The Jazz Legend of Gordon’s Town House

1949 Town House Ad, courtesy of the Knoxville News Sentinel.

For decades I’d heard rumors and fond and unbelievable memories of Gordon’s Town House. It opened at the corner of Cumberland and 17th Street in the 1950s. It had a big dining room with a dance floor, like those posh Manhattan nightclubs in black-and-white movies. Full swing orchestras would play in there, to dancing crowds in the hundreds. But it also had a smaller, more intimate room called the Blue Note. There you’d hear more current music, like bebop.

The stories of performers who appeared at Gordon’s in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s—Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Woody Herman—can be hard to believe.

Most of the people I interviewed in the ‘90s about Gordon’s Townhouse, including some who said they performed there, have since died. The fact that a lot of people of that era don’t remember Gordon’s Town House at all sometimes tempted me to suspect that these older guys were pulling my leg. I’m not sure I believed them until an older collector, Andy “Jazzman” Smith, showed me some yellowed posters.

About 20 years ago I wrote a feature story for Metro Pulse about the history of jazz in Knoxville. I included some vague Gordon’s Townhouse stories, wishing I knew more about it. It didn’t occur to me at the time that I could have interviewed Gordon Sams himself. In fact, I talked to him the other day. Gordon Sams still lives in town. He turned 95 a few days ago. His memories are clear.

“I’ve enjoyed music all my life,” he says. He’s helped others enjoy it, too.

He grew up in South Knoxville, and learned to play drums at old South Knoxville Junior High. He must have been better than average. When he was still a teenager, he got a job drumming with Knoxville’s best-known big band of the 1930s, Maynard Baird’s Southern Serenaders. Baird had led a Knoxville- based band since the early days of jazz, played live shows on WNOX, when it had a reach, made a few modest recordings, and had toured Northeastern cities.

Sams was just 15, and had to sit on Coca-Cola cases to reach all the drums. “I was crazy about Big Band music.” That was about 1939.

He was there in May, 1941, when Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra brought his 25-year-old singer, Frank Sinatra, to the stage at UT’s Alumni Hall to sing a few songs. Most of the dancers stopped dancing, and walked up to the bandstand to hear this young guy sing.” He remembers “Night and Day.” “People kept clapping, and Tommy Dorsey kept bringing him back.”

A prime age for World War II, Sams served in the Navy in the Pacific, as a gunner’s mate in campaigns at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Like a few thousand other guys, he came back home and returned to his old life, to try to pretend he was a regular college kid. At UT, Sams got involved in the annual event called Nahheeyayli–it was the ostensibly Cherokee name of UT’s biggest dance of the year, always at Alumni Auditorium, and usually with big-name bands. It was his job to book them.

Postwar UT students did a whole lot of dancing. Fraternities had dances all the time. It was Sams’ turn to book the entertainment, and he was perhaps a bit bolder than most, and went down to the corner of Vine and Central, the site of the Gem Theatre and the cultural epicenter of the black community, to try to stir up a band. He got directions to the Worker’s Club, a third-floor speakeasy in the Keller Building on Vine where a lot of black musicians hung out in the ’40s.

Most of the talent there was local, though some touring musicians, like saxophonist and bandleader Andy Kirk, performed there.

It was one of several downtown walk-up joints where you could find slot machines and whiskey, which was still banned in Knoxville. It was one of those places where the door with a sliding peephole where the doorman could see who he was letting in. They weren’t going to let Sams in because he was white– which would seem only fair, around 1950, since most of Knoxville was whites only.

As it happened, the talent that night was the biggest name that ever performed at the Worker’s Club. Just behind Sams in the hallway was Louis Armstrong. It was during the era when he was a middle-aged former star, but not yet a legend, and still occasionally playing little clubs. He was coming up the stairs right behind Sams. “If he can’t go in, I can’t play” said Armstrong, who must have had a generous sense of justice. Sams got in. He befriended Jock Smith, the owner, and became a regular, often the only white guy up there.

In that obscure room he met one Willie Gibbs, a talented and resourceful percussionist who’d been working casually with some other talented musicians, like local saxman Lance Owens, who had performed some in the service–once, in the Pacific, he shared a stage with Bob Hope–and admired Lester Young, whom he’d seen perform in New York. Later they connected with another saxophonist, a vaudevillian stranded by his troupe, named Rocky Wynder, who had once encountered Charlie Parker himself.

Sams saw their potential, and offered to be their manager. He worked with Gibbs and arrangements, and bought the band some suits, and booked them some gigs.

