Triangle Blues Society newsletter feature: Blues Geography

Heya Folks! Blues Geography this month takes place exclusively in the parking lot of Rick Hendrick Chevrolet in Durham. The biggest chunk of the old Hayti neighborhood lays under the various parking lots of Rick Hendrick’s Chevrolet – Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Workers and the only American woman ever considered by the Vatican for sainthood said “A long memory is the most radical idea in America today…” or something like that – it was Utah Phillips who gave me that quote. He’s dead and google’s not helping…


Reverend Gary Davis

If you walk down to the intersection of Fayetteville Road and Pettigrew Street, stand on the southern-most corner of the intersection and look around, you’ll be awful close to where Fayetteville Street and Pettigrew intersected when Hayti was still a viable neighborhood. At this corner, there was a barbecue stall owned by a woman whose name is apparently lost to history where Gary Davis liked to set up and play on the sidewalk right around five in the evenings when the tobacco workers were getting out, getting grub and getting home. This was one of his favorite and most profitable spots…

Blind Boy Fuller

If you walk about a hundred feet north on Pettigrew street and stop, you’ll about be where Henry Street used to pour into Pettigrew. It wasn’t much more than an alley – I’m given to believe that this is the street that was colloquially known as “Death Alley.” Fuller wrote a song about it called, appropriately enough, “Death Alley.” He recorded the song in 1937 at the same session where he recorded “Mamie.” The Trice Brothers had gone along with him on that session…

The Wonderland Theater

East Dillard becomes South Dillard at the intersection where it crosses Pettigrew. If you stand on the northwest corner of that intersection, you will be right close to where Ramsey Street used to be. The Wonderland Theater stood at the corner of Ramsey and Pettigrew. Whether for vaudeville shows, live concerts, pig pickin’s or moving pictures, for fifty years the Wonderland needed, used and schooled piano players. Every great piano player in the country at some point played at the Wonderland and as a result, the Wonderland became a rite of passage for some and a musical college for others. Why more of the local piano players were not recorded is a mystery to me.

Reverend Gary Davis

If you walk west along East Dillard between Pettigrew and Roxboro, you will essentially be walking parallel to and about ten feet off from where Poplar Street used to be. When Gary Davis first came to Durham, he lived at 410 Poplar Street. His mother, Belle Davis, lived at 410A Poplar. Apparently, there was a piano in this house, though his welfare case worker described the house as being a two-room tenement where Gary slept in the kitchen.

That’s the deal for this month. Next month I reckon we’ll still be in Rick Hendrick’s parking lot since so much of Hayti vanished underneath it. As always, if you’ve got some pictures, an address or anecdote you want to share with me – and I wish you would – feel free to write me some of your lines. Any additional information you have about these folks is appreciated. Remember, if you go hunting a cemetery or house where one of your heroes hung up or laid down their hat and that place is on private property, get permission first and be nice…you’ll be astonished at how forthcoming most people will be with you…

There is a fantastic blog called "Endangered Durham."  I've been using information from this blog to put together the old Hayti neighborhood in relation to all these addresses I've got and can't find.  It's a good read besides...

Endangered Durham