Dallas: Erykah Badu — The Girl from South Dallas

The record collection covered every wall. A radio in the bathroom stayed tuned to the local FM soul station. And uncles gathered in the back listening to Bootsy Collins, George Duke, and Stanley Clarke. Her mother put Chaka Khan, Phoebe Snow, and Deniece Williams on the turntable. One rebel uncle owned Prince and Pink Floyd. Erica Abi Wright grew up inside all of it, in Erykah Badu’s South Dallas home, and didn’t leave. Not really.

She arrived on February 26, 1971, daughter of Kolleen Maria Gipson, a former actress. And she stayed. Five generations of her family have called Dallas home. “I’m five generations in Dallas,” she says. “This is my place. It’s my home.”

The neighborhood built her in layers. She attended N.W. Harllee Elementary School at 1216 E 8th St — the oldest elementary school for Black children in Dallas. Then she moved on to Booker T. Washington HSPVA, studying theater and dance. There she performed as MC Apples in the hip-hop duo Def Ones. She changed “Erica” to “Erykah” because kah means inner light in Egyptian. She was already naming herself.

What She Built When She Came Back

After Booker T. Washington, she enrolled at Grambling State University. But in 1993, she left and came back to Dallas. Back to South Dallas. She took a job at the South Dallas Cultural Center, teaching drama and dance to children. She earned minimum wage. While she taught, she recorded a demo called Country Cousins with her cousin Robert “Free” Bradford. That demo became Baduizm.

Kedar Massenburg saw her open for D’Angelo in Dallas — while she was still waitressing at Grinder’s Coffee Shop. He signed her to Kedar Entertainment. The rest of that story is history. But the South Dallas story didn’t end there.

In 2003, she founded B.L.I.N.D. — Beautiful Love Incorporated Non Profit Development — to create social change starting in south Dallas. She’s also spent twenty years working as a doula. And the Badudio, her home recording studio, sits not far from where she grew up. She made New Amerykah Part Two, But You Caint Use My Phone, and “Window Seat” there. She showed it to Vogue in 2023: incense, vintage Rhodes, ankle bells, tuning forks, records everywhere.

She didn’t trade South Dallas for Calabasas. The studio, the nonprofit, the doula work — all of it lives within the same zip codes that raised her. That’s not nostalgia. That’s the whole point.

I’ve been here ♪