What legends did we miss just because they weren’t yet famous enough for us?
Today, we music fans may pay hundreds, sometimes even thousands of dollars to buy a ticket to see a major arena performer. They’re expensive even if our ticket is for the 62nd row, at such a distance that we just have to trust that that’s really your favorite singer up there, and not just a good impersonator with some makeup and a wig.
Of course, it’s not such a dilemma here. The most expensive performers are so globally big, we assume they won’t come to Knoxville anytime soon, and probably not until they’re no longer on the magazine covers.
We can only daydream about living in a place where we could have seen these talents before they were famous.
But history suggests we pay more attention to the little performers who show up in little places.
Sometimes they get big. A lot of these mega-famous superstars are people we could have seen perform here in Knoxville, if we’d been paying close attention to the listings.
If you had nothing to do on the spring evening of Monday, Mar. 27, 1989, at 7 p.m., for example, might you have been tempted by the public listing of a songwriting class at First Lutheran School at 1207 Broadway? There that warm evening was a young recording artist from Oklahoma. And maybe because they thought a new recording artist might be tempting to outsiders, the class invited the public to attend—that is, if they had $5 to defray expenses. The guest performer, there to play a few tunes and take your questions about songwriting, was 27-year-old Garth Brooks.
Knoxville News-Sentinel, June 25, 1989
Was he already wearing his big cowboy hat? Three months later, on June 30, the same Mr. Brooks performed a Friday-evening show at the old Village Barn on Asheville Highway. And apparently he hung around town for the weekend, because he performed a few days later, on Sunday, July 2, at Ella Guru’s, the basement club in the Old City. The space is now the fondue restaurant The Melting Pot. Brooks later mentioned Ella Guru’s in a 1995 song about his early career called “The Old Stuff.”
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Do you ever go to boat promotions? If you went to Aquapalooza, the boat festival at Lenoir City Park on July 22, 2006, you might have noticed a striking young blonde teenager. She was there, 18 years ago, singing and playing guitar outside, near the lake shore, for free. News-Sentinel writer Wayne Bledsoe tried to alert us to that fact, with a big feature story based on his phone interview with the pretty young Hendersonville High student, whose name—it was already a great name for a rising pop star—was Taylor Swift.
“Up-and-coming country singer-songwriter determined to succeed.” (Knoxville News-Sentinel, July 21, 2006.)
Performing that day on the same stage were a couple of older country musicians, Danielle Peck and Dusty Drake. Aquapalooza was a boat-centric promotion by Knoxville-based pleasure-craft manufacturer Sea Ray, who kept it going for some years, though mostly in other locations, from the Carolina coast to Austin, Texas.
She was on her way up, swiftly—just a few months later, she was on The Tonight Show for the first time.
The following February 23, Swift was on a bill with George Strait and Ronnie Millsap at UT’s Thompson-Boling Arena (some promotions referred to it as the George Strait Concert). Bledsoe attended, along with 17,000 others, and called it: “Swift was the surprise element of the evening. While she has the enthusiasm and energy appropriate for her age, she was surprisingly professional and poised for a performer who is just 17.”
But she may have caused more excitement when she performed the afternoon before when she played to a packed house at the Farragut High Gym.
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Reba McEntire is familiar even to those who can’t name a single one of her hit songs, and who wouldn’t like them if they could. She’s a TV star. She’s also one of the biggest country stars of the last 40 years. Before her name rang a bell with most folks, she performed in Knoxville several times beginning as early as February, 1978, when the 22-year-old from Oklahoma played with one of the big country jamboree shows that used to be regular things at the Civic Coliseum. That first time she played here, the bigger stars on the same stage with her were Ray Stevens and Mickey Gilley. She did several shows with other Nashville sorts, one at the Tennessee Theatre in early 1982 with Steve Wariner, usually for about $7.
But her first solo show in Knoxville was free, at least to anyone with a Tennessee Valley Fair pass. She performed outside at the Homer Hamilton Theatre on Sept. 14, 1983. It’s hard to tell how many of us showed up for that. By most accounts, her big breakthrough was just a few months later, with the album My Kind of Country, which put several songs high on the charts.
