With the publication of a new educational booklet from the Knoxville History Project, it’s a good time to take a look at the fascinating history of music here in Knoxville.
Designed to increase awareness and appreciation for the city’s rich musical heritage, Knoxville: A walking Music Guide is a free, 44-page booklet emphasizing the sites, predominantly downtown, associated with songwriters, composers and musicians well-known enough to be recognizable by the American music-listening public. The guide also introduces the Knoxville-centric work of these writers and musicians and helps enhance the city’s cultural appeal.
In its very early days as the first capital of Tennessee in the late 1790s and early 1800s, Knoxville boasted several publishing houses; by the 1830s some were printing sheet music. Spurred by the coming of the railroad, and along with it a wave of immigrants, many from Germany, musical events began to emerge, often with a German both before and after the Civil War.
One notable German immigrant who arrived from Leipzig in 1867 was Gustavus Knabe, a horn player with Felix Mendelssohn’s band. Knabe soon founded the Knoxville Philharmonic Society, which performed in small auditoriums which are all long gone. The grand Staub’s Opera House, built by Swiss-born Peter Staub (a two-time Knoxville mayor), opened on Gay Street in 1872 and was long regarded as a genuine wonder of Knoxville and lasted as a venue for about 80 years. In the 1880s it began hosting weeklong “May Festivals” that attracted not only locals, but also brought in hundreds of visitors to the city by train. In 1883, the audience were treated to an impromptu performance at Staub’s by “Knights of the Bow,”17 fiddlers, which may be the first “country-music” type of performance in the area, decades before the genre became recognized.
Across from Staub’s was the Lamar House, originally built in 1817, which began hosting concerts as early as the 1840s, as well as musical parades, dances on St. Patrick’s Day, and masquerade balls. Author Frances Hodgson Burnett fondly remembered a ball when she lived here as a young girl in the 1870s.
By the early 1900s, blind musicians like Charlie Oaks, George Reneau, and the duo Mac and Bob began playing for nickels and dimes on the streets of Knoxville. Charlie Oaks was particularly renowned for singing and performing his own sad laments, one based on the “New Market Train Wreck” of 1904. At least 56 people were killed in that tragedy that involved the head-on collision of two trains carrying numerous Knoxvillians. Another of Oaks’ songs was a tribute to politician and prosecuting attorney, William Jennings Bryan, involved in the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925. Jennings never came to Knoxville except when the train carrying his coffin stopped here for an hour, but within weeks, Oaks recorded a version of his song in a New York studio.
These street performers, or “Bluesy balladeers” as Jack Neely describes them, also included Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock, famous for his song “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” and banjo-picking Uncle Dave Macon. Musicians also often performed on Market Square and at what became known as the “Street Musicians’ Corner,” by the old Customs House where the Weather Kiosk by the East Tennessee History Center is today on Clinch Avenue at Market.
In addition to these venues and locations, the music guide features descriptions of less obvious downtown sites, including St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral where in 1906 Gustavus Knabe’s own funeral was accompanied by music from his own compositions. At the First Baptist Church on Main Street, built there in the early 1920s, originally featured a radio antenna on its steeple to broadcast religious music on its own radio station, WFBC. Later, one of its young members first performed there – future opera star Mary Costa.
The Bijou Theatre opened in 1909 opposite Staub’s on Gay Street. At the time it was the only venue in town open to Black people, though they had to sit in the second balcony, unless it was a rare all-Black event like the all-Black cast of the Broadway musical, Shuffle Along, which came here in 1924.
By 1928, just two blocks up from the Bijou, the Tennessee Theatre opened as a grand “motion picture palace.” Each night, the show opened with the in-house organist playing the “Mighty Wurlitzer” (the same bright red organ played at the Tennessee today) and a performance by a house band and a vaudeville-style show featuring live music. Despite the Depression, several high profile acts performed at the Tennessee Theatre in the mid-1930s, including risqué singer and dancer Fifi D’Orsay, and Ziegfeld’s Follies with Fannie Brice. The latter was a sold out show plus extra tickets for standing as well, thus exceeding the theater’s usual capacity.
The year after the Tennessee Theatre opened, a diverse cadre of talented musicians recorded songs for the Brunswick/Vocalion record label in the lobby of the St. James Hotel on Wall Avenue. In retrospect, these recordings, now available in a box set, The Knoxville Sessions, and a convenient single-disc compilation, Satan is Busy in Knoxville, highlight the tremendous talents who were writing and performing here in the early 20th Century. Several of these musicians, including The Tennessee Chocolate Drops featuring fiddler Howard Armstrong, singer Leola Manning, and jazz bandleader Maynard Baird, are now regarded as some of the city’s greatest musical legends.
ABOUT KHP
The nonprofit Knoxville History Project tells the city’s stories, focusing on those that have not been previously told and those that connect the city to the world. Donations to support the work of the Knoxville History Project, an educational nonprofit, are always welcomed and appreciated. Learn more at KnoxvilleHistoryProject.org
Knoxville: A walking Music Guide is available for free at the following locations: Visit Knoxville, east Tennessee History Center, and Union Ave Books. Funding for the guide has been provided by the Aslan Foundation, a grant from Humanities-Tennessee and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Downtown Knoxville Alliance, Visit Knoxville, Union Ave Books, and City Council 202 Funds. An online version can be found on KHP’s website.