Deep Deuce, The Jazz Block That Made Oklahoma City
Near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Northeast Second Street in the nineteen twenties and thirties was one of the most musically alive blocks in the American interior. The neighborhood was called Deep Deuce, a contraction of Deep Second, and it was the center of Black commercial and cultural life in a rigidly segregated Oklahoma City. On a single block you could find barbershops, pool halls, pharmacies, a rooming house or two, and at night, the clubs: the Ritz, the Aldridge Theater, the Dew Drop Inn, places where the music went past midnight without apology.
The figure who walked out of Deep Deuce and changed American music forever was Charlie Christian, born in Bonham, Texas, in nineteen sixteen and raised in Oklahoma City from early childhood. Christian attended Douglass High School on the northeast side, played dances and clubs across Deep Deuce as a teenager, and by the late nineteen thirties had developed a single-string electric guitar technique that nobody else was doing. The guitar had always been a rhythm instrument, you strummed chords, you kept time, you stayed in the back of the band.
Christian pulled it to the front. He played single-note melodic lines through an amplifier with the authority and fluency of a saxophone. In nineteen thirty-nine, promoter John Hammond heard Christian play in Oklahoma City and arranged an audition with Benny Goodman in Los Angeles.
The audition famously ended with Goodman trying to dismiss Christian after a single number, only to find that the band had kept playing without him for forty-five minutes while Goodman stood offstage. Christian joined the Goodman Sextet that year and made a series of recordings that defined the transition from swing to bebop. He died of tuberculosis in nineteen forty-two at age twenty-five, in a sanitarium on Staten Island.
The other voices that came through Deep Deuce are nearly as remarkable. Jimmy Rushing, the blues shouter who became Count Basie's star vocalist, grew up on the northeast side. Ralph Ellison, who would write one of the defining American novels of the twentieth century, Invisible Man, was also a product of this neighborhood, a trumpet student at Douglass High School who absorbed the music of Deep Deuce before leaving for Tuskegee Institute in nineteen thirty-three.
Most of the original Deep Deuce block was demolished during urban renewal in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies. What survived did so by accident or neglect. The neighborhood is now the subject of preservation efforts, and Charlie Christian's name appears on a park and a statue a few blocks from where he first played.
The music, at least, is still audible if you know where to listen.
