Stephen Hull of The Stephen Hull Experience. Photo courtesy of Jerome Justine.
The Blues in the Bottom festival will take place during Memorial Day weekend on Saturday, May 23 at Eloise Lundy Park from 1-6 p.m.
The free community music series honors the neighborhood’s former resident and blues artist T-Bone Walker. Walker grew up in the Tenth Street neighborhood, attending N.W. Harllee until seventh grade. He later pioneered the use of electric guitar in the genre.
Artist Vicki Meek said that the festival came about as an extension of Urban Historical Reclamation and Recognition, a project she worked on for the Nasher Sculpture Center. The project captures the voices of the community through interviews and collected archival material highlighted throughout sites in the Tenth Street Historic District, accessible by a QR code sign.
“That was all history, but I wanted to have something that became like a living memorial to the area, because T-Bone Walker lived there, and everybody knew him and there were a lot of juke joints back in the day before they destroyed that community,” she said. “That seemed like a no brainer, ‘let’s do a blues festival,’ and everybody we interviewed, the elders that we interviewed, talked about how they used the park as sort of a social gathering space, and it just seemed right to do it at Eloise Lundy Park.”
Meek reached out to AT&T Performing Arts Center to collaborate on the first iteration of Blues in the Bottom because of the organization’s work featuring Brass and Jazz in the Park throughout Dallas.
“So they decided to make this part of their series, and we did the first two mini-concerts as a way of just sort of introducing the idea to the community,” Meek said.
Those concerts included one in the backyard of bcWORKSHOP’s little blue house and another in the auditorium of the Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Center. This year’s festival is presented by the community arts program of AT&T PAC, ArtsBridge, and is supported by BMO.
“Now this is the one that will become the annual festival, the Blues in the Bottom Festival, and we wanted to kick off this first one with Tufara Waller Muhammad, who is out of Little Rock, Arkansas. She’s a blues aficionado,” Meek said.
Muhammad, an artist and community organizer, curated this year’s festival. She also has an ancestral connection to the community as the granddaughter of local blues musician Sam Waller.
“He had five different bands that he also managed that worked in the DFW, so they traveled on the Chitlin’ Circuit, basically,” she said. “My grandfather was a blues man. He was a drummer. And so my first like earliest memories of being in a juke joint are being asleep under the bar in the ’70s as they were playing.”
Like Muhammad’s own connection to the blues, the artists selected pay homage to local blues legends.
The lineup includes set-list-free group The Stephen Hull Experience, the classic blues tradition of Gregg A. Smith and His Blues Revue Band and solo artist Tamara Tramell. In addition to the live music lineup, there will be a DJ, a community-created mural, food trucks and a vendor market.
Both Tramell and Smith are from Texas, with Tramell a graduate of Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. They are joined by The Stephen Hull Experience, which Muhammad describes as internationally renowned and largely inspired by T-Bone Walker.
“(Hull)’s like a real history nerd that was like, ‘this is an honor,’ and he also understands because what we hope to do is not just talk about T-Bone Walker and the legacy of T-Bone Walker, but also help people to understand the other magnificent people that live in this community,” Muhammad said. “So although it’s like understanding the legacy of T-Bone Walker, but also understanding this Tenth Street neighborhood also was like the Bourbon Street of Oak Cliff. … I think we’re gonna create a lot of space for joy. And I feel like that’s what people need. You know, music is a healer. Music is a unifier.”
