Erykah Badu: Oak Cliff, Deep Ellum, and Neo-Soul

She was born Erica Abi Wright in Dallas on February twenty-sixth, nineteen seventy-one, and grew up in the Oak Cliff neighborhood south of the Trinity River. She went to Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the magnet school in the Dallas Arts District that has produced a remarkable number of working musicians relative to its size. She developed her voice, her stage presence, and her name, Erykah Badu, in the clubs and open-mic nights of Deep Ellum, the historic music district in East Dallas that had housed blues musicians since the nineteen twenties.

Her debut album, "Baduizm," came out in February of nineteen ninety-seven. It debuted at number two on the Billboard two hundred and went platinum in its first month. Critics struggled to categorize it. It was not hip-hop; it was not traditional rhythm and blues; it drew on jazz phrasing, soul dynamics, and a lyrical introspection that had few recent precedents. The category that eventually settled around it was neo-soul, a term that "Baduizm" did more to define than any other single record.

Dallas's mainstream musical identity runs heavily toward country and Western swing. The city's deep cultural self-image is Cowboys and cattle drives. But Dallas has had a Black music tradition running from Deep Ellum blues in the nineteen twenties and thirties through rhythm and blues in the postwar decades to Erykah Badu's career in the nineties and beyond. That tradition is the longer and, in some respects, the more consequential one. It just does not have a Stockyards museum.