Welcome to KHP’s guide to Knoxville music. “Knoxville: A Walking Music Guide,” emphasizes downtown sites associated with songwriters, composers and musicians well-known enough to be recognizable by the American music-listening public, and serves as a handy introduction to the Knoxville-centric work of these writers and musicians.

The guide is split into three sections:

Overture: Music in Knoxville: an introductory essay. 

Key Figures in Knoxville Music History: Bio’s of 54 notable composers, musicians, songwriters, and civic leaders who have left their musical mark on the city over the decades.

Places: An interactive Google map highlighting downtown locations and a few outliers where musical legends have occurred.

Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors (see below), this digital guide is also available as a free 44-page booklet. Copies are available (while stocks last) at the following downtown locations: Visit Knoxville, East Tennessee History Center, Union Ave Books, Addison’s Books, and The Maker Exchange.

The guide is also available to order for a “penny + shipping” through KHP’s online store.

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Key Figures in Knoxville Music History

 

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Overture: Music in Knoxville

 

Connecting several different cultures and eras, Knoxville’s music history is deep and diverse, and occasionally innovative and influential, offering a good many significant surprises along the way.

What is known about the struggling frontier city’s early musical history is random and episodic. Violins were advertised in Knoxville in the 1790s. A school for young women employed musical teachers in the 1820s. Local publishers of the 1830s printed sheet music, mostly of hymns. Occasional musical events, like a vocal concert by celebrity Tom Thumb in 1849, drew crowds.

The arrival of railroads in 1855 energized the half-forgotten former state capital with new cultures, new musical traditions, and new demands for musical performance. Refugees from famine-wracked Ireland and Central Europe’s political catastrophes brought their own cultural traditions. Almost suddenly the city supported multiple brass bands and classical-music groups.

Just after the Civil War, the city flowered culturally with German classical musical events and performances by native sopranos, as well as Black brass bands and choruses composed of people recently freed from slavery.

In 1867, a remarkable immigrant named Gustavus Knabe, of Leipzig, a horn-playing former member of Felix Mendelssohn’s famous orchestra and an aspiring composer himself, founded the Knoxville Philharmonic Society, which encouraged musical expertise and performance with regular recitals and concerts, while also sponsoring traveling operatic troupes.

Three new venues for local and visiting classical musicians seated as many as 400. German-speaking Swiss immigrant Peter Staub answered the demand more extravagantly in 1872 when he completed Staub’s Opera House, a European-style theater on Gay Street, with multiple balconies and a capacity of more than 1,100. In its inaugural year, Staub’s welcomed globally hailed Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, performing with Italian opera singers. Bull closed his show by shifting to fiddle, and a crowd-pleasing surprise: his rendition of “Arkansas Traveler.”

By the 1880s, Staub’s was hosting annual musical May Festivals, which were dedicated to European opera, with visiting musicians ranging from composer Victor Herbert to Austrian soprano Emma Juch. The weeklong festival, which included ticketed shows at the Opera House but also public shows at Chilhowee Park, was a much-anticipated event on Knoxville’s calendar for several years, drawing hundreds of strangers, “great crowds of them upon every train.”

While focusing on European opera, a festival in May, 1883, ended with a dramatic surprise not on the original agenda. After the last operatic performer, 17 fiddlers—”Knights of the Bow”—paraded single file onto the stage at Staub’s. Together and separately, they performed old-time tunes, delighting the well-dressed crowd. “The applause from the audience was almost deafening,” reported the Knoxville Tribune. If it was not the festival’s aesthetic high point, the contest “furnished more fun than all of them put together, and was appreciated by the most cultured people of the city, there being several hundred ladies present.”

Hence an opera festival made a space for one of history’s first country-music concerts. In the half-century afterward, especially on Market Square, fiddling contests became part of the culture, often spiced with comedy.

In 1885, Carter County politician Robert Taylor moved to Knoxville; one of the era’s chief proponents of old-time music, “Fiddlin’ Bob,” member of a Market Square quartet, would be elected governor in 1886 after an uncommonly musical campaign. His famous essay, “The Fiddle and the Bow” exalted music as “the wine of the soul.”

Meanwhile, various ethnic associations celebrated their own musical traditions. By the early 1870s, the Irish Mutual Benevolent Society hosted musical parades and all-night dances at the Lamar House, especially for St. Patrick’s Day.

