Dallas: Charley Crockett at Adair’s Saloon

Charley Crockett walked into Adair’s Saloon in 2014 with five thousand pressed copies of his debut album, A Stolen Jewel. He had recorded it in a California barn, paid for the discs himself, and moved back to Dallas to find anyone willing to listen. Deep Ellum was the place to do that. The neighborhood was in the middle of a musical renaissance, and Adair’s — a long-running honky-tonk on Commerce Street — was where you started.

He came with a plan and a collaborator. Guitarist Alexis Sanchez had grown up in nearby Garland and knew exactly where the blues jams ran. Together they worked every room in range. A typical long weekend might include Adair’s, the Pecan Lodge BBQ joint, a Deep Ellum barbershop, a public radio fundraiser, and a beer festival. Crockett played all of it. “I just got lucky from where I was stepping off of the street and learning how to front bands and play clubs, mostly through informal blues jams around Dallas, Fort Worth, New Orleans, and in Austin,” he told Cowboys & Indians magazine.

The Men’s Room Marketing Plan

Crockett devised his own distribution strategy for the debut album. He left free copies of A Stolen Jewel in the men’s rooms of every club where he played. People picked them up, listened on the drive home, and came back. Soon he was jumping onstage as a guest with larger acts — including a then-unknown Leon Bridges. The two have been close friends ever since. From Adair’s, Crockett moved to headlining his own shows. By 2023 he was filling three-to-five-thousand-seat venues. Cowboys & Indians noted that this was “a long way from when he would work Adair’s.”

Deep Ellum had been building musicians this way for over a century. Blind Lemon Jefferson worked these same streets in the 1920s. T-Bone Walker learned guitar on this same corner. Crockett arrived already shaped by that lineage — he had spent a decade busking in New Orleans, New York, Paris, and rural Morocco. Adair’s was simply the next corner he needed to earn. The Texas State Historical Association chronicles the full history of what Deep Ellum built and what it keeps building.