It’s easiest to find instances of famous country performers playing in Knoxville when they were so obscure they’d have a hard time cashing a check—like the whole band Alabama, a ragged quartet who about 45 years ago were playing so frequently in one bar called the Brewery that some regulars figured it was the house band. Some were refugees from Nashville, like Chris Stapleton, who was with his new band the Steeldrivers was featured on a WDVX public-radio experiment called “Tennessee Shines” in August, 2008, one of several different acts on a $10 ticket.
But there are several performers from other genres, like REM, who played a few bar shows on Cumberland Avenue in the early ’80s, before their first album. That might have been a natural move for a North Georgia band.
If you’d been at the Jacob Building at Chilhowee Park on Dec. 23, 1960, you would have seen a young rising talent billed as “America’s Top Favorite Recording Personality.” That may have been stretching it—before 1960, he had seen only two charting singles, and when he played at Chilhowee, he’d had only one #1 hit on the R&B charts, “Try Me.” But those who attended had no reason to quibble with promoters’ exhortations. The headliner at that Christmastime show was Georgia’s James Brown, who at 27 had been recently emerging as the standout star of the Famous Flames, the band that was still backing him that night. Brown had a strong following, but he was not nearly as well-known as he would be later in the ‘60s, when he was the “Godfather of Soul,” and “Mr. Dynamite,” the very founder of Funk.
Knoxville Journal, December 23, 1960.
At Chilhowee Park, several other R&B bands played on the same $2 bill, including the Clovers, the Spaniels, and the Five Satins. It was a show mainly for Black patrons, but in those segregated days, the ads assured that there was a “Section reserved for White spectators.”
It was one of Knoxville’s last segregated shows. A few months later, the Civic Coliseum opened, on a quietly unsegregated policy. Brown performed there at the Coliseum many times in years to come; although one performance in the early 70s led to his arrest for inciting to riot, he was one of the all-time most frequent performers at that venue. Brown eventually invested in a Knoxville radio station, which survives, through many changes, as WJBE. Of course, Brown was from Georgia, too, just like REM was, so it may be not that startling that he would have performed one state north, in East Tennessee.
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Sometimes older eras are more surprising. Drummer Chick Webb was the consummate Harlem bandleader, the informal host of the famous Savoy Ballroom. Due to his disability he didn’t tour much, and rarely toured in the segregated South, but for reasons yet to be known, he performed in Knoxville on three separate occasions in 1937, for both white and African American audiences. The last of them was the one most open to the general public, and a very big deal: the New Year’s Eve show at Chilhowee Park, in the last hours of 1937 and the first hours of 1938. At that show, attended by both races in segregated circumstances, he featured his current singer, a 20-year-old who had recently lived in a New York orphanage: Ella Fitzgerald.
By then, her name was making headlines even in Knoxville. She hadn’t reached her peak, but jazz fans who were paying attention had heard of her, and perhaps attended just to hear her brilliant voice.
One perhaps more surprising example comes from the months before World War II. Every spring, University of Tennessee students organized the traditional Nahheeyayli dance. Remarkably, they often got famous big bands to perform, like those of Chick Webb, Benny Goodman, Hal Kemp, Paul Whiteman. On the first Tuesday evening in May, 1941, at Alumni Memorial, which was decorated with green and yellow balloons, you’d have seen a big star, Tommy Dorsey, and his famous band. The bespectacled trombonist was indeed very famous in 1941, one of America’s leading big-bandleaders. He was by far the most recognizable face in the room. Not yet a star was his vocalist, mentioned in an odd line in the sixth paragraph of a society-page account of the event. “Note well the mellow notes by which vocalist Frank Sinatra wins the crowd.”
A young Frank Sinatra (right) with Tommy Dorsey In Ship Ahoy (1942), about a year after his performance at UT. (Wikipedia.)
