton’s dinner theater show one night, and spend a day at her theme park, Dollywood. And inside Dollywood, inside Chasing Rainbows, a museum dedicated to telling Dolly’s life story, was my pilgrimage: a collection of Dolly’s rhinestoned, beaded, and sequined costumes, more beautiful and breathtaking than anything I’d ever bickered over in the never-named game of my childhood.

Two years after high school, I moved to New York City and dug my heels into culture shock. Five years in, I got into a Dolly Parton-themed holiday party put on by a fancy New York PR firm. I glided through the night among the well-dressed and well-heeled. I sipped moonshine and peach iced tea with a party-themed name like it was mother’s milk. I danced to Kylie Minogue performing Dolly covers. And I held my head up high all night because I’d long already seen the installation in the front room, a sparkling display of Dolly’s costumes on loan from Dollywood.

I won’t say Dolly Parton changed my life. I’ve only just read her 1994 memoir “Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business,” loaned it to three people, gave it as a wedding present, and have the first and only edition in paperback and hardcover. I recently got the first Christmas album Dolly recorded with Kenny Rogers, “Once Upon A Christmas.” I’m pretty proud of that. I don’t own any Dolly T-shirts or anything like that (maybe I should), I just think she’s a gift to humanity — a living, breathing embodiment of dreams. Maybe you agree, maybe you don’t. Dolly would say, “It’s hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world.” Maybe she’s not for you, even though she’s for everyone. But, hey, don’t take my word for it.

1. “Outta That Holler” (Sarah Smarsh, Slate, October 2020)

In this excerpt from her 2020 book, “She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs,” journalist Sarah Smarsh describes Parton’s brand of implicit feminism. By harnessing the value of economic agency and sexual power to overcome the poverty that defined her childhood — born the fourth of 12 children, “wearing dresses made of feed sacks” and “dyeing her lips with iodine from the family medicine cabinet for lack of lipstick” — Parton has shaped the person she is today.

She reminds her audiences that, no matter where they came from, everyone can identify with being shamed one way or another, and no one deserves it. Never be ashamed of your home, your family, yourself, your religion, she says, and adoring crowds applaud. One need look no further than her immense LGBTQ following to know that Parton’s transformation from a slut-shamed, talented teenage bumpkin to entertainment superstar contains a universal struggle that has less to do with being Appalachian than with being human. If her presence and the appreciation it instills in people could be whittled to a phrase, it’s “be what you are.”

2. “The Grit and Glory of Dolly Parton” (Emily Lordi, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, November 2020)

The person and brand that is Dolly Parton did not just happen overnight. Emily Lordi provides an overview of Parton’s decades-long career, illustrating how it’s been furthered not by reinvention, but through the reintroduction of Parton and her music, all while Parton herself engages with the times. Lordi first interviewed Parton over the phone, then in person after providing a negative COVID-19 test.

People want her gifts, her glow, her time; and Parton, who, as she says, “loves everybody and wants everybody to love me,” is often happy to oblige. She can’t sit still anyway — and early on in the pandemic, she decided to keep working, as long as her team could do so safely. Last May, she released “When Life Is Good Again,” a song of reassurance that justifies the journalist Melinda Newman’s claim, in Billboard, that, during the coronavirus crisis, Parton seems to have appointed herself America’s “comforter in chief”: “When everything is on the mend, / I’ll even drink with my old friends, / Sing and play my mandolin … And it’s gonna be good again.”

3. “Dolly Parton Steers Her Empire Through the Pandemic — and Keeps It Growing” (Melinda Newman, Billboard, August 2020)

The daughter of an industrious sharecropper father and a musically inclined mother, Parton is a savvy businesswoman whose earliest and latest decisions in the music industry are only the core of her empire. As Melinda Newman writes, “Her legendary body of music is just the start of what makes her Dolly. …”

She sounds surprisingly giddy as she talks about the next chapter of her career as if it’s her first. “I’m touched and honored that I’m still around and that I’m able to still be important in the business,” she says. “I honestly feel like I’m just getting started. I know that sounds crazy but I really feel like I might have a big music career, record career. Who knows?”

4. “Dolly Parton on How to Be More Like Dolly Parton” (Anna Moeslein, Glamour, November 2019)

In an interview with Parton, Anna Moeslein and Parton review “Heartstrings,” a Netflix series in which each episode is based on a different Parton song. They also discuss emotions and Parton’s position on what people can do to bring “a little Dolly in their own lives,” as well as fashion and beauty.

Well, I think it’s always important for us to be allowed to be who we are, all that we are, and appreciate that. And I know being a woman in this world…I’ve always been proud that I was born a woman, and I’ve joked that if I wasn’t, I would have been a drag queen. That’s my favorite line, but it’s probably true. I love being able to express myself, and I want to be seen and appreciated for who I am. So I’ve always appreciated and loved people for who they are. Because we don’t need to all be the same.

5. “Is Dolly Parton the Voice of America?” (Rachel Riederer, The New Republic, December 2020)

Citing Jad Abumrad’s Radiolab podcast (“Dolly Parton’s America”), Parton’s Netflix series, shoutouts from Nicki Minaj and Drake, and even a history course at the University of Tennessee, Rachel Riederer discusses the latest Dolly Parton renaissance. And, given the political landscape of the U.S., Riederer wonders if there’s a place for Parton’s enduring position to sidestep politics — which Abumrad refers to as “Dollitics.”

You cannot talk about sharecropping without talking about politics, and to say more would not be her style. She was not shy about her desire to sell books or to present her life as a fairy tale, and you sell a fairy tale by focusing on the romance and adventures of the rising princess, not the conditions that made her a scullery maid.

6. “Springtime for the Confederacy” (Aisha Harris, Slate, August 2017)

When I mentioned Dolly’s “dinner theater show” above, I was intentionally vague. Despite my setup, I know Dolly is human. And humans are complicated. Dolly’s dinner show seems complicated, too, but really, it’s not. The show, known until 2018 as “Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede,” is performed before an arena split into the “North” versus the “South,” where the audience, feasting on a four-course dinner eaten without cutlery, cheers on white-washed narratives of colonization, then the Antebellum South, then a performance competition between the North and the South. As a high schooler attending the show, I sat and watched from the North side, not fully grasping how problematic the programming was. I suppose I could do what Parton did in the Billboard article above: plead “innocent ignorance.” As an adult, I know better.

The last time I saw the show was in 2006. Aisha Harris reviewed the show in 2017, after watching it the same week as Unite the Right, a white supremacist rally, descended on Charlottesville, Virginia. At the rally, a neo-Nazi intentionally drove into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing an innocent woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring others. (The president notably remarked in the aftermath that there “were very fine people, on both sides.”) Harris recorded the experience of the dinner show from start to finish, without holding back.

While the show makes zero mention of slavery, that’s not to say there were no references to the Civil War. The war was alluded to both in the overarching North-versus-South conceit and through details both subtle (the gray and blue color schemes on each side) and blatant: The racing piglets were named after Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Scarlett O’Hara. Dolly says that the show is about bringing back “those good old times,” referring to her childhood, but of course she wasn’t around during the days of Grant and Lee.

Harris wrote a follow-up to this piece after the show responded to her initial review, and again in April 2018, when the show dropped “Dixie” from its name.