Welsh immigrants, who came to Knoxville to work in the iron and coal industries, were proud of their singing, and their Eisteddfod music festival of 1890, in the urban Mechanicsville neighborhood, seems to have drawn some attention beyond state boundaries. (Dolly Parton, whose ancestors lived in nearby Sevier County, has credited her Welsh ancestry for her family’s famous love of music.)

Black musicians formed musical groups like the Colored Brass Band of Knoxville, which played for a visit by former President Andrew Johnson in 1869 and became a regular at political rallies across party lines. Knoxville College, founded in 1875 for Black students, spawned several instrumental and vocal groups, some of which achieved acclaim beyond the region.

During Staub’s first 30 years, an encyclopedic array of major musicians from around the world performed at the “Opera House.” The African American piano phenomenon known as Blind Tom Wiggins was there in 1877. The same year, saxophone pioneer Louise Linden astonished a crowd, many of whom had never witnessed this instrument not yet manufactured in the United States. The Four Cohans (including musical composer George M.), were there in 1902. Sissieretta Jones, the legendary Black soprano who was internationally famous for her operatic style, filled the hall with a biracial audience on at least three separate occasions, 1900-1902.

At the same time, around the train stations and on Market Square, street musicians made a meager living playing for nickels. Charlie Oaks, a blind guitarist who perhaps as early as 1890 was frequenting the train station and Market Square, often singing tales of tragedy, has been claimed to be one of America’s first professional country musicians.

Joining them was a much-younger street musician also known for creating his own personae, Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock, author of “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” Stories about his local years are mysterious and contradictory, but the California-based hobo singer always claimed Knoxville as his hometown.

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By 1900, a Knoxvillian who was not particular about genre could see a different musical show almost every night. Arriving in 1909, the Bijou Theatre, smaller than Staub’s, offered a venue for traveling Broadway musicals and vaudeville shows, which always included musicians.

Bertha Walburn Clark, a young conservatory-trained violinist from Cincinnati, was teaching music and performing at Knoxville hotels by 1902, raising the profile of instrumental classical music.
Black music found an audience in the streets. Perhaps the best-remembered of them was the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, featuring Carl Martin and Howard Armstrong—though plaintive singer Leola Manning also created a following then, and made recordings that have survived.

The 1920s was a watershed decade for music, an era that combined new technology in photographs, radio, and sound motion pictures, with new combinations of cultures—just as Bertha Clark developed her “Little Symphony” in the ballroom of the Farragut Hotel. The ensemble of about 20 trained musicians offered a hint of things to come.

Radio arrived in 1922, and was immediately broadcasting live music, at first mostly local classical, religious, and jazz performers. Launched by young tech entrepreneur Stuart Adcock, WNOX began airing in 1925 as a substantial station with interesting programming and a significant reach, heard as far away as New Jersey. Soon, a second smaller station, WROL, also associated with Adcock, emerged to compete with WNOX for the regional market.

Theaters were featuring Black performers as headliners more than ever before: Mamie Smith, Roland Hayes, Noble Sissle, Earl Hines, and Marian Anderson all performed for biracial audiences in Knoxville during that era. A reconstituted Knoxville College Quartet drew new attention, first at shows in Pennsylvania, then with a 1925 tour of Great Britain, culminating in a live broadcast on the BBC.

And phonographs, which had been around for decades, were becoming more affordable, but the recording industry was still focused on an affluent market of the college-educated, with jazz and classical recordings. Run by a Swiss family, Sterchi Brothers Furniture sold phonographs, and attempted to expand the market by greeting the working class with simpler “folk music.” Sterchi sponsored some of the earliest country-music recordings, ca. 19241926. These early recording artists were otherwise obscure street musicians from the streets of Knoxville, most of them bluesy balladeers, including George Reneau, the aging Charlie Oaks, and the duo Mac and Bob, but also banjoist Uncle Dave Macon. Several of these early recordings, though considered progenitors of “country music” in retrospect, were called “blues” (including Macon’s “Knoxville Blues”), suggesting the African American influence on early country.

As it developed, “country music,” in ways almost indistinguishable from jazz, adopted and improvised elements of several other kinds of music, including blues, western swing, martial band music, and even Hawaiian music, most obvious in the incorporation of a new steel guitar sound.

To raise interest in records, Sterchi’s became a major sponsor of WNOX, and was involved in the array of field recordings undertaken by the Brunswick/Vocalion label in 19291930, at the St. James Hotel.
Brunswick-Vocalion’s months of recording sessions at the St. James, near Market Square, offer an unusual window into Knoxville music during that creative age. Although not the most famous of the field recordings made in the South during that era, it was the most diverse, featuring ballads,

spirituals, sophisticated dance jazz, country music, novelty tunes, African American blues. At the controls was Richard Voynow, a significant figure in jazz circles, a sometime songwriter who was former pianist in Bix Beiderbecke’s classic Wolverines band.

