How can a festival that hosts bands like the Carolina Cud Chewers, the Corn Potato String Band, Roochie Toochie and Ragtime Shepherd Kings, and Uncle Shuffelo and His Haint Hollow Hootenanny not be fun? The organizers of Knoxville Stomp, a celebration of old-time country, jazz, blues, and gospel (and more) from Knoxville, are going super old-school with entertainment for the festival, which is set for May 5-8 at various venues around downtown.
“When we announced that these lost recordings were going to be re-released in May, it was like we’d turned on a tractor beam for musical historians and re-creators of historical music,” says festival production manager Matt Morelock, an old-timey music enthusiast and practitioner, ex-Knoxvillian, former proprietor of Morelock Music on Gay Street, and current Hawaii resident, in a press release. “This is a really big deal! Be ready for the best in old-time, vintage jazz, country blues, and gospel music. Local bands and historians along with those coming from all over the world are ready to put on quite a show to honor this special occasion!”
The specific occasion for the festival is the upcoming release of a CD box set from prestigious German label Bear Family Records that compiles a set of legendary recordings made in Knoxville in 1929 and 1930. The so-called St. James Sessions (many of the recordings were made at the St. James Hotel on Wall Avenue) were among the last commercial music recordings made in East Tennessee before the Great Depression. They were notably different from similar sessions in Bristol and Johnson City that have also been documented by Bear Family—while those sessions produced landmark sides by Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, and other country music pioneers, the Knoxville recordings were much broader in scope.
The sessions attracted artists from around the Southeast, some country but also blues and gospel singers, jazz combos, black string bands, and country blues performers. Most of them disappeared when the record market crashed along with the stock market. Some of them are lost, probably forever. Most of them were preserved by the early generations of 78 collectors in the 1950s and ’60s. (Those collectors are a sort of sub-theme of Knoxville Stomp—Joe Bussard, one of the most famous of the early collectors, will be here for a presentation, and music writer Amanda Petrusich, author of Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records, will also attend. And there’s a 78 record show scheduled.)
Dom Flemons, formerly of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, headlines the music schedule—he’ll perform at the Bijou Theatre on Friday, May 6. Local bands will recreate some of the music from the Knoxville Sessions on the Market Square stage on Saturday, May 7. Gospel and jazz artists take over the Square on Sunday, March 8.
The full lineup includes the Bearded, Bill and the Belles, the Carolian Cud Chewers, the Corn Potato String Band, the Down Hill Strugglers, Matt Downer, the East Tennessee State University Old Time Pride Band, Matt Foster, Eli Fox, Frog and Toad’s Dixie Quartet, Gammon, Horton and Reynolds, the Georgia Crackers, God’s Gospel Singers, the Hellgramites, Hunter Holmes, Kelle Jolly and the Will Boyd Project, Matt Kinman, the Knox County Jug Stompers, the Knoxville Banjo Orchestra, Alex Leach, Sean McCollough (with students from South Knoxville Elementary School), the Mumbillies, the John Myers Band, the Old Time Travelers, Roochie Toochie and the Ragtime Shepherd Kings, Todd Steed, the Streamliners Swing Orchestra, the Tennessee Stifflegs, Uncle Shuffelo and His Haint Hollow Hootenanny, and Kukuly Uriarte.
Panelists and speakers include Bussard, Petrusich, Eric Dawson and Bradley Reeves of the Knox County Public Library’s Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, John Fabke, Martin Fisher, Lance Ledbetter, our own Jack Neely, Ted Olson, Tony Russell, Nancy Brennan Strange, Elijah Wald, Bear Family founder Richard Weize, Marshall Wyatt, and Jerry Zolten.
Knoxville Stomp is being presented by TAMIS, WDVX, the East Tennessee Historical Society, and Visit Knoxville as part of Knoxville’s 225th anniversary celebration.
Senior Editor Matthew Everett manages the Knoxville Mercury's arts & entertainment section, including the comprehensive calendar section—Knoxville’s go-to guide for everything worth doing in the area. You can reach Matthew at matthew@knoxmercury.com.
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