7. “Living with Dolly Parton” (Jessica Wilkerson, Longreads, October 2018)

Jessica Wilkerson, who grew up in East Tennessee, where Dollywood is located, confronts the worldviews of her upbringing with those acquired as an adult after moving away from home for graduate school in New York. Weighing the socioeconomic implications of Dollywood’s hiring practices and confronting “Dolly Parton’s blinding, dazzling whiteness,” Wilkerson strikes a reluctant balance, compartmentalizing more than one version of Dolly Parton.

But the aftermath of Dollywood left me low-spirited. I was nestled into a cozy room in the log house my dad built on top of a ridge, where we lived. From the peak of that ridge, I could stand and see the Smoky Mountains, where Dolly Parton grew up and where she built a simulacrum of her mountain childhood. Hers felt more real than mine. I was sad, but jealous, too. I lived in the real world of Appalachia. A world of layaway stores and packaged foods, bleary-eyed workers and stressed-out mothers. I longed for the simulation.

Alison Fishburn is an American writer living in Paris, Ontario.

Ten Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2021

Author Kelly Link (Photo by Awakening/Getty Images)

The #longreads hashtag on Twitter is filled with great story recommendations from people around the world. Pravesh Bhardwaj is a longtime contributor — throughout the year he posts his favorite short stories, and then in January we’re lucky enough to get a list of his favorites to enjoy in the year ahead.

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Read more…

The Power of a Judith Krantz Sex Scene

Author Judith Krantz (Photo by Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty Images)

Kristin Sanders | Longreads | October 2020 | 12 minutes (2,551 words)

Decades later, the paperback edition of Spring Collection still arouses me: A tall, thin woman who is clearly a model strides across the cover, wearing a glamorous white ‘90s dress, slit open to the top of her right thigh. Her white high heels are dated, but everything else from the image, which cuts off just above her nose as if to prevent her from appearing as a real woman, is timeless in the way that images of objectified women usually are: just boobs, legs, and arms. The book has the one Judith Krantz sex scene I still remember, have always remembered, between the character Maude and a girl whose name doesn’t matter, a girl who should have been me.

I must have been in seventh or eighth grade when I found my mother’s copy on our bookshelf. It was published in 1997, so I would have been 14.

Read more…

How to Learn Everything: The MasterClass Diaries

hand with bowl with ravioli in the background
Photo credit: Jure Gasparic / EyeEm (Getty Images) and Vladimir Sukhachev (iStock / Getty Images Plus)

Irina Dumitrescu | Longreads | August 2020 | 5,406 words (21 minutes)

When I was a teenager I read James Thurber’s Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I fell in love with this story of a meek, middle-aged Connecticut man whose daydreams afford him temporary escape from a dreary shopping trip with his overbearing wife. Maybe it was because I was an incorrigible daydreamer too. Or maybe I read in his fantasies of being a fearless Navy commander, a world-famous surgeon, or a brandy-swilling bomber pilot a sense of my own opportunities in life, at that point still wide open if you left my gender out of it. Unlike Walter Mitty, I could still learn anything, be anyone.

With time I found a calling, studied for a doctorate in medieval literature, published a book only a handful of people would read, and gained a longed-for professorship. But new desires arose. I discovered I want to write books for more than five readers, and that doing so is remarkably hard. I started to feel afraid of being trapped in one role for the rest of my life. That sense of endless possibility I once had was slipping away.

One day, when MasterClass sends its millionth paid ad into my Facebook feed, I decide this is the answer to the Walter Mitty lurking inside me. MasterClass seems to offer everything: from writing seminars with over a dozen famous authors to celebrity-driven inspiration to take my hobbies further. Clearly, all I was missing were the right teachers, filmed professionally and beamed into my living room. I may not become a surgeon or a pilot, but what if the renaissance woman I’d hoped to be is just a $200 subscription away?
Read more…

The Proving Grounds: Charley Crockett and the Story of Deep Ellum

Photo credit: Bobby Cochran

Jonny Auping | Longreads | July 2020 | 32 minutes (8,734 words)

In 1912 two musicians were playing near the Union Depot on the corner of Elm Street and Central Track in a pocket of Dallas, Texas where, if you believed what the local papers wrote, you’d be wise to keep your money in your shoe. One was 24, likely playing his signature 12-string guitar. The other was 18 or 19 and blind with an acoustic guitar strapped across his imposing frame.

People passed by, some dropping change they could afford to part with. To hear the older one tell it, their music sent women running over to give them hugs and kisses. From there, they’d head a few blocks down Elm Street or Commerce, talking about women, music, and survival, the 24-year-old with the 12-string leading the blind man. They’d stop outside of local businesses, most likely pawn shops, and play. The older one would learn plenty about the blues from the blind one. Their little pocket in the middle of Dallas is known as Deep Ellum. You could walk the whole area in 15 minutes.

Around 1915 the two would part ways and never see each other again. The older one left Dallas with his 12-string. In 1918 he went to prison for murder. He spent the next 20 years in and out of incarceration and was dead by 1949. His name was Huddie Ledbetter, but he went by Lead Belly. The blind man would purportedly die in a Chicago blizzard in 1929. People called him Blind Lemon Jefferson.

In his Nobel Prize lecture, Bob Dylan credits Lead Belly’s records with getting him into folk music. George Harrison stated that without Lead Belly there would be “no Beatles.” Kurt Cobain would make similar sentiments about Nirvana. In his autobiography, Blues All Around Me, B.B. King wrote that he “flat-out tried to copy” Blind Lemon Jefferson. That line of influence traces directly through Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones.

Almost exactly 100 years later, a modern songster named Charley Crockett would stand at about that same spot playing for people’s change, though the Union Depot had been gone for over 70 years. Anyone with an ear for musical history would hear Crockett’s stories-disguised-as-songs and his blues style as an homage to men like Jefferson and Lead Belly and to a long-ago era of music, but Crockett wasn’t standing in that spot for its history. He was there for a particular kind of foot traffic; the kind where feet were attached to bodies that found street music endearing. By that point in 2014, he had survived for nearly a decade as a musician living on the streets. He’s said to be a distant relative to Davy Crockett, and he’s covered more of the United States, hitch-hiking and hopping trains, than the Texas legend ever did.

Almost exactly 100 years later, a modern songster named Charley Crockett would stand at about that same spot playing for people’s change, though the Union Depot had been gone for over 70 years.

While the journey reflected in his songs has since garnered him national acclaim and landed his music on both the Blues and Americana charts, Crockett is barely a chapter in the story of Deep Ellum. Then again, the stories of Deep Ellum tend to be written in disappearing ink. You won’t find plaques commemorating Blind Lemon Jefferson or Lead Belly’s time there, though it’s more responsible for Texas Blues than any one place could claim. It was a haven for punks and counterculture in the ’80s and breakout stars in the ‘90s. A “Deep Ellum act” can mean anyone from T-Bone Walker to the Old 97’s to Erykah Badu to St. Vincent to Leon Bridges.

For over a century, Deep Ellum has been a spot where Dallas has put either the people it didn’t want or didn’t know what to do with. Crockett fit right in. There’s no way to quantify how different modern music might sound if Lead Belly and Blind Lemon Jefferson never spent that time together. But Crockett’s journey to Deep Ellum is as good a start as any to try to explain how music has managed to keep returning to this neighborhood whose own city has never fully understood.

***

By the early 1920s, one third of eligible male residents in Dallas were reportedly members of the Ku Klux Klan. In the first quarter of the 20th century, the few blocks of Elm Street, Main Street, and Commerce that made up Deep Ellum were a center of activity for African Americans in the heart of a city that some claim was run by deep prejudice. “Dallas was an intensely racist place,” said Alan Govenar, co-author of Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas, the most exhaustive text on the history of Deep Ellum.


