Bull City Blues
Durham, Durham County, North Carolina
Marker Inscription
Bull City Blues. During the 1920s-1940s, Durham was home to African American musicians whose work defined a distinctive regional style. Blues artists often played in the surrounding Hayti community and downtown tobacco warehouse district. Prominent among these were Blind Boy Fuller (Fulton Allen) (1907-1941) and Blind Gary Davis (1896-1972), whose recordings influenced generations of players.
Erected by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources
The Story
From the 1920s through the 1940s, Durham's Hayti neighborhood and tobacco-warehouse district nurtured a distinctive regional blues sound. Musicians such as Blind Boy Fuller (Fulton Allen) and Blind Gary Davis played its streets and clubs, and their recordings shaped generations of players to come.
Why it matters
The Piedmont blues born in Durham's Black community became a lasting strand of American music, carried far beyond the tobacco town where it took shape.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Blind Boy Fuller
- · Fulton Allen
- · Blind Gary Davis
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
North Carolina Central University
Durham, NC
In 1910, at the height of the Jim Crow era, educator James E. Shepard founded this Durham institution to give Black North Carolinians access to higher learning that segregation otherwise denied them. It became a state-supported liberal arts college in 1925 — one of the first publicly funded liberal arts colleges for African Americans in the nation — before growing into today's regional university.
Black Wall Street
Durham, NC
In the early twentieth century, Durham's Parrish Street earned a national nickname: Black Wall Street. Along it clustered African American enterprises including the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, led by John Merrick, Dr. Aaron Moore, and C. C. Spaulding, and the Mechanics and Farmers Bank, led by R. B. Fitzgerald and W. G. Pearson. Together they made Durham a byword for Black entrepreneurship.
Royal Ice Cream Sit-In
Durham, NC
On June 23, 1957, a group of young African Americans sat down at the Royal Ice Cream parlor on this site and refused to leave the whites-only section, staging one of the earliest sit-in protests of the modern civil rights era. Their arrest led to a court case that directly challenged the doctrine of separate racial facilities. The quiet act of sitting became a demand for dignity.
Pauli Murray
Durham, NC
Pauli Murray grew up in Durham, in a childhood home a quarter mile south of here, and went on to break barrier after barrier. A lawyer, activist, poet, and writer of the memoir Proud Shoes (1956), Murray helped shape the legal arguments behind the civil rights and women's movements, and in later life became the first African American woman ordained an Episcopal priest. Few Americans left a mark across so many fields.