In the 1950s, the Knoxville R&B band was Willie Gibbs and the Illusioneers. Or Illusionaires. They both worked. For a decade, they were the hardest-working band in Knoxville. They played a lot in Knoxville, but Sams found them gigs as far away as Orlando. They loved jazz, but there was more demand for R&B.

Sams booked other acts, too, big names like Gene Krupa, the aggressive percussionist who was changing jazz. Krupa played the Jacob building in Chilhowee Park on Christmas Eve, 1946, and a few times after that. Sams says he was the only licensed booking agent in Knoxville. There were others, good ones, he says. They just weren’t licensed. Sams was serious.

He had connections to several of the big dance bands, and when he knew one was going to be in the vicinity, perhaps for a UT dance, he says, “I’d call all the country clubs, and ask whether they needed a band on a Sunday night, or a Monday. These country clubs would jump at it.”

Among those he booked were Hal McIntyre and his then-famous orchestra, who played in Knoxville several times in the late ‘40s and ‘50s; McIntyre died in a California fire in 1959. Another Sams booked was Glenn Miller trumpeter Ray Anthony, who’s still alive today, at age 97.

In 1953, he witnessed the Dorsey Brothers reunion, surprising for two reasons, that bandleaders Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, who were widely perceived to hate each other since their 1935 split, were reuniting at all—and secondly that these Pennsylvanians well known in Los Angeles and New York would do it in Knoxville. The usual story is that it happened at Deane Hill Country Club, where Jimmy Dorsey unexpectedly joined Tommy Dorsey on stage. (Now vanished—even the hilltop is gone—Deane Hill was in West Knoxville, just off Morrell Road.) Sams said that was actually their second reunion—something similar has happened at a UT dance at Alumni Auditorium a day or two earlier, when Jimmy Dorsey slipped in as Tommy Dorsey’s sixth saxophonist. Those who attended the UT show somehow kept it quiet, but the Deane Hill show made national news.

1961 Town House Ad, courtesy of the Knoxville News Sentinel.

Sams knew people. Cumberland Avenue was once a place for automotive shops and car dealerships. It was a natural place for it, on the national routes known as the Dixie and Lee Highways, and just outside of downtown’s traffic. At Cumberland and 17th was a broad building that had been a car dealership since the 1930s, with lots of floor space, and parking underneath. It emptied in 1957. To Sams, and probably to no one else, it looked like a great jazz nightclub.

Although there had been beer joints and restaurants on West Cumberland for decades, live music was uncommon on that strip not yet known as the Strip. In the 1950s, nightclubs were either downtown or out on the highways, Asheville Highway or Clinton Highway or Alcoa Highway, where people could get away with ignoring city rules about drinking and gambling. Even dancing was closely regulated by city codes.

Still in his early 30s, Sams had never run a club, never mind a big one, with seating for several hundred. “It was a big jump for a young guy with very little money to sign a loan for that big building,” he recalls. He was turning the idea over in his mind, loping around Cumberland late one night trying to decide on the place when he picked up half a brick and hurled it at the big building. It went through a glass window. With that gesture, he was either a criminal or the guy who was going to buy the building. “I couldn’t back out then.” He confessed to the vandalism at the same moment he told the owner he was ready to sign. He replaced the glass in a building that he owned.

He spent a lot of money making a car dealership look like a sophisticated New York nightclub. He set up a good restaurant with a 50-foot-long kitchen and a chef from New Orleans. He was lucky that the Andrew Johnson Hotel, once famous for its big restaurant, was cutting back on its dinner service; Sams hired most of its staff.

He says his club seated 300-400 (contemporary newspaper reports claimed 600). It was a complex place with multiple parts, a dance hall and three banquet rooms, separated by folding walls. In the back he put the more intimate club he called the Blue Note Lounge.

Usually the dance orchestra was a local group, the one led by Dick Jones, or sometimes the new 21- piece UT band known as the Jazz Giants, under the leadership of saxophonist Bill Scarlett. Blues pianist and singer, Charley Boyd was a regular.

But on special nights, Duke Ellington and his orchestra performed there. Count Basie, Tony Pastor, Woody Herman, and the irrepressible trumpeter Louis Prima did, too. Several Town House attractions had been Big Bands of the ’30s and ’40s.

Like Louis Armstrong, they were former pop stars, no longer at the top of the charts, but not yet legends that scholars wrote books about. Still, they were big names who occasionally appeared on the new medium of national television.

Sams became good friends with Woody Herman, who played at the Town House four times. They did some traveling with the clarinetist and bandleader, which was sometimes a harrowing experience. Herman had a convertible sports car—Sams thinks it was a Mercedes—and liked to drive it very fast. “I don’t think we went under 100, going through the mountains,” he recalls.