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Technically, Deep Ellum has never really been a neighborhood. Rarely have many people lived there. Recently immigrated Jews opened up pawn shops. The Model Tailors sold suits. Black-owned movie theaters and vaudeville houses opened. Places like the Gypsy Tea Room and Park Theater, managed by Ella B Moore, offered live jazz, gospel, blues, and vaudeville shows.

All this happened based on a confluence of realities. Deep Ellum was about a half mile from downtown Dallas. African Americans who had to venture to the heart of Dallas, perhaps for an errand at City Hall or to purchase something, would find few places where they could eat or even use the restroom. “Segregation was formal,” said Jay Brakefield, who co-wrote Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas with Govenar. “It was legal.” African Americans could buy clothes most places in Dallas, but in Deep Ellum they were allowed to try them on beforehand. And once there, they could enjoy live music. It was within these circumstances that a Black and Jewish business and entertainment district formed right under the Klan’s nose.

Check out “Easy Rider Blues” by Blind Lemon Jefferson.

It was only natural that musicians found their way to the streets of Deep Ellum, many trying to escape a life of manual labor, singing about the harshness of the world around them. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s lyrics covered the spectrum of human suffering, as mundane as mosquito bites and as crushing as destitution or incarceration. “The lyrics that he sang were about the breadth and depth and scope of human emotion,” said Govenar. Jefferson was from East Texas, and his ability to move around Deep Ellum and in and out of greater Dallas on an apparently daily basis is a testament to how much people loved hearing him play. Jefferson claimed that he could get around just fine by himself, but Lead Belly isn’t the only guitar player who is said to have led him around Deep Ellum. T-Bone Walker claimed that, as a young boy, he used to pass Jefferson’s cup around and collect tips. Walker would have been only 19 when Jefferson died, but it was in that same year that Jefferson would release two recordings that showed Jefferson’s influence and an evolution of his style. Walker’s electric blues guitar innovations and his brand of showmanship became commonplace with live guitar music. Chuck Berry cited Walker as his influence.

But Jefferson is the Father of Texas Blues. In the ‘20s commercial recording scouts found Dallas, and Jefferson’s songs were impossible to miss. Paramount Records sent him to Chicago for numerous recordings, and he became a radio star. “He was the first commercially successful solo blues artist,” Brakefield said. His songs reached the Delta and helped inspire the modern blues movement. “It was like him and his guitar were part of the same being,” B.B. King wrote of hearing Jefferson as a child in Blues All Around Me. “You didn’t know where one stopped and the other started.”

***

The city of San Benito, where Charley Crockett was born in the 1980s, is in Texas, but it was worlds apart from Deep Ellum. Also the birthplace of Tejano music legend Freddy Fender, it’s about 20 minutes from the Mexican border and eight hours from Dallas. Soon after his birth, Crockett and his mother moved 11 miles east to Los Fresnos, a city with less than 6,000 residents, more than 90 percent of them Latino. Crockett’s arrival coincided with his father’s departure. “He was living a rough life,” Crockett said of the man whose last name he claims. “He was pouring concrete and working on shrimp boats and ending up in ditches on the side of farm roads instead of making it home. He wasn’t around.”

Crockett, his mother, and eventually his grandmother shared a small trailer parked on Old Port Road with nothing to see but the oranges, grapefruit, and sugar cane growing around them. Most of his memories of his time in South Texas fall under two categories: poverty or music. Tejano singers like Freddy Fender and Johnny Canales would perform nearby, and Crockett’s mother would encourage singing while doing chores or just to pass the time. “Music was really kind of everywhere in that rural area,” Crockett said. “I think it was just part of the culture.”

Looking for more opportunities, Crockett and his mother moved north to Irving, just outside Dallas, when he was 9. His mother worked non-stop in those days, but their lives didn’t seem to be improving as Crockett grew old enough to understand their struggle. Sometimes a “city of opportunity” only paints a clearer picture of one’s poverty by contrasting it with the expensive shops and generational wealth that’s flaunted in Dallas. In the summers Crockett would go to New Orleans to live with his uncle, who worked in a restaurant in the French Quarter. Before Katrina there was still a heavy street culture in the city. Bands played everywhere. Crockett arrived in New Orleans for the first time as a 10-year-old who had spent much of his childhood in isolation. Suddenly he was immersed in a city of diversity, music, and mischief, playing cards for his uncle in bingo halls. The food, jobs, and agriculture weren’t unlike Los Fresnos. New Orleans had the soul of the Gulf Coast he was born into but injected with vibrancy.

Back near Dallas, his mother lost her job while Crockett was still in high school, but still managed to buy him a guitar from a pawn shop. By the time he was 18, he was completely purposeless. He took that guitar and just started “hobo-ing” around Texas. He’d squat with people he’d meet without a thought or plan for the next day, let alone the next week. “I really felt limited by what I thought my future had to offer me,” he said. He was learning how to steal to survive, “and just kind of becoming a delinquent, getting into trouble, doing stuff I shouldn’t be doing.”

One day, he was sitting on a park bench near a baseball field in the town of Farmers Branch when a woman walked by and threw him 50 cents. In those days, music wasn’t an ambition as much as an introduction to other musicians he could pass the days with. Jamming with street musicians in Carrollton, Crockett met a man who was planning to drive to Northern California the following day. Crockett begged the man to let him join. He knew nothing about the area and had no real reason to want to be there. “I just wanted so badly to get out of my situation,” he said.

So, Crockett rode along on the ride west, but as they neared their destination, the driver decided he had no intention of bringing a new friend to his town, so he stopped in Vallejo, California and let Crockett out in a parking lot with nothing but a guitar.

***

Pre-World War II Deep Ellum served a purpose to the future of music by putting musicians in physical proximity to each other before they went their separate ways and made their names elsewhere. “There was a cross-fertilization that occured between musicians and among musicians who got together,” Govenar said.

It wouldn’t be the last time those same streets would play that role, but as would be the case in later eras, its real lifeblood were musicians whose music was never recorded and whose names were never written down. In a preview of “Exploring 508 Park,” a yet-to-be-released documentary directed by Govenar about the recording studio about a mile from Deep Ellum where Robert Johnson recorded a significant portion of his catalog, 508 Park committee member Carol J. Adams said that, in the area around Deep Ellum, the 1920s and 1930s were, “a time of displacement that created musicians who were practically homeless traveling around with their guitars.”

Then again, the stories of Deep Ellum tend to be written in disappearing ink.

The Great Depression hit some of the local businesses hard, and Deep Ellum’s deterioration became apparent. In the 1950s, Elm Street was converted into a one-way street heading into downtown and away from Deep Ellum, and perhaps not-so-coincidentally, making it much less convenient for drivers to happen upon the largely Black and Jewish area. A collection of merchants came together to carry a coffin down Elm Street in a mock funeral for Deep Ellum.

By 1969, an elevated Central Expressway was built directly over the 2400 block of Elm Street, plowing over what was once the center of gravity for what used to be Deep Ellum and making a distinct line between downtown Dallas and a place where something else once existed. By that point, Deep Ellum had long died its first death under the traffic of a rapidly growing Dallas.

“For me, the sound of the cars rattling overhead evokes the ghosts of Deep Ellum,” Govenar said.

