Knoxville, with a leer and an elbow

by Jack Neely

You'd figure I'd have to do this every once in a while. No story's ever completely told. It keeps unfolding after you put it down in print. Stories are troublesome that way; they never hold still.

My story about the Dorseys alleged reunion at Deane Hill in 1953 drew several comments from people who know more about the boys than I do. Some readers claimed that the famous bandleaders had actually reunited before 1953; some claimed they split up again at least once after 1953; some claimed the Dorseys were just another couple of white guys getting rich off the music of Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington and don't deserve the posthumous attention.

Some of that I can't prove now, but I do want to clear up one point. Though several big-band histories do strongly imply the Dorseys didn't play together between 1935 and 1953, it seems there were a couple of occasions when Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey did play in the same bands in the late '40s. One was when they appeared as themselves in a fanciful biopic called The Fabulous Dorseys, where they did play a fictional "reunion" show, under the direction of the legendary Paul Whiteman. Their unexpected reunion at Deane Hill in April 1953 may have been the first time in 18 years that the two had played in a band led by either of them, and the beginning of the final stage of their careers, during which they played jointly and made some more Dorsey Brothers recordings.

I expect I'll hear more yet.

* Several months ago I wrote a column about Amelia Earhart's stay at the Andrew Johnson Hotel in 1936, the year before she vanished. I discovered that fact only because a McClung Collection staffer had run across a local clipping about the occasion. No Knox-ville visit was mentioned in any of several Earhart biographies I'd seen.

That changed with the publication of the latest Earhart bio, Amelia, by Donald Goldstein and Kathryn Dillon. It mentions her overnight visit here only in passing—she apparently sent her mother a letter from Knoxville—but the reference sounds provocative, anyway: "From Knoxville on January 18," it goes, "Amelia sent Amy [her mother] a check, with the apology, 'I am sorry to be late but I have been leading a terrific life.'"

* Finally, two weeks ago I wrote about James Agee's "missing year," the 16 months in 1924 and '25 that he attended Knoxville High School, and added that I hadn't been able to find copies of two Knoxville-based spoofs scholars sometimes mention, "Knoxton High" and "Jenkinsville," which appeared in the Phillips Exeter Monthly. They're not listed in short-story indexes.

But it turns out that those stories and several other obscure Knoxville-based fragments are included in a recent book published by Whitston in Troy, New York, called Agee: Selected Literary Documents. My friend Paul Ashdown, UT professor of journalism, happened to have a review copy of it and graciously loaned it to me, surely knowing he'd probably never see it again.

"Knoxton High" is just an eight-page, wickedly sarcastic description of a high school; Knoxton is obviously Knoxville, and Knoxton Memorial High School is old Knoxville High. The satire of the crowded, esthetically chaotic school is blistering but accurate down to what minute details I've been able to check, including the Toledo-raised principal's resume, the marble columns, and the doughboy statue (which wise-guy Agee alleges was mass-produced by "the Doughboy Statue Mfg. Co. in Corinth, Neb.") There may be other similarities I don't know enough about to notice. If there's anybody out there who remembers Knoxville High in the '20s, I'd be very interested in how much of Agee's description is strictly accurate.

Along with that too-clever bit of prose, scholars mention another adolescent satire called "Jenkinsville." Agee's chief biographer, Laurence Bergreen, and other out-of-state scholars have assumed that the small Tennessee town the teen Agee called "Jenkinsville" was really Knoxville. The two do bear some superficial similarities, such as the main business street that leads from the courthouse to the depot—which, in Knox-ville, was once Gay Street. However, just from the excerpts I'd seen, Jenkinsville sounded to me like a much smaller place than the Knoxville of Agee's youth. (With only two grocery stores, it seems smaller than Knoxville has been at any time since the 1790s.)

The differences are clearer than ever in Agee's 1927 sequel, "Jenkinsville II," which includes a character named Seigbert "Sig" Pearson, proprietor of the Friendship Pool Hall—who actually leaves Jenkinsville on trips to another place that Agee, for reasons of his own, chooses to call "Knoxville." Sig's Jenkinsville business is so prosperous, the story goes, that Sig "was able to go to Knoxville quite frequently, for a lil' weekend. In the Pool Hall, he accompanied the announcement of such an excursion with an elbow and a leer. (When he mentioned it to his wife, he discarded the leer and the elbow.) Upon his return, on the noon train Monday, he was invariably very cross, very sickish, very sleepy." A weekend in Knoxville is still known to have that effect on some folks.

That book, by the way, makes for some very interesting reading, especially for those who are drawn to Knoxville-based stuff. Included is a story written in the stark style of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. It's called "Boys Will Be Brutes"; published in the Harvard Advocate in 1930, it describes bird-killing kids on Highland Avenue. If it doesn't make you cringe, try "Dream Sequence," a darkly surreal story based downtown and in Fort Sanders circa 1950, in which the narrator encounters a mob in the vicinity of Gay Street beating a street preacher to death. What happens next is stranger than anything Poe wrote.

If Agee didn't always recall Knoxville nostalgically, these pieces prove he never really left his hometown; he was writing about Knoxville, light and dark, at every stage in his career.