A century before Drake, Adele and Olivia Rodrigo sang their sad songs, Blind Lemon Jefferson showed the world what depression and heartache were really all about.

The first male blues superstar — and arguably the most important musician ever to call Dallas home — Jefferson (1893-1929) was the undisputed “Father of the Texas Blues.”

With his strong, keening tenor voice and buoyant guitar playing, he inspired everyone from B.B. King to Bob Dylan, who both recorded his prophetic “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” His lament about poverty, “Match Box Blues,” evolved into “Matchbox,” a hit for Carl Perkins and a single by the Beatles.

Country guitar great Chet Atkins called him “one of my first finger-picking influences.” Even post-punk rockers paid tribute to him, with Nick Cave writing the eerie “Blind Lemon Jefferson” in his honor.

Yet for all his impact on music, Jefferson is largely forgotten today.

He’s a victim of poor recording technology that makes his crackly songs sound like relics of a bygone era. He’s a phantom, due to the scarcity of facts about his life. As far as anyone knows, Jefferson never gave an interview. Just one photo of him exists.

It’s hard to love a ghost. But Dallas writer-documentarian Alan Govenar and his collaborators hope to change that with a trio of projects that shed new light on the enigmatic singer-songwriter and guitarist.

• Seeing a World Blind Lemon Never Saw runs through May 30 at the African American Museum in Fair Park and features 34 large-print color photos by Govenar, many of them taken around Jefferson’s hometown of Wortham, Texas. Phillip Collins curated the exhibit.
• The local nonprofit Deep Vellum Publishing recently issued See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, a new biography of Jefferson written by Govenar and Maryland-based ethnomusicologist Kip Lornell. Pieced together from decades of research by the authors and others, the biography also features all of the photos in Govenar’s exhibit.
• On Feb. 25, a revival of Lonesome Blues opens at Club Dada in Deep Ellum. A one-man musical starring J. Dontray Davis as Jefferson, directed by Akin Babatundé, it looks back at the singer’s life in the moments before he died at age 36. Lonesome Blues builds on Babatundé and Govenar’s earlier musical Blind Lemon Blues, which earned critical acclaim in Europe and New York City.

“Years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson told Akin and me that for him, ‘Blind Lemon Jefferson was the voice of Black America at that moment,’” Govenar says in an interview.

“Ultimately, Blind Lemon is a muse to the popular imagination. He’s larger than life. An icon.”

Blind at birth, the youngest of seven children, Lemon Henry “Blind Lemon” Jefferson grew up near Wortham, 80 miles southeast of Dallas, a rural area whose isolated beauty Govenar captures nicely in the photo exhibit.

As a teen, in the early 1910s, Jefferson began traveling regularly to Dallas, where he sang and played acoustic guitar for tips near present-day Deep Ellum. He was often accompanied by two protégés: Oak Cliff-raised T-Bone Walker and Louisiana-born Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, who’d moved to Dallas around 1908, then left and returned a number of times.

“Blind Lemon and I run together for about 18 years around Dallas,” Lead Belly says in his 1947 recording, “Blind Lemon.”

While little is known about Jefferson’s Dallas days, Govenar and Lornell learned that he lived at a boarding house at 1803 S. Preston St., a road that no longer exists, near the present-day “Traveling Man” sculptures on Good-Latimer Expressway in Deep Ellum.

Jefferson was reportedly gregarious and very independent. But given the racism that pervaded Dallas in the 1920s, he was “vulnerable and no doubt extremely cautious about where he went to perform,” the authors write in See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.

“His virtuosic guitar styling and bellowing voice may have tempted whites on their way to and from work to stop, listen, and possibly flick a nickel or dime in his tin cup. But ultimately, he must have known that he needed to seek refuge in the African-American community of Old North Dallas or in his trek back to his rented room on South Preston.”

Like many Black Southerners before and after him, Jefferson traveled to Chicago for work. He recorded nearly 100 songs between 1925 and 1929 for Paramount Records, a label that had made Ma Rainey a star by the time Blind Lemon arrived.

At first, Jefferson mixed “the devil’s music” with spiritual lyrics in a string of religious songs he released under the pseudonym Deacon L.J. Bates. But the “Deacon” soon faded as Blind Lemon returned to the secular topics he knew best.

In March 1926, he recorded “Got The Blues” and “Long Lonesome Blues,” which both reportedly sold more than 100,000 copies — a word-of-mouth phenomenon in an era when many people didn’t own a radio and few stations played “race music.” Paramount released more than 40 songs by Jefferson in the coming years, with the combined sales estimated to be in the millions.

“He was the biggest-selling male downhome blues musician of his generation. He was a superstar,” Govenar says. “At the height of his career, Blind Lemon reportedly owned two automobiles and had a chauffeur, a residence in Chicago, houses in Mexia and Dallas, and $1,500 in the bank at the time of his death. He defied all stereotypes.”

Another thing that set Lemon apart from his peers was the breadth of his songwriting.

He could temper his bleak mood with silliness, as in “Mosquito Moan.” Or he could dive headfirst into the horrors of humanity, as he does in “Hangman’s Blues,” a song discussed in both the biography and the photo exhibit.

Govenar says Jefferson probably wrote “Hangman’s Blues” about the mob killing of three Black men accused of raping and killing a 17-year-old girl in 1922 in Kirvin, Texas, near were the singer grew up. The song “not only alludes to the lynching, but it articulates the trauma of virulent racism that plagued African Americans nationwide,” he said.

In December 1929 — a year after “Hangman’s Blues” came out — Jefferson was dead, most likely of heart disease and exposure after he got lost in a heavy snowstorm in Chicago. He was just 36.

Today, his body lies in what’s now known as the Blind Lemon Jefferson Memorial Cemetery in Wortham. A marker quotes the lyrics from “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” but the exact location of his grave remains unknown — a fitting end, perhaps, for an artist whose entire life is shrouded in questions.

Who knows what Jefferson might have accomplished if he’d lived deep into the 20th century?

Would he have stayed in Chicago and teamed up with Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters? Would he have followed T-Bone Walker to L.A. and traded his acoustic guitar for a Gibson electric? Or would he have returned to Dallas and lived long enough to mentor Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan?

Davis, who portrays Blind Lemon in the Lonesome Blues musical, says questions like that don’t matter: The singer’s tale is compelling just the way it is.

“Playing Blind Lemon has been life-changing for me. Being able to tell this heartfelt story about a man who lived his life unapologetically, a man who pushed through all obstacles and proved determination and hard work pays off, is very liberating,” the Dallas actor says.

“Blind Lemon and I are from the same area and have a lot of similarities. I honestly feel like he is speaking to me, using me as a vessel to tell his story and encourage a new generation.”

Details

Lonesome Blues opens its run of weekend matinee shows on Sunday, Feb. 25, and continues through April 7 at Club Dada, 2720 Elm St., Dallas. For tickets, visit lonesomebluesmusical.com.

“Seeing a World Blind Lemon Never Saw” runs through May 30 at the African American Museum in Fair Park. The museum is open Tuesdays through Fridays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission and parking are free.

See That My Grave Is Kept Clean is available through online retailers or at deepvellum.org.