***

The parking lot where Crockett was dropped off wasn’t far from Vallejo’s town square. It seemed as good a direction as any to start walking. He and another musician who was dropped off with him started playing music in front of local businesses and met some young musicians doing the same. They were heading to Santa Rosa and had room in their van, so Crockett hopped in, discovering a culture that would dictate the way he lived the next few years of his life. “Kind of immediately, to be honest with you, there was this acceptance of the drifter thing I was becoming,” Crockett said. “There was no judgement from a bunch of people I’d never seen before.”

As he met more people, he wandered and played in more environments. There were hikes in the hills of Santa Rosa. There were jams on rural open land. There were open mics in town or trips to San Francisco when someone was heading that way. He stayed in Northern California for about a year. In that time, he worked on farms, slept in pastures or barns or spare rooms, lived on communes, did co-operative work or work-traded for food and board, and hitch-hiked with everyone from musicians and hobos to Hare Krishnas. “That’s where I really got comfortable hobo-ing,” he said. “Then I took that [skill] to the rest of America with me.”

The transience that followed Crockett’s time in California might have you believing that the country is far less vast than it actually is. He traveled east and eventually north to New York City where he played on the streets and subway platforms. He still wasn’t much of a musician. “I had a couple songs, but I was comfortable on the streets. I knew how to blend right in with street culture.”

Crockett continued this lifestyle for the majority of his 20s. There was strategy and deliberateness to his survival. It required an ability to befriend people and a willingness to sleep on floors or on benches outside. Seasons dictated what city he might be in. New York City in the summertime. Heading back to North Carolina as it started to get cold. Try to make it to New Orleans by October and potentially stay there until May and try to move along before the hottest months. There were stretches of the New York trains where he could get a few hours of unbothered sleep. During the Occupy Wall Street movement, he was regularly sleeping and living in parks, not because he was part of the movement but because “it was a window when that was being tolerated,” he said.

If the itinerant musician sounds like a relic of the past, Crockett would invite you to look at the current statistics for poverty in the U.S. He was living his life on the fringes of society, and a guitar was the only thing separating him from much darker existences. “I saw an enormous amount of homelessness traveling around this country,” he said. “I’m talking about homeless people with disabilities, veterans, people from outcast sections of society, people with mental problems, deep systemic multi-generational poverty, [and] drug addictions. It was never lost on me how close I was to that, sharing the same space.”

He was living his life on the fringes of society, and a guitar was the only thing separating him from much darker existences.

***

Plenty of people have their own stories about Jeff Liles, but no matter who’s telling the story, they all seem to agree that he’s someone who’s lived many lives. He’s a guy who could refer to founding NWA member Easy-E as “Eric” (he was also the first DJ in the country to play an NWA song on the radio, in Dallas, and was fired the next day for it). He’s likely booked more ultra-famous bands in Dallas than there are albums in your record collection. He performed an alternative spoken-word act on the same Lollapalooza tour as Snoop Dogg and Devo.

But in 1985 he was just a kid trying to convince a guy named Russell Hobbs at the Theatre Gallery, a rundown venue Hobbs had just opened up in an even more rundown stretch of warehouses, to let his band perform there. In-between booking the show and the date of the performance, Liles’ band broke up. He went back to Theatre Gallery to tell Hobbs.

“I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t walked through those doors,” Liles said, parked outside of where Theatre Gallery used to stand, over 35 years later.

Hobbs asked him if he’d be interested in a different task: helping him book bands. Together, Liles and Hobbs would become the early architects for what some would refer to as the “golden age” of Deep Ellum. It wasn’t called Deep Ellum then, in the sense that a place where no one went to with nothing to offer didn’t need a name. It was Hobbs who had read about a bygone era of music in a place called Deep Ellum. Liles was originally afraid to use that term as it was essentially a reference to an African American pronunciation of Elm Street. Liles lost the argument.

Theatre Gallery was a refuge for musically inclined misfits as much as it was a concert venue. Everything about its early days was DIY and, in all likelihood, very illegal. “We just gave away free beer,” Liles said. “You paid $5 and got beer all night. There were no licenses.” The Republican National Convention was held in Dallas in 1984, and the Dead Kennedys performed outside the convention in protest. According to Liles, when the police came to break it up, they mistook Hobbs, who was simply watching the performance, as being involved and demanded he get the stage off the property. That stage made its way to Deep Ellum and became the Theatre Gallery stage.

Soon, Hobbs opened up the Prophet Bar and Club Clearview in 1985, Club Dada in 1986. A new Gypsy Tea Room opened up in homage to the old Deep Ellum. Liles says a movement started with three specific bands from three Dallas suburbs: Three On a Hill from Carrollton, Shallow Reign from Richardson, and End Over End from Highland Park. “Those three bands were bringing in suburban kids,” he said. “They were hiding from their parents. Those kids started the music scene in Deep Ellum.”

Those bands were eclipsed by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, arguably the first great band to come out of modern Deep Ellum — The New Bohemians would break up after the release of their second album, in 1990, and Brickell would marry Paul Simon. Liles and Hobbs hired Jim Heath to be the “sound guy” for Theatre Gallery and Prophet Bar despite his lack of experience. Heath would form The Reverend Horton Heat, a modern “psychobilly” band with a large cult following.

In the mid-80s, Deep Ellum was a scene with no rules and no definition of cool. It was the height of J.R. Ewing’s Dallas and rebellious teens were being suffocated by the images projected on their North Texas lives. It coincided with radical punk movements also manifesting in New York and Los Angeles. In a 1987 story in D Magazine, Skip Hollandsworth wrote of Deep Ellum, “The little underground scene, mostly centered in new-music nightclubs, was so ephemeral that by the time mainstream Dallas had heard of one of these clubs, it had already shut down and another had opened somewhere else.” Deep Ellum became a place where Dallas parents were terrified their children would be exposed to drugs, crime, skinheads, and violence. None of those worries were unfounded.

Still, it was growing rapidly, partially on the strength of Liles’ bookings. Dinosaur Jr. played Theatre Gallery for $50. The Replacements played and hung out in Deep Ellum for three days. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, the Flaming Lips. Liles has a story of Michael Stipe of REM doing yoga naked on the Theatre Gallery roof. It was a mixture of bands, kids, punks, and misfits walking the streets in the shadow of downtown Dallas.

Then Trees opened in 1990. “Trees took it to the next level,” Liles said. A venue on Elm Street with a capacity of about 500, it would book Radiohead, Soundgarden, Elliott Smith, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, and Geto Boys, all at the height of their popularity. Pearl Jam performed for less than 40 people at Trees and played basketball in the parking lot beforehand.

But to some people, Trees, and Jeff Liles, will always be known for the night they booked Nirvana in 1991. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had come out four months earlier and there were more people outside trying to get in than had tickets. Trying to accommodate Nirvana’s label, Liles hired more bouncers to prevent the crowd from rushing the stage, but a few songs into the performance Kurt Cobain lept over a bouncer with his guitar into the crowd. The guitar hit the bouncer in the head. Furious, the bouncer punched Cobain in the face. Cobain retreated backstage.

…a few songs into the performance Kurt Cobain lept over a bouncer with his guitar into the crowd. The guitar hit the bouncer in the head. Furious, the bouncer punched Cobain in the face. Cobain retreated backstage.

One thing was clear to everyone there: If Nirvana didn’t finish their set, there would be a riot in Deep Ellum. Liles had to convince Cobain. He found him hiding in a broom closet sniffing heroin and managed to get him back on stage.