Among the dozens who recorded for Voynow were Howard Armstrong and Carl Martin; bandleader Maynard Baird; the country but Hawaiian-tinged Tennessee Ramblers; old gospel balladeers Mac and Bob; singer Leola Manning (her only known recordings); country song stylist Hugh Ballard Cross; singer-songwriter guitar bluesman Will Bennett. It was not a popular or financially successful enterprise, partly due to the sudden arrival of the Depression, but offers a witness to the diversity of musical forms in Knoxville during that pivotal era.

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“Hillbilly music,” a term used disparagingly but nonetheless embraced by its fans, had often been considered a niche genre, sentimental old-time music appealing mostly to unpretentious older folks from the country. That changed in the mid-1930s. Roy Acuff, a high-school athlete who, when his dreams of playing big-league baseball evaporated, turned to petty crime, but then began working on fiddle and vocal technique, performing in public around 1930. By 1935, he and his ever-changing band, The Crazy Tennesseans, became a local phenomenon, filling studios, boxing rings, and ultimately the Market Hall auditorium with an audience of mostly young, mostly male enthusiasts who enjoyed Acuff’s unpredictable, energetic, almost aggressive presence, as well as his gimmicks, including sound effects and a little-known new pseudo-Hawaiian instrument from the West Coast called the Dobro. His raw, untrained country voice harked from earlier eras, but would influence some younger singers, like Hank Williams, who was listening at home in Alabama.

Acuff left Knoxville in 1938 to make his first records, including the Dobro showcase “Great Speckled Bird,” which became a national sensation, even during the Big Band era. He landed in Nashville to broadcast from the famous WSM tower, one of the most powerful in the middle part of the nation, and made the Grand Ole Opry famous.

But he had begun a stir in Knoxville, and it didn’t vanish with his departure. Chicago promoter Lowell Blanchard, who arrived in town in 1936 to build on Acuff’s momentum, created an often loony, irreverent, unpredictable variety show called the “Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round.” Country music, as it was emerging, was its mainstay, but the 6090 minute show also offered humor, jazz, and occasional classical pieces.

It was the beginning of an era when musicians from other parts of the country would come to Knoxville just to perform on an influential radio station. Among Blanchard’s early hires were singer-comedian Archie Campbell and Pee Wee King, a Western-swing accordionist of Polish origin from Milwaukee. King would later co-author the “Tennessee Waltz.” Local music-and-humor act Homer and Jethro joined the fun. Another during that first year was a Kentucky guitarist, later to be legendary as a songwriter, James Arthur Pritchett, whom Blanchard renamed Arthur Q. Smith. It may seem remarkable that the raw, rowdy heyday of country music coincided with the full ripening of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, led by Bertha Clark, whose progressive experiments resulted in a full-sized orchestra in 1935. She remains a rarity as a woman who served as a longtime conductor, but even rarer as one of the very few women in history who has created a symphony orchestra, and arguably the most durable symphony orchestra in the South.

Hence the full-fledged KSO debuted just a few weeks before the decidedly informal “Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round.” But country and classical were not entirely alien from each other, as a few musical ambassadors proved: violinist/fiddler Harry Nides played country fiddle on WNOX at lunchtime and classical violin at night as the KSOÕs first concertmaster.

By 1940 WNOX became an especially respected draw for country musicians, among them teenaged Chet Atkins, a talented fiddler and guitarist from nearby Union County. Thanks to his connections to Knoxville musicians passing around records backstage at WNOX, he was discovering the work of “gypsy jazz” virtuoso Django Reinhardt. Atkins would later say his unusual style was his failing to imitate Reinhardt. For years to come, even after his success as a producer and session musician in Nashville, Atkins preferred to bill himself as a “jazz guitarist.”

Likewise, another early WNOX star, Jethro Burns, transcribed Reinhardt partner Stephane Grappelli’s violin style on the mandolin. Songwriter Don Gibson later described the Hot Club of France as an inspiration.

It may have been an ironic sort of backhanded coup when Rogersville’s respected Judge Winfield Hale, himself a Schubert aficionado, denounced the “shrieks, howls, and tom-tom beating called hillbilly music” in a 1945 speech in Knoxville. His words drew scorn and hilarity in newspaper columns and on live-radio shows. Nothing could have exalted country music more.

