ANCIENT TALES OF OUR SPANISH-SPEAKING POLICE CHIEF ARE AT LEAST PARTLY TRUE Knoxville has traditionally emphasized its Scots-Irish origins, but when we think of Knoxville’s first century, it’s hard to deny an intriguing thread of the Mediterranean. John Sevier’s ancestors […]

SOME AWKWARD LATE-CAREER DRAMA FOR TWO OLD PROS It’s baseball season, and one of those national movie channels has been showing an old baseball movie that raises an interesting question about the relationship of a couple of once-famous Knoxvillians. After […]

The former Knoxville Singing Group whose influence crossed genres in unexpected ways. One Black musical group has been cited by multiple well-known songwriters as an important inspiration for some of the most emblematic national and international hit songs of the […]

The Remarkable Story of a Diversified Horseman To us, Pryor Brown is the name of a parking garage, and of a longstanding dilemma of a large, unusual building that seems to have value but never a developer with the wherewithal […]

Wonderful Flowers, Phantom Princesses, Painted Legs, Ghostly Hands, and the Ku Klux Klan This has become a tradition, or a habit, which may be the same thing. Since the early days of Metro Pulse, I’ve written a column each about a […]

Our first big street fairs set a high bar for Fun, but also presented an early flowering of African American culture Imagine October in Knoxville, and subtract Volmania, drives in the Smokies, and Halloween decorations, and what would you have? […]

And the story of another Knoxville Hootenanny, the strangest concert of 1964 This month, our friends at the East Tennessee Historical Society are hosting a first-ever History Hootenanny. The word has a down-homey feel, which makes it a little surprising […]

The Scourge of the Snap-Shot People You may know that we have an ongoing project called “Knoxville Shoebox,” which is a slowly growing collection of personal photographs of historical value. Despite some major important collections of historic photographs, it’s surprising […]

Some thoughts about the new book about Frances Hodgson Burnett: Are we keeping our garden too secret? It’s gardening season, of course, and in local libraries and bookstores there’s a popular gift book called Unearthing the Secret Garden: The Plants and […]