“The rest of the show was great,” Liles said.

***

By 2008, Crockett had mastered survival, but he was just starting to master music. He’s a self-taught guitar player, originally unable to play the most basic G or C chords. Instead, he would wrap his thumb around the top of the guitar’s neck to hold down strings, “like choking the neck of a chicken.” He wrote his first song (“Fool Somebody Else”) this way, by experimenting with this finger and thumb placement, moving up and down the guitar’s neck until he’d found enough strums that sounded right. He went 10 years before recording that song.

“Why don’t you fool somebody else.

Do it to yourself. Tell me how it feels.

When you hold somebody tight

And the trust is gone

In the middle of the night

Got to fool somebody else.

Do it to yourself, tell me how it feels

When you hold somebody tight

Then they gone

Like the middle of the night.”

To this day, he has almost never used a guitar pick for a live show or recording. His travels and the musicians he met influenced his music. Older musicians heard him play open-mics and told him he was playing the blues, something he was barely conscious of. He realized that Robert Johnson’s lyrics sounded a lot like the life he was living.

It was in Manhattan, in Lucky Jack’s, that Crockett got the invitation to go to Europe. A regular there from Denmark had heard him play multiple times and told him he’d be a hit there. He offered up his place in Copenhagen and said he’d set him up with gigs at bars and cafes. Crockett took him up on the offer but ended up making as much playing on the streets as he did in bars and cafes, and before long, he’d overstayed his welcome. So he took the money he’d made and bought a train ticket to Paris without knowing a word of French.

He started playing the streets with a surprising amount of success. Perhaps to the French, there was a novelty to this American playing his version of the blues. “They could hear the Louisiana thing in me, which obviously the French have a big connection to that culture,” Crockett theorized. Remarkably, Crockett survived in Paris for almost a year without ever learning the language. “The language barrier was a surprising gift in that it separated me from the culture and put me in a place where I lost all fear,” he said. He couldn’t understand what anyone was saying about him, anyway, so he just played with confidence.

American culture tends to demand that we create self-narratives by which to live by, false identities that dictate the person we become. “I think in the streets of Paris, I killed that person,” Crockett said. “When I hit New York stateside again, I was a changed person. I just had no fear.”

American culture tends to demand that we create self-narratives by which to live by, false identities that dictate the person we become.

Back in America, he was starting to expect to make money playing on the streets, and he was getting results. He’d mapped out cities like New Orleans and figured out where to play and when in the day to move from Royal Street to jostle for space and ears in Cafe Dumont before finding a blues jam later that night. He was playing at least eight hours a day, whether in New Orleans or New York. “Do you know how good it feels to go from begging and stealing to having $30 in your pocket?” he asked. “And as soon as that money goes out I could just make $30 more right then.” Some of his music might lean toward country, gospel, or even jazz, but now he could command a room or a block of street, which was more important than any technical skill he’d learned. Even now, he won’t commit to a traditional genre of music, coining the term “Gulf Coast Boogie Woogie” for what he does.

One day in 2010, Crockett was busking on the subway platform at the Lorimer stop in Brooklyn. Riding the G-train was a 19-year-old street musician named Jadon Woodard, rapping to passengers for tips. When the doors opened, Woodard could hear the rhythm of Crockett’s guitar playing and thought he could rap over it. He convinced Crockett to move from playing on subway platforms and get on actual trains with him. Crockett had a song called “You’re So Strange” that Woodard loved. Together, they each started making more money than either had on his own.

The next time Crockett returned to New York the following year the two linked up with another guitar player and a trumpet player. The group would play on moving train cars for 12 hours a day. “We were making hella money,” Woodard said. On a good day they’d pull in $600 or $700. They called themselves the Train Robbers.

The four band members and a videographer who filmed their performances split a $500 apartment in Bushwick and paid the deposit in small bills. Crockett convinced them to play folk and blues rhythms and Woodard found them easy to rap over. New York runs off the subway system, and thousands of people were seeing them perform each day, some of them in the music industry. They were getting interest from record labels and getting offered residencies to play a few hours a night. A lost Train Robbers album was recorded in the women’s bathroom of a rehearsal space in Brooklyn. Eventually they were making enough money to split two apartments among themselves.

‘Do you know how good it feels to go from begging and stealing to having $30 in your pocket?’ he asked.

Thinking they’d finally made it, they signed a management deal that would ultimately tear them apart. Looking back, Woodard and Crockett agreed that the management was determined to change their sound to something more mainstream and was unfair in terms of publishing rights. That same management arranged a deal with NBC that would largely increase their visibility but would surely push them in a different direction musically. As they walked into a Manhattan office to sign the deal, Crockett backed out and disavowed the management label. “The band didn’t even know how I was feeling,” Crockett said. “I just dropped the bomb on them in that office.” They were still technically handcuffed to the management deal, but Crockett’s decision essentially ended the Train Robbers.

“I harbored some [negative] energy for a while,” Woodard said. “But we were all young and we were all caught up in everything.”

***

The first time Ken Bethea, guitarist for the Old 97’s, went to Deep Ellum was in the fall of 1987. He’d just graduated from the University of Texas. In Austin, he had been indoctrinated to believe that everything in Dallas was lame, but his favorite band, the Butthole Surfers, was playing at Club Clearview on Main Street, just off of Elm. “I thought, ‘I bet that’s in the Deep Ellum place they talk about. Elm? Ellum?”

He left the show with a black eye and a notion that there was something special about the area. “I went there on a Wednesday night and had the best time that I’d ever had in my life going somewhere solo,” Bethea said.

After that night, Bethea ended up living in Denton, Texas for a year, where he’d meet the drummer Philip Peeples. When they moved back to Dallas, Deep Ellum was evolving quickly and driven by music. Bands were meeting other bands, breaking up, and the best members of each band were forming newer, better bands. Rhett Miller and Murry Hammond were hanging around the scene, playing in bands or individually. Eventually the four of them would meet and form the Old 97’s.

The Old 97’s didn’t originally try to play Club Dada or the early days of Trees. They aimed lower than that and played in places without cover charges. One of those places was a cowboy/country bar called Naomi’s Lounge about the size of a Starbucks. “I’d be standing right next to the door as people would come in and I’d have to lean away while playing guitar to let them in,” Bethea remembered. They were winning over fans, and the physical area that made up Deep Ellum was so condensed that the whole scene could hear about a great performance in the same night. “We were playing all the time,” Bethea said. “Rhett was writing so many songs.”

The seeds of Deep Ellum that were planted in the ’80s were growing uncontrollably in the ’90s. Suddenly, along with national acts that Liles and others were bringing to the area, homegrown bands were catapulting from Deep Ellum to national success. Tripping Daisy was a Deep Ellum act that became a household name. Toadies, a Fort Worth band that broke into the Deep Ellum scene, released Rubberneck in 1994, which would sell over a million copies. The Old 97’s would go on to have an enormous national following — one they enjoy to this day. In all likelihood, each member of each of those bands saw each other perform multiple times in Deep Ellum. “The butterfly effect of hearing that things were working out for Tripping Daisy was huge for us,” Bethea said. “We thought, ‘if they can do it, and Edie Brickell can do it, we can do it.’ You want to keep up.”

Every North Texas band with any semblance of success that decade had to play Deep Ellum. The band Funland was an area favorite. Deep Blue Something and Bowling For Soup would be loosely affiliated with the scene. A young St. Vincent saw Tripping Daisy perform at Trees multiple times before eventually joining the Polyphonic Spree, a large choral rock band founded by Tripping Daisy front man Tim DeLaughter.