Gordon’s Town House was written up in one of the entertainment magazines as one of the finest of its kind. He didn’t save the clipping, and doesn’t remember which one, but it’s easy to believe.  People responded. Sometimes the place was packed. He says despite the location, his clientele was not mostly UT students, but adult professionals, many of them married, coming out for dinner and a little dancing. In its time the place also hosted many luncheons, of fraternal and charitable groups that wanted something a step up from the usual banquet halls.

Of course, the era of the Town House was also the era of desegregation. He remembers one of the few incidents from the civil rights era that was actually funny. Two of Knoxville’s leading civil-rights activists, Avon Rollins and Marion Barry–long before he was the controversial mayor of Washington, he was a UT student and a Knoxville civil-rights activist–came into the Town House and confronted Sams. They came straight to the point. “We’d like you to integrate this restaurant.”

In those days, some restaurants on Cumberland were still refusing to desegregate. Sams said he couldn’t desegregate, either, because he’d never been segregated. “This place is open to anybody who can buy the food,” he laughed. From the day he opened, he says, two years before the first sit-ins, it had never occurred to him to bar customers because of their race. Avoiding other races was not a major priority for real jazz fans.

It lasted a little more than four years, seemingly too short a time, but by the standards of Knoxville nightclubs, a decent run.

Sams’ Political Ad, courtesy of the Knoxville News Sentinel.

Two things changed. Approaching middle age with a family, he got a desk job, an unusual one for a jazz guy. In 1960, Sams was elected Knox County Register of Deeds. He was apparently pretty good at it, because he was re-elected four years later. “I started mixing more with politics” he says in a tone mixed with apology and perhaps regret.

The other thing was rock’n’roll. The new thing, which at first seemed like a weird fad for kids, blindsided him. He had been up in New York back in early ’56 with his friend Jack Comer, one of Knoxville’s other big music promoters. They were peeking in on the reunited Dorsey Brothers’ TV variety show. Both Sams and Comer knew the Dorseys. They’d both played multiple Knoxville shows, including UT’s Nahheeyayli, never mind their dramatic reunion in Knoxville three years earlier.

Comer and Sams were there to see Dorsey and others, but at the suggestion of another promoter they met, a persuasive guy named Tom Parker, they lingered in the empty TV studio to give a listen to a fellow Tennessean, barely 21 years old, who was rehearsing for the Dorsey show.

The kid’s name was Elvis Presley. It was several months before Elvis’ infamous waist-up-only performance on the Ed Sullivan show.

Sams admits he didn’t get Elvis, his greasy looks and his physical stage presence. “I looked at Jack, and he looked at me,” Sams recalls. “I said, “That’s the nastiest damn thing I’ve seen in my life.”

He was not the only one who responded that way. Jackie Gleason, who produced the show, was appalled at Presley’s act, and apologized for booking a “porno show.”

Tommy Dorsey died later that year at age 51, his brother Jimmy a few months later at 53. They were hard livers. It seemed the end of an era, part of a slow changing of the guard.

For lovers of dance jazz, things did’t get better. Maybe it was a golden age for bebop, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. That didn’t pass Knoxville by. Local guys like Lance Owens and Rocky Wynder and Bill Scarlett were exploring that meditative, sometimes dissonant new forms in the Town House’s Blue Note Lounge (Saxophonist Lance Owens was still playing occasional gigs until his death early this year.) But bebop didn’t bring in the dance crowds that made a big restaurant club work.

1962 Ad for Dugout Dougs, courtesy of the Knoxville News Sentinel.

The year 1962 was the year of the Twist, the dance craze that inspired a near riot across the street at Dugout Doug’s record store, where twisters spilled out into the street, blocking traffic.

One of the last performers at the Town House was Tony Pastor, who for 20 years had been leader of a famous big band that had played Nahheeyayli. Like a lot of the surviving old Big Band leaders, Pastor now had a much smaller band, a sextet.

When Gordon’s Town House closed at the end of 1962, the hit on the radio waves was the electric-guitar instrumental “Telstar” by the Tornados.

Beginning in 1963, Sams rented the space to other restaurants, more than one at a time. Part of it became known as the Pump Room, described as a “plush nightspot.” In February, 1965, the whole building went up in flames.

Today it’s hard to point to where Gordon’s Town House was. For many years, 17th Street had a dogleg to it. With the building on its southwest corner gone, the city took the opportunity to straighten out 17th Street. They scraped away the rubble of what had been Gordon’s Town House, and built the street right over it.

Gordon Sams lives in Northeast Knoxville, and remembers it better than anybody.

~Researched and Written by Jack Neely