That era saw the dawn of a new form of country. Two of bluegrass progenitor Bill Monroe’s best players, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, mutinied, leaving his Nashville band. Eventually they landed in Knoxville to broadcast on WROL and make their first recordings in 1948, planting bluegrass music here. In some ways the improvisation-based style was a string-band answer to bebop. Also on WROL were the Bailey Brothers, who sometimes added a touch of Hawaiian guitar to their bluegrass. Several early bluegrass talents were nurtured by an offbeat country populist from Sevier County named Cas Walker, a grocer who used music to promote his stores.

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Gospel was always around, and some Black churches, like Seney Chapel and Payne Avenue Baptist, became known for their vocal ensembles. A bit of an outlier arrived on a newer station, WBIR, in the early 1940s. Claude Jeter and the Silvertones, a bluesy gospel quintet previously based in West Virginia, arrived in Knoxville thanks to sponsorship by local Swan’s Bakery. On the airwaves and in concerts and church services, Swan Silvertones, as they would be known for the rest of their career, developed a fan base attracted to their sometimes-surreal harmonies. Their records would much later have a surprising influence on several white rock ‘n’ roll bands of national stature.

Coincidentally during the Silvertones’ radio heyday, a young girl later to be known as Tina Turner was singing and dancing in downtown streets for the nickels of passersby.

Just after World War II, the KSO took a step toward a national profile with its 1947 hiring of new conductor David Van Vactor, a flute expert from Indiana whose own compositions had been drawing attention in New York and elsewhere since the 1930s. With Van Vactor’s arrival, classical music branched into the academic realm when the maestro also became director of UTÕs new music school. Van Vactor encouraged and developed new talent, like the prodigy Trythall brothers—especially Gilbert, who was working with the KSO while still a teenager, and would soon be experimenting with electronic music.

Joining Van Vactor at UT in 1952 was Edward Zambara, Canadian bel-canto voice expert, who over the next quarter-century would draw several aspiring operatic singers to Knoxville for his training, including Delores Ziegler and Cheryl Studer.

Meanwhile, that other more basic strand of music that began in the streets faced new opportunities and challenges. In 1953, a classical-music fan named Jim Dick launched the city’s first single-genre station, WIVK: it was, and remained, a country-music station.

Then in 1954 WNOX moved to new state-of-the- art studios at suburban Whittle Springs, with much fanfare, and expectations that the 1,000-seat complex would launch a new era for performing, broadcasting, and recording, at a time when Nashville’s recording industry was still in its infancy.
However, several things went wrong with the model. The live-radio phenomenon was dwindling, partly due to the competition of television. Complicating the picture was a new music more exciting to young people. In the summer of that year, a Market Square record store (Bell Sales Co.) caught the attention of RCA studios in New York, for a phenomenon: a 78 record, “That’s All Right,” by then-unknown Elvis Presley was selling by the thousands, to a diverse Knoxville market. Although WNOX hosted a few rock ‘n’ roll shows, most mainstream venues were slow to embrace it—with the exception of Chilhowee Park’s Jacob Building, which hosted a few dozen prominent Black rock pioneers, from Fats Domino to Little Richard, for predominantly Black audiences.

But it was a jazz show during that era that made national headlines, when a February 1957 Louis Armstrong concert at Chilhowee Park was targeted by segregationist bombers protesting the desegregation of nearby Clinton High, as well as Armstrong’s own racially integrated band. No one was hurt in the bombing that only briefly interrupted the show, but the incident alarmed the legendary trumpeter, who became more outspoken about civil rights.

In its final decade, though, Knoxville’s live-radio era yielded several dramatic successes: singer-songwriter Don Gibson, who claimed to have penned “Sweet Dreams,” one of Patsy Cline’s greatest hits, backstage at the new WNOX auditorium. The Everly Brothers first performed rock ‘n’ roll as a duo on the air at WROL around 1954, much to the consternation of their sponsor. And, by 1958, a remarkable girl from Sevier County named Dolly Parton, began performing her own songs on newer, all-country station WIVK.

As live radio fizzled in the early 1960s, Knoxville was less well-known for nurturing country music, with a few exceptions. In the 1970s, Buddy’s Barbecue, a suburban fast-food restaurant beside a successful music store, hosted free weekend bluegrass conventions that nurtured local musicians like the boundary-pushing band Knoxville Grass, while also attracting talent such as J.D. Crowe, Bela Fleck (with his early band, Spectrum), a very young Ricky Skaggs, and Doyle Lawson. Local dobroist Phil Leadbetter joined Crowe’s band and later earned several Grammy nominations.