Meanwhile, when the New York rap duo Mobb Deep came to Deep Ellum, a local singer named Erykah Badu opened for them. Badu’s 1997 debut album, Baduizm, has sold over three million copies. Labeled “the queen of Neo-soul,” Badu has mostly remained in Dallas for the past two decades, almost like she’s looking over its music scene, popping up for surprise performances or guest DJ sets in Deep Ellum and hosting a birthday concert event there every year.

But as Deep Ellum’s streets were packed every night, the crime didn’t seem to be receding. The depiction of crime in Deep Ellum over its various eras has usually been exaggerated but rarely unfounded. Fights broke out, and rich kids were mugged, and for the first time, perhaps ever, greater Dallas was paying attention. A shift was happening in the early aughts as devotees to the scene grew frustrated seeing it be co-opted by polite society, and polite society was just as quick to label it dangerous.

Things came to a head in 2004 when the Old 97’s, by then a popular national act, returned to Deep Ellum for a show at the Gypsy Tea Room. A man named David Cunniff attended the show with his two teenage daughters. Cunniff got in an altercation with a man that quickly turned violent. It would end with Cunniff temporarily immobile, his neck broken in front of his children.

The man who Cunniff fought had affiliations with skinheads. By most accounts, any legitimate skinhead presence in Deep Ellum was long gone and largely an ancillary product of the ‘80s punk movement. But greater Dallas had heard the stories. “I remember people saying, ‘If you can’t be safe at an Old 97’s show, something’s wrong,’” Bethea said. Within a year, Deep Ellum was basically a ghost town.

“This area went dormant in the 2000s,” Liles said. “Trees closed. Dada closed. Bomb Factory closed. Clearview was gone.”

***

Crockett’s journeys can sound like a romantic ode to a simpler time, but outrunning poverty can bring mistakes, and risks can seem smaller when you have almost nothing to your name. Even before Crockett left Dallas his half-brother got him in legal trouble by getting him involved in stock manipulation. “My brother got me into some under-world Dallas stuff when I was younger,” he said. “All that stuff blew up and everybody went to prison.” His brother was sentenced to seven years. Crockett says he had to defend himself in court but wasn’t convicted based on his apparent ignorance of the scheme’s machinations.

In 2014, he says he’d find himself on the wrong side of the law again, when Virginia police caught him with a considerable amount of marijuana. A sentencing was pushed back and jail time was a possibility, but even probation could prevent him from traveling state to state and ending the musician’s life that he’d adopted.

Photo credit: Bobby Cochran

With that hanging over him, he realized he hadn’t seen his mother in nearly four years. He decided it was time to go home. While in Dallas, he decided to check out a blues jam happening in Deep Ellum. He met a guitar player named Alexis Sanchez, who currently plays guitar in Crockett’s band. That same night, Sanchez introduced him to a guy who had been performing in Deep Ellum named Leon Bridges. This was before Bridges would release his debut album with Columbia Records and win a Grammy, but his name was bouncing around those few blocks. “Something about meeting Alexis and Leon allowed me to realize that there was a renaissance happening in Deep Ellum,” Crockett said.

Crockett was as confident in his abilities as he’d ever been, but his publishing rights were still controlled by his old managment for almost another year. So he went back to Northern California and worked manual labor, waiting out his contract with a head full of songs. When the time came, he recorded an album on his own and received donations from locals up there in order to print copies of it. He called it “A Stolen Jewell.”

In 2016 he faced a judge who held his future in his hands. Crockett told the judge about his musical journey, his progress, and his determination to make a real career of it. He even had a record he could show as proof. “They were going to take everything away from me,” he said. “I begged him. Told him I wanted to be legit.” Crockett’s plea resonated with the judge, who spared him any serious punishment for the 2014 marijuana charge. Armed with a guitar, an album, and a second chance, he went to make a name for himself, and he knew exactly where to go.

“It was from that moment,” Crockett said. “I hit the bars in Deep Ellum [as a performer] harder than I ever had.”

***

Kendrick Lamar was performing at a re-opened Trees in 2012, and Cam McCloud just wanted a minute of his time. “I was at the front of the stage at the dead center,” McCloud said. “I’m watching him and turning around and watching the whole crowd, and I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what I want to do.’” After the show, he freestyled for Lamar, who validated his skills.

A few years later, McCloud was fired from his job at Olive Garden for missing a shift to open for Florida rapper Gunplay at Trees. In 2015, McCloud would become the rapper and visionary behind Cure For Paranoia, a genre-defying hip-hop/soul group that D Magazine deemed “the poster boys of the new Deep Ellum.”

Trees had been reopened in 2009 by Clint and Whitney Barlow — Clint was a former drummer for Vanilla Ice. They also reopened Bomb Factory, a 4,000-plus capacity venue that books national acts. “The Barlows, as far as I’m concerned, are responsible for the revitalization of Deep Ellum,” said Pete Freedman, the president and co-founder of CentralTrack.com, a daily cultural guide to Dallas named after the street that Central Expressway demolished and separated downtown from Deep Ellum.

Freedman has witnessed and chronicled nearly every step of that revitalization, which represents the most eclectic era of Deep Ellum. Hip-hop had never gotten much substantial coverage or attention in Deep Ellum. Bands ruled the golden era. But hip-hop is arguably the most popular genre in America now, and it’s helping carry today’s Deep Ellum with acts blowing up and being surpassed before mainstream Dallas even hears of them, like the punk acts of the ’80s. “Deep Ellum always reflects the zeitgeist of whatever’s popular,” Freedman said.

A Dallas collective of individual hip-hop acts known as Brain Gang made waves in Deep Ellum at the beginning of last decade. From that group, Blue, the Misfit would go on to have a collaborative relationship with Kendrick Lamar, Bobby Sessions would sign with legendary hip-hop label Def Jam Recordings, and the producer, Justus, signed with Interscope and was pegged as Dr. Dre’s protege.

Cure For Paranoia reached a turning point when McCloud snuck backstage at Bomb Factory for a performance by West Coast rapper The D.O.C. and saw Erykah Badu and her entourage walking towards him (Badu and D.O.C. have a child together). McCloud approached her and freestyled, impressing her. The next week he got a call. Badu wanted them to open for her birthday concert. The group played at Three Links on Elm Street every Tuesday before bars temporarily closed due to COVID-19, typically packing the venue.

“Deep Ellum is just all over the place,” McCloud said an hour before opening for Houston rapper Bun B, his hair dark purple with a strip of lavender running through it. “I think that’s why it definitely shaped me as an artist. Because you can put us anywhere. We can literally play anywhere. We’ve opened for rock bands. We’ve opened for country bands. You name it. It’s the ultimate domino effect.”

The variety in Deep Ellum, which has expanded in size over the years, but still mostly extends to about six blocks of Elm, Main, and Commerce, is staggering. Every weekend there are hip-hop, punk, country, blues, jazz, folk, and metal shows. “The Deep Ellum music scene is the Dallas music scene,” said Freedman.

“I’ve been to every town in the U.S. and played gigs,” Bethea said. “There are very few places like Deep Ellum in the United States. It’s singular.”

