A small, warm, idyllic 1920s-era living room set-up sat off to the side of the Bijou Theatre stage, replete with a vintage lamp, wooden chairs and an antique Victrola, playing Knoxville Sessions records. Throughout the night, a running joke on stage lauded shellac, the waxy substance used in 78s before WWII, and mocked vinyl as “the new stuff.” Artists on stage crowded around a few vintage-style large-diaphragm condenser mics (the Edwina model from Ear Trumpet Labs for the gearheads). An elderly man outside played “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore” on a saw.
This was Friday’s keynote evening of the Knoxville Stomp.
Tony Lawson, an integral part of WDVX’s success over the last decade, recently began working with the Birthplace of Country Music and its radio project Radio Bristol. He introduced the night and the first act, the Knox County Jug Stompers, who partially take their name from “The Knox County Stomp,” a Knoxville Sessions song.
The Knox County Jug Stompers came out to rowdy applause. At various points in their set, they employed banjo, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, wash-tub bass, drums, harp, kazoo, and of course jugs, and each person in the band took turns on lead vocals with rowdy group vocals on the choruses. KCJS have the distinction of singing more songs about food than perhaps any other band around, definitely at the festival. They played songs about biscuits, buns, and jelly rolls to name a few. The food often symbolized love lost, the comfort of home, or served up hot sexual innuendo. The band’s original “Mama Don’t Make Them Biscuits Anymore,” a staple of their set, is a former winner of “Best Original Song” at the International Biscuit Festival. The band also played multiple songs from the Knoxville Sessions, a crowd favorite being “Vine Street Rag.”
In between sets, TAMIS archivist Eric Dawson came out to again brief the audience on the history of the sessions and to praise the Bear Family box set, The Knoxville Sessions. He also discussed how artists from the sessions were represented in the Old City’s Knoxville Music History Mural. Derisive murmurs–boo-hiss–snaked through the crowd. A recent controversy erupted when a local developer Leigh Burch III (a partner of Carleo) painted over the mural, located on the side of his building on 118 East Jackson. To the downtown community, especially among the highly concentrated population of local musical history buffs in the crowd, the wounds are still fresh.
Dawson explained TAMIS’ connection to WBIR’s The Heartland Series over the years, and introduced a video highlight reel from the series’ coverage of Knoxville Sessions’ artists Willie Sievers of the Tennessee Ramblers and Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong of the Tennessee Chocolate Drops. The series first captured them in 1984 when they were reunited with several other musicians of the sessions when filmmaker Terry Zwigoff was making a documentary about Armstrong. A particularly stirring one-two punch of scenes was an interview where Sievers, white, recalls her father taking her down to the corner of Central and Jackson in the Old City to watch the black Armstrong brothers jam, and being so moved and excited by Armstrong’s music that she and her family band learned several of their songs. That clip was immediately followed by one in which Sievers and Armstrong, both in their 70s at that point, jam on piano and fiddle in an old cabin like there’s no tomorrow, with all the passionate intensity and fun of a couple of teenagers.
Some of the same folks were brought back to Knoxville again for The Heartland Series in the early 2000s to celebrate the unveiling of the Knoxville Music History Mural, originally commissioned by Keep Knoxville Beautiful and painted by Walt Fieldsa with help from students from Laurel High School. It celebrated Knoxville Sessions artists like Armstrong and Leola Manning, as well as other Knoxville greats like Donald Brown and RB Morris. At the time, Armstrong had recently entered his nineties, and he died soon after in 2003 at the age of 93. This put the protest against the mural’s demise in poignant context. That it was painted over seems bad enough to lovers of Knoxville’s musical history; that it was painted over mere weeks before a festival specifically celebrating said legacy seems an insult and a downright travesty.
Dom Flemons has a strong connection to the music of Howard Armstrong and the Tennessee Chocolate Drops–after all, his claim to fame is his former black old-time group the Carolina Chocolate Drops, named in homage to the black Knoxville Sessions group. Flemons played classics of the period on various styles of banjo, Guitjo, harp and fife with accompaniment from his trio on fiddle, stand-up bass and a coffeehouse-style bare-bones kit with hi-hat, snare (played with brushes) and a kick drum featuring a cartoon Flemons on the head. Later Flemons brought out guest fiddler Aaron Jonah Lewis of Corn Potato String Band and Roochie Toochie and the Ragtime Shepherd Kings, the 2015 National Old-Time Fiddling Champion.
Throughout the night Flemons talked about his favorite records, from Knoxville Sessions artists to other famous Knoxville artists like Roy Acuff. He played several songs on the Victrola and talked about them, and did a wax cylinder recording of a song with festival production manager Matt Morelock, and finished the evening pulling the Jug Stompers back up on stage and ending the night leading the audience in a few verses of “I’ll Fly Away.”
Blank recommends the following for today at the Knoxville Stomp (all events are FREE to the public):
-Record Collectors’ Show and Sale: East Tennessee History Center, 10am-4pm
-Knoxville Musical History Walking Tour with Jack Neely-Meets at north end of Market Square, 11am
-WDVX Blue Plate Special with Carolina Cud Chewers, author Tony Russell and surprise guests, Knoxville Visitor’s Center, noon
-Square Dance-a-thon, with The Hellgramites and caller Ruth Simmons, Emporium Center for the Arts, 12:30pm, and Corn Potato String Band and caller Stan Sharp, 1:30pm
-Stomp on the Square, Sean McCollough and South Knoxville Elementary Students, 4pm on the Market Square Stage
-An Evening with Joe Bussard (internationally known rare record collector), Scruffy City Hall, 5pm
-Stomp on the Square with The Bearded and Knoxville Banjo Orchestra, 7pm
-Kinman’s Back Porch with Matt Kinman, Tennessee Stifflegs and Georgia Crackers, Boyd’s Jig and Reel, 10pm
