A near-forgotten fire, and an unforgettable blues singer

by Jack Neely

I was just finishing up a cover story, that Friday afternoon a few months ago, when I got a call from Scott Miller, the singer of the V-Roys. "Jack, Steve and I are down at the Bistro," he said. "He has something to ask you."

He didn't have to tell me Steve's last name, even though I'd never actually met the guy. I'd had an opportunity to meet Steve once, at a party at the brewpub, and had chickened out. I'd heard his records for years, seen him on TV. What could I have to say to one of the greatest singer/songwriters of our time?

I left the cover story in my boss' chair 94 percent finished and half-ran out the door, past Steve's name on the marquee of the Tennessee, to the Bistro.

I recognized him right away, of course: a big guy with longish hair and a T-shirt, drinking a glass of iced tea. He was sitting at the brick-lined Bistro like Jesse James, with his back to the back corner with Scott and a couple of musicians who were touring with him.

I'd only barely shook his hand when he asked, "Where was the Arcade Building at?"

I stuttered that the Arcade Building that was still there, the old marble art-nouveau Journal Arcade not two blocks away on Gay Street, recently renovated. Steve said he'd seen that one, and it wasn't the one. The Arcade Building he was looking for had burned down, over 60 years ago.

Steve had heard about the Arcade when he was on a recent tour in Europe—in Austria, I think he said. He'd heard about it in a song. He couldn't recall the name of the song, or the woman who sang it, but he said it was a great blues song about the fire that destroyed the Arcade Building in Knoxville.

I admitted I'd never heard of it, and wondered if Steve was a little too innocent in his faith that there was really an Arcade Building in Knoxville that burned down; I suspected it might have been about an Arcade Building in another city, Memphis, maybe, or that it might have been altogether fictional.

I told Steve I was familiar with the popular-music sources, and I was sure I could find something.

I didn't find anything. But the other day I was surprised to spot my friend Nancy Brennan Strange up in the McClung Collection. I hadn't seen her up there before. You don't necessarily expect to find a popular nightclub chanteuse seated at a reading table in a genealogical library, not that there's anything wrong with that; but there she was. She was there trying to find what she could not about an ancestor but about a predecessor, a jazz-age nightclub singer named Leola Manning. Nancy'd been impressed when she heard a tape of one of Miss Manning's songs: one recorded in Knoxville in 1930, called "The Arcade Building Moan."

I dropped whatever I was working on and spent an hour or two trying to track down Leola Manning. All I could find about her was that she was a black woman who lived in East Knoxville from about 1927 to 1936—a different address every year, and not showing up at all a couple of those years. She apparently lived with friends, and worked in the cafeteria of the old Mountain View school on Dandridge. Her name vanishes from the City Directory the year Bessie Smith died. Whether she moved or died or married I don't know.

Her song has been on record at least a couple of times; once was when it appeared on a disk MTSU historian Charles Wolfe put together in 1982, Historical Ballads of the Tennessee Valley. According to Jubilee Arts' Brent Cantrell, who worked with Wolfe, Manning cut at least six sides at the St. James Hotel on Wall Ave. in the spring of 1930, part of Vocalion's near-legendary series of sessions there; Vocalion recorded everything from slick new jazz to rough-edged old-time hillbilly stuff on the mezzanine of the St. James.

Cassette tapes of the "Moan" have been making the rounds of prominent local musicians. It's a blues: piano, guitar, and a rare voice sounding a little more polished than some of the Mississippi stuff of that era, a young, high, perfect voice—in opera you'd call it soprano—singing a long and detailed account of a fatal fire. "Oh it was sad, sad, oh how sad/When the Arcade Building burnt down."

Bridging the stanzas is a shy ad lib, in which Manning gives the song a title: "What a moan in Knoxville." Another song from that session was called "Satan Is Busy In Knoxville."

But back to the original question: the Arcade Building in the song was on Union, at the other end of Market Square from the St. James. Just behind the Arnstein Building, in fact, where our offices are. The Arcade Building was a modest two-story walkup that didn't even have a whole-number address: 410 1/2 Union Ave., just 19 apartments, several of them vacant, but most of them occupied by white working-class families: a brakeman, a painter, an auto mechanic.

"On one Thursday morning, March the 20th day/I think it was about two a.m..." as the song goes, a gas explosion tore through the Arcade, blowing shards of glass into the windows across Union. The fire killed a family of three—a middleaged couple and a teenage boy. Another victim, a German immigrant named Carl Melcher, died nearby under mysterious circumstances, a story which deserves its own column.

According to Wolfe, Leola Manning sang her version of the story only 10 days after the fire—into a microphone right across the Square at the fireproof St. James.

Today the Arcade site is occupied by the much-larger '30s-style Grand Union building, I'll have to tell Steve. I haven't run across anybody who recalls the humble Arcade Building—or the promising young blues singer, Leola Manning. If you do, drop me a line.