***

Freedman can tell you exactly when Crockett came back to Deep Ellum in 2016. “I couldn’t go to a bar without sitting on one of his CDs,” Freedman said. Crockett had taken his signature hustle, as well as the guerilla marketing he and the Train Robbers had learned, and applied it to the streets of Deep Ellum. Unlike New York, he could canvass all of Deep Ellum in an hour.

“The first night I met Charley I saw copies of his CDs on toilets,” Liles said. “I grabbed them and said, ‘Is this you?’ He said, “Yeah, man.’ I said, ‘C’mon man, have a little respect for yourself as an artist.’ I gave them back to him and told him to just hand them out to people.”

“I put them on top of urinals in every bar in Deep Ellum,” Crockett said.

Crockett was playing two sets a night all over Deep Ellum. On Commerce is a New Orleans-themed Cajun/jazz bar called The Free Man — about the same size as the now-closed Naomi’s where the Old 97’s got started. It’s hard to imagine a crowd more suited for Crockett’s music. Next door is Adair’s Saloon, a tiny dive bar Crockett could play for hours. It cost nothing to walk in and hear Crockett play and sing in rooms where he wouldn’t even have needed a microphone. After Leon Bridges broke as a national sensation, a collection of lucky Wednesday night patrons in 2015 at Twilite Lounge on Elm Street saw Crockett perform with Bridges providing backup vocals.

When he was playing in Deep Ellum he let customers name the price they wanted to pay for a copy of “A Stolen Jewell.” It wasn’t the first time people were appreciating his music, but something was happening on those streets that was new to him: He was gaining reputation. “‘A Stolen Jewell’ was the break for me because Dallas writers and Dallas musicians and the Fort Worth community started championing me immediately.”

Soon, Crockett moved from cleared out corners of bars to stages in venues all over Dallas. He was drawing paying crowds and things were snowballing behind his work ethic. Since 2016, Crockett has released seven albums to critical success with another album Welcome To Hard Times, coming out in July. He toured Texas, and then the United States. Last summer, he headlined an international tour, returning to Europe with his name on marquees in Spain, Sweden, and Paris.

“He didn’t start recording until he’d had all this time on the streets,” said Thomas D. Mooney, a music critic for Rolling Stone and Texas Monthly. “So he had a late start actually recording, but once he started making albums he had this hard-working, hustler mentality that’s in his songs. And he’s not pretentious when he’s on stage. Fans realize that he’s working just as hard at his job as they are at theirs.”

And he’s not pretentious when he’s on stage. Fans realize that he’s working just as hard at his job as they are at theirs.

In June 2019, he was invited to headline the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, arguably the most legendary country music venue in the world. For someone who’d played the streets and “backdoored” bars and clubs all over the country, it’s a surreal accomplishment. “I believe that stage was built up by a lot of artists back in the day who came at it like I have, with the real hard work,” he said. In November, Crockett headlined The Troubadour in West Los Angeles, a stage that’s helped make countless stars.

“[Being in this industry], you know when people are the real deal or not,” said Liles, who now books shows for The Kessler, a venue in a different Dallas neighborhood called Oak Cliff. “Charley Crockett is the real fucking deal.”

“I’m really happy that my brother blew up,” Woodard said. “Make sure you tell Charley he owes me that song, ‘You’re So Strange.’ I’ll come to Texas and we’ll record it.”

Crockett once begged a man to take him to Northern California just to get away from Dallas. At the time, he didn’t understand that the music he’d travel the country and world learning owed such debts to the place he was trying to escape. Knowing what he knows now, having become an obsessive historian of music, he doesn’t waver on its impact. “Deep Ellum is as important to American music as New Orleans or Memphis,” he said. It’s only fitting that when he returned, Elm Street, Main Street, and Commerce were ready for him to come back and play his part in bridging Deep Ellum to its past. He represents both the street musician whose name you never heard and the nationally touring acts that began in those same streets.

“Areas that have a micro-culture of music are based on a foundation of artists who didn’t necessarily ‘make it out,’” said Mooney. “They keep the scene what it is. I think why Charley’s been able to transcend that area and still have such respect in Deep Ellum is that he’s a lifer. He’s lived his music.”

“I feel like Crockett is the human embodiment of Deep Ellum,” McCloud said before taking the stage to rap for an audience of hundreds.

***

In 2022, Uber plans to operate over 3,000 employees out of a soon-to-be-constructed 23-story tower with adjacent parking garage on the westernmost edge of Deep Ellum. The project officially broke ground last November. “The live-work-play environment of Deep Ellum, honestly, it just has us psyched out of our minds,” Uber spokesman Brian Finch reportedly said last fall.

What this means for the culture of Deep Ellum going forward depends on who you ask and what they think about the current commercialization happening there. There’s been an influx of boutiques, restaurants, breweries, and bars with waitresses who dress like they’re catering to a college fraternity clientele.

These aren’t unique developments for an American city. “Creative people create an identity for the neighborhood, they give it a cool factor, then the real estate developers come in and price them out of the neighborhood,” Liles said. Few people have traditionally lived in Deep Ellum (though that is currently changing), so it’s not people who are being pushed out. It’s places, and if you believe those lamenting the death of Deep Ellum, it could be the music. “A building that’s committed mostly to local bands and the local music scene isn’t going to generate a whole lot of revenue,” Liles said.

It won’t surprise you to hear that this isn’t the first time that Deep Ellum has been pronounced dead, and while it’s certainly changed over the years, devotees of the scene were panicking over its changes during the height of its most exciting movements in the ’80s and ’90s. Freedman believes that Deep Ellum operates in 30-year cycles and attributes much of the hysteria over its current changes to “good ol’ days syndrome.” He points out that Uber is building its tower over four vacant lots and that most of the trendier places popping up are doing so in empty building spaces or struggling businesses that the frustrated parties weren’t supporting anyway. “Deep Ellum of today shouldn’t be the Deep Ellum of 1988,” he said. “Under what guise should it be? There were skinheads.”

Deep Ellum’s music survived during the racism of the 1920s (and the less transparent racism since). Will it survive the capitalism of the 2020s? Prior to the restrictions due to COVID-19, the streets of Deep Ellum were flooded with people every weekend, even as crime in the area remains a talking point. Deep Ellum’s cool factor is built on the credibility of places like Trees, Bomb Factory, Twilite Lounge, Three Links, The Free Man, Club Dada, Adair’s Saloon, and so many more. Dallas has woken up to Deep Ellum. “I think it’s amazing,” said McCloud, the last person to be accused of conforming his music to anyone. “It just means more money coming in. The music will be fine. That’s what they’re coming for.”

Dallas has woken up to Deep Ellum.

The rapper Post Malone, from the Dallas suburb Grapevine, is not a Deep Ellum artist — prior to his national ascent, he was characterized as a soundcloud artist — but after his single “White Iverson” went viral in 2015, making him a household name overnight, his first Dallas show was at Trees. He played “White Iverson” two times during a 25-minute show, latching on to a bit of the neighborhood’s credibility. “These things don’t happen by accident,” Freedman said. “Deep Ellum is still unequivocally, without a shadow of a doubt, the proving grounds.”

The story of Deep Ellum is the story of music’s relationship to physical space. It can feel like there are no traceable links of influence or even knowledge between the various musical eras of Deep Ellum. Whenever an era ended, it must have been impossible to imagine music ever coming back. But it always did, behind musicians and the people who wanted to hear them play. “In 25 years there won’t be anything wrong with [Deep Ellum] turning over a little bit,” Bethea said before smiling. “As long as they’ve got a statue of the Old 97’s down there for people to worship.”