Musical performance shifted toward the university area, if not UT itself. Western Cumberland Avenue became known as the Strip, and by 1959 was hosting both record stores and multiple nightclubs that drew crowds to hear jazz, folk, and rock ‘n’ roll. Several bands in the folk, alt-country or alt-rock realms—the Cumberland Trio, Sweet William and the Stereos, Ashley Cleveland, Fatback (as it evolved into the Amazing Rhythm Aces), the Lonesome Coyotes, R.B. Morris, the Judybats, Superdrag, the V-Roys, most of whom earned some modicum of national fame, played early shows on the Strip—even as it became a mecca for punk rock, somehow attracting appearances by California hardcore bands and Iggy Pop.

But by the late 1970s, UT itself was becoming known for its jazz program, thanks to the teaching leadership of former Woody Herman saxophonist Jerry Coker, inviting both students and teachers to come to Knoxville to learn technique on campus, and then perform in local bars and restaurants, in a city where maybe people would listen. It’s what drew well-known recording artists like pianist Donald Brown and saxophonist Gregory Tardy to Knoxville, not just to teach at UT, but to become part of Knoxville’s living environment, performing in theaters and nightclubs, on Market Square, and even in restaurants and bars.

The energy began to tilt back toward downtown in the mid-1980s, especially as the historic Bijou and Tennessee theaters hit their stride with regular performances, and as the Old City blossomed as a nightclub district, with the Annie’s/Lucille’s jazz continuum, the legendary if short-lived club Ella Guru’s, and later the bare-bones music-lover’s haven the Pilot Light, as well as multiple other clubs most notable for alternative rock.

Leading much of that charge was a former public-radio announcer turned promoter, Ashley Capps, who in 2002 was key to creating the Bonnaroo music festival in Manchester, Tenn. Some Bonnaroo performers also made appearances in Knoxville theaters as part of the deal.

Knoxville Opera, a spiritual descendant of Knabe’s Philharmonic Society of 1867, emerged in 1976 through the leadership of a native-born opera star, Mary Costa, as well as singing coach broadened the city’s cultural options while launching careers, like those of future Met mezzo-soprano Delores Ziegler.
KO began hosting the annual Rossini Festival in 2002. Proposed by Maestro Frank Graffeo, it originally featured concurrent performances of full operas, but always included operatic singing emphasized among dozens of other musical performances across genres. The spring festival surprised many when it drew thousands to Gay Street as likely the most popular downtown street festival in history, and still does so by combining opera and popular music, including country. It might almost have seemed an homage to the opera-oriented festivals on the same street in another century.

In 1999, trumpeter Vance Thompson launched the independent nonprofit Knoxville Jazz Orchestra, a 17-piece big band, some of whose members are notable instrumentalists in their own right. The KJO frequently performs with many of the living greats and their several recordings have achieved international acclaim.

Meanwhile, Knoxville bred a number of talented singers, especially in the country-music idiom, notably Kenny Chesney, one of the major stars of his era. Thanks to the internet and network TV, though, several became famous nationally before they were well-known locally, among them Ashley Monroe, Emily Ann Roberts, Kelsea Ballerini, Morgan Wallen.

Even more surprising was the 2009 launch of the Big Ears Festival, a labor of love by Capps and his colleagues, intended to celebrate the best in creative new music globally. It made the best of the historic but recently reimagined Tennessee Theatre, as well as the Bijou and several other nightclubs and historic churches within walking distance. Big Ears has drawn big audiences and extravagant praise as one of the most-daring musical adventures among world festivals.

Like some of the operatic festivals of yore, Big Ears is a four-day event, with multiple performers from all over the world, some famous, some not, in downtown venues, and an unspoken guarantee of surprises—perhaps befitting its musically surprising host city.

By Jack Neely

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THANK YOU

 

The Knoxville History Project deeply appreciates the support and generosity of our sponsors who helped underwrite the cost of research and the production of this music guide, the first of its kind in Knoxville.

Without your support, this project would not have been possible.

 

The Knoxville History Project also wishes to thank the following for their assistance with this project:

 

Thanks also to Rosalind Hackett, Joe Parrott Jr., Shawn Poynter, Alec Riedl, Alan Sims.

All other images by the Knoxville History Project.