Metro Pulse/Cover/Bluegrass

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Knoxville and Bluegrass: A Primer

Why Knoxville is—and isn't—a center for an American art form

by Jack Neely

In an old school building in the hills, the classrooms don't have desk chairs, but old living-room furniture lines the walls. Late at night, fluorescent lights keep the room Kroger-bright. All the chairs are taken, some people are standing, and more than a dozen more are leaning outside the door in the hallway, listening. It's an all-ages crowd, maybe loaded toward the older end: some ancient ladies are hobbling around the place with walkers, and there's one retired state governor who appears to be enjoying himself, but there are also a number of children who don't seem bored, and a few solemn teenagers. The strongest drink available in the place is Coca-Cola. A band is playing in one end of the room, and the crowd is absolutely respectable, as if the fiddler were a preacher.

About 25 miles north of this place, on a city street, on a different night of the same week, there's a big dark brick-lined room with a long bar and dozens of tables. It's a completely different crowd, fewer bald heads, fewer children. The people are drinking strong ale and eating pizza, talking, laughing, flirting, sometimes dancing. A band's playing music, and if you were to guess about the music by the look of the crowd, you'd figure maybe it was a rock 'n' roll band.

About 50 miles to the west, on a sunbaked baseball field near a small-town square on an afternoon of the same week, people are wearing tractor caps and eating deep-fried pork rinds. Most are sitting in folding chairs beneath a big funeral-style tent. They sit silently, watching the band reverently as a tuxedoed crowd might watch a string quartet. A few take notes.

The music in all these places is exactly the same: a five-piece band, mandolin, guitar, fiddle, banjo, upright bass, played in a fast and tightly disciplined fashion, with improvisational breaks and high-lonesome harmonies.

To thousands in East Tennessee, bluegrass is still the bold new thing, after 60 years, much as it is in the broad world beyond. It's about all that can get some creaky old-timers out of the house on a Friday or Saturday night, but it's also what animates the conversation of lots of teenagers in high-school hallways.

Bluegrass appeared rather suddenly in the 1940s as a country string-band style, but one influenced by jazz riffs and blues rhythms. Its improvisational breaks featuring one instrumentalist were almost a string-band version of bebop, which was developing simultaneously; but the vocal harmonies of bluegrass were straight out of the church, reminiscent of family-based gospel groups.

The current bluegrass phenomenon has several sources, one of which is the fact that it never died out to begin with; but it has earned added interest and energy from recordings by local heroes like Dolly Parton, and the phenomenal success of the soundtrack to the 2000 movie O Brother Where Art Thou. As strange as it may seem, the anthology of rural Southern music from the pre-stereo era is one of the nation's bestselling CDs of the 21st century so far. And it didn't hurt that the homogenization of Nashville country music did its part by making bluegrass the alternative. As WUOT's longtime bluegrass-show DJ Paul Campbell says, "bluegrass filled the void when commercial country collapsed." Bluegrass in 2003 has an intergenerational reach hardly any newer form of music can rival.

How good Knoxville is to bluegrass is a complicated question which depends in part on how you define bluegrass—and moreso on how you define Knoxville.

The Knoxville Metropolitan Statistical Area hosts three or four professional bluegrass bands with recent albums available nationally, one of the nation's most bluegrass-dominant radio stations, maybe a dozen significant bluegrass festivals which draw hundreds of musicians from across the nation, several weekly all-comers bluegrass jam sessions, and a theater that specializes in bluegrass performances.

All of that's in the Knoxville area; none of it's in Knoxville. Though bluegrass has taken hold in some urban areas in the North and West, here bluegrass is still, almost too literally, country music. Most of the counties in the region host at least one major annual bluegrass festival, like last weekend's Dumplin Valley Festival, in Sevier County (Sevier also hosts a Christmastime bluegrass festival in Pigeon Forge), and October's Homecoming at Anderson County's Museum of Appalachia, which in recent years has drawn major stars like Ralph Stanley, Earl Scruggs, and Ricky Scaggs. But the closest one to Knoxville is this weekend's Raccoon Valley Fall Festival, at Knox County's extreme northeastern border. Now in its third year, it will likely draw thousands to see featured bluegrass performers this weekend: Mountain Heart, and Blue Moon Rising.

However, city-limits Knoxville does host some of the region's biggest in-auditorium bluegrass concerts, especially in the form of AC Entertainment's annual "Downtown Hoedown," which typically draws paying audiences of 1,500. And the Disc Exchange on Chapman Highway may be the biggest purveyor of recorded bluegrass music in the region.