At the time Sinatra was 25. He had recorded “I’ll Never Smile Again,” as part of the Dorsey band—but not yet another one of his earliest hits, “Night and Day.” He’d never been in a movie except for a brief uncredited bit in an obscure B-musical, Las Vegas Nights—which happened to open at the Riviera downtown nine days after his appearance at UT. Some students knew who he was, but he could have gotten a grilled cheese at the counter at Ellis & Ernest Drugstore without being pestered for any autographs. He’s said to have played some pick-up baseball during his brief time at UT. Of course, he was from Hoboken, said to have been the birthplace of baseball.
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Stars aren’t all singers. Thanks to our spell as a TV-production center, we sometimes got to see lifestyle icons before the rest of the country did. If you’d gone to a United Way fundraiser telethon at the Bijou Theatre in September, 2009, for example, you could have seen host Hallerin Hilton Hill on stage, but also a 40-ish cohost named Guy Fieri. While not exactly unknown, the unorthodox chef was familiar mainly only to devotees of the Food Network, where he’d had a show for about three years.
Sports fans have had their opportunities, too. Johnny Unitas would be one of the great pro-football quarterbacks of all time, playing for the Baltimore Colts whom he led to their first Super Bowl victory in 1971. But Knoxvillians who went to see the Vols play a non-conference game on Oct. 24, 1953, against the University of Louisville, got to see the 20-year-old Pittsburgh native on Shields-Watkins Field on Oct. 24, 1953. (It wasn’t yet called Neyland Stadium, but the same gridiron, and the old masonry horseshoe that greeted the young Unitas is still the core of the stadium we know.) He was already getting some attention for his passing prowess, but the famous Vols defense was ready for him, and shut him down. Unitas scored one touchdown in Knoxville on a run, but the Vols beat the Cardinals 59-6.
Actually more impressive at the same field in 1962 was Bear Bryant’s latest find, another quick-handed Western Pennsylvania native, in fact, and one drawing comparisons to Unitas. Joe Namath was just a 19-year-old sophomore when he came to Neyland Stadium on Oct. 20, 1962, and led the Tide to beat the home team 27-7, in a passing game at Neyland Stadium. The day Namath played there was the day the old arena was dedicated with its new name, honoring Gen. Robert Neyland, who had died earlier that year.
There are hundreds of others, of course. The only time I know that dancer Fred Astaire ever performed in Knoxville was at Staub’s Theatre in April, 1907, when he was not quite 8 years old, as part of a large company performing a incongruously Christmas-themed play; with his older sister Adele, he was part of a duo.
A lot of our opportunities of the past may remain obscure, because often music, and the musicians who perform it, are vaporous. They often come to seem important and worth paying attention to only in retrospect.
The most perfect example is not a one-time visitor, but a local. To read Dolly Parton’s autobiography, we might gather that she performed in Knoxville several hundred times, many or most of those times with a small live radio audience made up of local folks who wandered in off Gay Street. But she hardly caused a ripple in local history. Unnoticed by newspaper columnists who, if they saw her, may have just thought of her as another cute little mountain girl, she was likewise unrecorded by radio spreadsheets. Radio found it more urgent to keep records of sponsors, often recording performers only by the word “talent.” All that fermentation, the applause that Dolly still remembers, has just vaporized, remaining only as vague and sometimes conflicting memories.
Or course, there are lots more. Several Knoxvillians of a certain age remember Jimmy Buffett performing on the Strip in the early ‘70s, long before his Margaritaville era, some even claiming he assembled his first band here. Others even have vague recollections that a seminal boy band with the odd name of NSYNC, presumably including Memphis-born lead singer Justin Timberlake, was here in the mid-’90s making a very early promotional appearance at the Western Plaza bowling alley. All are plausible, but it’s hard to find dates or verifying written evidence for these. You may know of more.
This is the lesson of music history. Performers who aren’t famous yet may deserve our attention, too. Go see an unknown this weekend. Take notes, and keep them.
By Jack Neely
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