Once a year, the historic Tennessee Theatre invites the Knoxville History Project to lead an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour with historian Jack Neely of Knoxville’s 1928 Moorish-revival “motion-picture palace.”
Jack knows more than a thing or two about the theater, as he researched and wrote the official history of the cathedral-like venue, The Tennessee Theatre: A Grand Entertainment Palace published in 2015.
Jack will show you around the big building, including the backstage area, as he relates the theatre’s extravagant story, which has included several first-run regional movie premieres (and a few world premieres), but also thousands of live performances: on that stage, Desi Arnaz sang Cuban songs and demonstrated the rhumba; Glenn Miller led his famous orchestra in a national radio broadcast; Fannie Brice and the Ziegfeld Follies drew a standing-room-only audience, the biggest in the theater’s history; the legendary cowboy Tom Mix hosted a small rodeo; and, in recent years, major performers Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Lou Reed, Johnny Cash, Lionel Hampton, and composer Philip Glass gave concerts to big audiences, some of which have earned international attention. It was also the first theater that Roy Acuff performed in – and the last for Chet Atkins.