“Maybe one day all this will go away,” Freedman said from a dark booth in Twilite Lounge. “But for now, I’m still going to play in it.”

***

Now, imagine it’s a Friday night at some point in the future when public gatherings and live music are allowed and deemed safe, and you just saw a show at Trees that you’ll talk about for weeks, exaggerating whatever details you still remember. You’re walking out the front door onto Elm Street with about 400 other people. It’s entirely possible you haven’t been sober since halfway through the set list. It’s 11:30 and the streets are packed with people, some of whom are probably going to manage to find a little trouble to get into, and you haven’t yet determined if you’ll be one of them. Maybe you aren’t ready for the night to be over. You could grab another drink somewhere or find some late-night food. Or you could walk around the area and settle for the first place that’s playing the kind of music you want to hear.

As the Trees crowd pushes you about 50 feet down Elm Street and you try to determine your immediate future — the only future that seems remotely important in that moment — you might look up and see a mural facing you from the brick wall across the street. It’s a tinted image of a man dressed in black with sunglasses and a cowboy hat standing in a field of bluebonnets. The man’s name isn’t on the mural, which is fine. A mural like that in Deep Ellum is for the type of person who already knows who Charley Crockett is.

Or maybe, you’re ready to go home and bask in the buzz of the performance you just witnessed. You’ll have to find your way to the designated ride-share pickup zone on Commerce — the necessity of which is a testament to just how much Deep Ellum has changed. It’s two streets over, so you’ll probably want to cut through Radiator Alley to get to Main Street. As you breeze through the alley, you might see another mural of a stout man wearing a suit and holding a guitar with two musical legends flanking him on each side. Their names are Freddy King and T-Bone Walker, and little crowns are painted above their heads. But those two are clearly in the background. It’s the stout man who’s front and center. No crown is above his head; only a bright circle, almost like a halo. The image is a recreation of the only known photograph to ever exist of this man. His name was Blind Lemon Jefferson.

The people and businesses that make up this era’s Deep Ellum have been drastically impacted by COVID-19 and its attendant restrictions. If you would like to support and help keep this tight-knit and historical community vibrant in the future consider donating to Deep Ellum 100, an organization giving grants to workers, musicians, and artists who have helped make Deep Ellum what it is.

* * *

Jonny Auping is a freelance writer based in Dallas, Texas. His work has been featured in Texas MonthlyThe New YorkerVICENew York MagazineSlateand McSweeney’s.

Editor: Krista Stevens

Fact checker: Matt Giles

The Promised Land

Trans activist Karla Avelar poses for a portrait in San Salvador, El Salvador in 2018. (Danielle Villasana)

Alice Driver | Longreads | July 2020 | 16 minutes (3,906 words)

“Me with two suitcases, without knowing anything, so far away, not speaking the language, oh no, it was a total odyssey.” — Karla Avelar

* * *

Home was 16 by 26 feet. When Karla, 41, lay on her single bed at night, she could stretch out her left arm and grab her mother Flor’s* hand. She and her mother, who was 64, hadn’t lived together for 32 years: Now they practiced French together and her mother, who never learned to write, carefully traced the letters of the French alphabet in cursive well into the night. Neither of them had finished elementary school; Flor, born in rural El Salvador, was forced to leave school after first grade to work and help support her family and Karla was forced out of school in eighth grade due to bullying from teachers and students who told her she had to dress like a man in order to attend class, who once tried to hold her down and cut her hair and who frequently beat her up. Home was the name she had chosen for herself — Karla Avelar — one that was first legally recognized when she was 41 and requesting asylum in Switzerland. When the weight of memories of her previous life haunted Karla, she went outside to search for a place to cry alone.

When I first met Karla in San Salvador, El Salvador in July 2017, her home was a place I couldn’t safely visit. Karla, a renowned LGBTQ activist, had been nominated for the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights, which would come with a large cash prize if she won. Members of the Mara Salvatrucha in Karla’s neighborhood, part of an international gang known as the MS-13, had become aware of the news and had threatened to kill her if she won and didn’t hand the money over to them. She had even been forced to change houses due to the threats, but she still felt her neighborhood wasn’t safe for me to visit, so we met at the offices of COMCAVIS TRANS, an NGO that was the culmination of her life’s work as an activist. Like so many trans women in El Salvador, she had survived more violence than most of us could imagine — rapes, assassination attempts, being unjustly imprisoned — and after being released from prison, she founded COMCAVIS TRANS as the first openly HIV positive trans woman in the country. I interviewed Karla for a story about the reasons why trans woman flee El Salvador, neither of us knowing that Karla would eventually become the story.

On October 6, 2017, roughly a month-and-a-half after we bid each other farewell in San Salvador, Karla and her mother flew to Switzerland to attend the awards ceremony for Martin Ennals Award nominees. When they arrived in Switzerland, Flor broke down and told Karla that members of the MS-13 gang had come to her house, beat her up and forced her to watch a video in which they were torturing a man, telling her that they would do the same thing to Karla. Before leaving, they told Flor that they would rape her in front of Karla and then kill her if Karla didn’t hand over the prize money. And then they asked her to confirm the date that Karla would return to El Salvador after her trip to Switzerland.

Karla relayed the threats to the members of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights who were worried that she would be assassinated if she returned to El Salvador. They encouraged her and her mother to apply for asylum in Switzerland. At the awards ceremony, Karla was recognized for her activism and awarded a monetary prize plus an additional amount to donate to the NGO of her choice. Karla and Flor didn’t have time to celebrate — they needed a few days alone to consider what it would mean to never return to the land of their birth. Karla was proud that she had lived honestly in El Salvador, not hiding her past as a sex worker, as someone who had spent time in jail and was HIV+, even when it put her at risk, but she also knew many trans women who had been murdered for their activism. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jane Mayer, Patricia Lockwood, Rachel E. Gross, Ann Babe, and Theresa Okokon.

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1. How Trump Is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic

Jane Mayer | The New Yorker | July 13, 2020 | 34 minutes (8,530 words)

“The secretive titan behind one of America’s largest poultry companies, who is also one of the president’s top donors, is ruthlessly leveraging the coronavirus crisis—and his vast fortune—to strip workers of protections.”

2. Insane after Coronavirus?

Patricia Lockwood | London Review of Books | July 8, 2020 | 14 minutes (3,546 words)

Patricia Lockwood recounts her maddening experiences with COVID-19: “I had developed a low-grade fever. My head ached, my neck, my back. My eyes ached in their orbits and streamed tears whenever I tried to read or watch television. My mouth tasted like a foreign penny.”

3. How Koalas With an STD Could Help Humanity

Rachel E. Gross | The New York Times | July 13, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,360 words)

The adorable eucalyptus-eaters are on the front lines of research for a chlamydia vaccine.

4. Tune In, Drop Out

Ann Babe | Rest of World | July 14, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,350 words)

In South Korea, the cultural and familial pressure to conform is massive, and for many, crushing. Meet the individualist loners, the honjok, who are carving out a new way — and changing the Korean economy.

5. Me Llamo Theresa

Theresa Okokon | Hippocampus Magazine | July 7, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,403 words)

“Mrs. Wilson would have cocked her head to the side, furrowed her brow a bit as she pursed her lips like she had tasted something sour. She removed her eyes from my proud gaze to look instead at my mother. Is there anything else we can call her? Mrs. Wilson asked. Does she have a real name? An American name we can call her?