The blind street musician who almost hit the big time
by Jack Neely
Writing about music, Frank Zappa once observed, is like dancing about architecture. He had a point, of course. But if dancing is your only source of information about architecture, well, it's better than nothing.
Most of the music from the earliest days of recording isn't available to listen to. Those of us who don't have working Victrolas and impressive collections of 78s have had to depend on scholars who've listened to those scratchy old 78s, writers like Charles Wolfe, who would occasionally stoop to write about that old music—to dance about architecture.
For years I've run across stray mentions of a Knoxville musician named George Reneau: put together, the fragments tell an intriguing, if incomplete story about one of those ghosts from the foggy dawn of country music.
Just after World War I, this blind busker came from Jefferson County to make a living on downtown Knoxville streets, playing guitar and harmonica, singing his songs for whomever would stop to listen. One who stopped was a man named Gus Nennsteil. He worked for Sterchi Brothers Furniture —regional purveyors of phonographs, and one of the most influential recording promoters in the South. Sterchi's sent Reneau to New York in spring, 1924, to make a record.
On that trip Reneau became one of country music's first recording artists. As much as the Vocalion people liked Reneau's guitar playing and songwriting, however, they found his voice too rough. Vocalion got pop crooner Gene Austin—later famous for his smooth hit "My Blue Heaven"—to ghost Reneau's country-style vocals on these earliest recordings.
At the time of that seminal trip, a George Reno lived at Maggie Guinn's boarding house up above the Army Bargain Store on Wall Avenue near Market Square. The city directory features four different spellings of his name, including Renaud; uncorrected misspellings must be a distinct hazard for the blind.
Vocalion later let Reneau sing, himself, and he enjoyed a vogue as one of early country music's most prolific talents. Some of his songs became minor classics: "Wild Bill Jones," "Here, Rattler, Here," "Rovin' Gambler," "Wild and Reckless Hobo." Over a period of three years, he cut maybe 70 singles—but he didn't get rich. By 1926, confident enough to list himself as a "musician," and with his name spelled correctly, Reneau was living with his wife Elsie on Charles Place, an alley between State and Central that ended at the Presbyterian graveyard. He remained in Knoxville, living in cheap walkups with one-half addresses, still playing the streets.
The Jazz Age didn't bode well for what Reneau did best. It was the era of the crooner, like Gene Austin. By the time he turned 27, George Reneau's day as a recording artist had come and gone. George Reneau's national career was over just before the recording sessions that gave Bristol its Congressionally sanctioned "Birthplace of Country Music" status.
Without a record contract, George and Elsie Reneau moved frequently, living for a time in South Knoxville, then above a grocery beside the Gay Street Bridge, then on the east side. The directories suggest that George and Elsie separated in the early '30s. They say he took his guitar to the streets every day until December, 1933, when he came down with a bad cough and died days later, of pneumonia. He was 32.
That was all I had. I'd still never heard Reneau's work. If you're going to have the nerve to dance about architecture, I've always thought, you should at least observe the architecture first.
A few weeks ago I was browsing a bin of new CD releases when I ran across Yazoo's latest compilation, a two-volume release called My Rough and Rowdy Ways. It's a great collection of recordings from the 1920s, those fascinating days when working-class blacks and whites were playing and listening to about the same music, and no one guessed anyone would ever try to separate country music from the blues.
Though these songs were recorded 70-75 years ago, you may find yourself turning down the volume when the kids come in the room. These are desperate songs, about murder, sex, betrayal, prison, and drinking Sterno. Many, not surprisingly, are from East Tennessee. One song, "Tell It To Me," tells about how to buy cocaine in downtown Johnson City in 1925. Having heard these, I feel better about the evil effects of gangsta rap. We've been here before.
On this new collection there are several interesting Knoxville connections, too: a mention of Knoxville in an Uncle Dave Macon song and a nautical anthem called "Sailing Out on the Ocean" by a Knoxvillian named Haskell Wolfenbarger. And on volume II of My Rough and Rowdy Ways appears one of the very earliest recordings on the whole set. It's a cut called "Jesse James," by one George Reneau.
It's not necessarily one of the standout cuts on this collection, just plain guitar and harmonica with a simple lyric about the outlaw who'd been murdered more than 40 years before: "We used to read about him in our homes at night / When the wind come down the chimney we would shake with fright..."
Most of George Reneau's music is still not available in any modern format, and may never be. But while I wasn't looking, a couple of other recent music projects have also rediscovered the rough-edged songs of George Reneau. One collection of songs about the Titanic features a Reneau contribution, and a recent PBS American Experience documentary about railroading featured one of Reneau's railroad songs. Maybe, 65 years after this blind street musician's death, we're hearing the opening chords of his second set.
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