Don Cassell is a talented mandolinist who plays part time in the Chattanooga-Knoxville band known as the Dismembered Tennesseans. Though not famous, the band—founded in 1946, they claim to be the oldest band in Tennessee—sells about 1,000 recordings a year, mostly at festivals. Originally from Southwestern Virginia, the cotton merchant settled in Knoxville about 25 years ago, partly attracted to the bluegrass opportunities. He believes that Knoxville is one of the top five bluegrass markets in the country. "I travel all the time," he says. "You can go to any other Southern city, and you're not going to find more, or better, bluegrass players. You could go around getting every bluegrass player in Atlanta, and it wouldn't take Knoxville," he claims. Cassell has taken advantage of that fact on his new CD, which like all bluegrass recordings, is not exactly a solo effort. Called Music Pals, the recording enlists 27 area musicians. "I could have used another 27," Cassell says, "there are so many great players here."

He admits that Knoxville's stock of bluegrass musicians is a little guitar-heavy. "There must be 600 bluegrass guitar players in town," he says, and insists he's not even exaggerating. "That may be low." He thinks there may be half as many banjoists. "Mandolin has kind of become one of the instruments people want to play—there are maybe 60 or 70 of them. As for fiddlers, dobroists, and upright bassists, he estimates there may be 25 or fewer. "If you're a dobro player, you've always got a gig."

"Knoxville can be a bluegrass capital," Cassell says. "Look at who plays here, all the time." He remembers one night recently when his band, the Dismembered Tennesseans, played at the Laurel Theatre, the same night that bluegrass star mandolinist Ricky Scaggs was playing at the Tennessee—and the same night major banjo player J.D. Crowe was playing at the Palace Theatre in Maryville. All drew near-capacity crowds, simultaneously.

Several bluegrass aficionados make extravagant claims for Knoxville as one of the biggest bluegrass cities in America and, hence, the world. Cassell's Top Five claim is typical. You wonder if maybe it's one of those apocryphal just-so stories, like the one we used to hear that Knoxville was one of the Soviets' top-five ICBM targets.

A long-distance call to Sugar Hill in Durham, N.C., one of the chief labels for new bluegrass, shows that the Top Five claim could use some adjustment. Bev Paul is general manager and director of marketing at Sugar Hill, which tracks the demand for bluegrass carefully. She notes the strong market for bluegrass is a national, not regional, phenomenon, and that much of the strongest demand today is in the West, in the Rockies and along the Pacific Coast.

She says the three biggest markets for new bluegrass in America are Boulder, Colorado; the San Francisco Bay area, in California; and Knoxville, Tennessee. "There are others," she says, "Portland, Seattle, D.C. Asheville, Spartanburg, Greenville are also very strong. But Knoxville's at the top of the list. It's an extremely important market."

Paul notes the Boulder and Bay-area bluegrass markets arose partly in response to trendy retro-ish musical phenomena like Hot Rize, String Cheese Incident, David Grisman, and even the Grateful Dead, "Knoxville comes by the music really honestly," she says. "It's been a hotbed for all that."

Caught by surprise, she doesn't need to refer to notes to talk about what makes the Knoxville bluegrass market strong. "You've got two great radio stations, WDVX and WNCW broadcasting into that market, an incredibly strong preponderance of bluegrass and other acoustical music, a supportive press, a great retailer called the Disc Exchange, and live performances—not so much in Knoxville, but in the area."

Her excluding phrase touches on Knoxville's paradoxical connection to bluegrass. The fact that the Knoxville area is considered one of the world's centers for bluegrass may well surprise Knoxvillians. If not for amplified recordings of "Rocky Top," ubiquitous in the fall, a Knoxvillian might easily pass a year without overhearing any bluegrass at all.

And there is, in fact, relatively little bluegrass to be heard in Knoxville proper. In the country-music honky tonks of Asheville Highway and Clinton Highway, where hundreds of working-class Knoxvillians converge on Saturday nights, real bluegrass is a rarity.

When people talk about bluegrass points of interest in the Knoxville area, they may mention Rocky Branch, the lively Friday-night jam session in Blount County; Dumplin Valley, which hosts a couple of bluegrass festivals each year, in Sevier County; Loudon and its Smoky Mountain Fiddlers Convention; Corryton, Blaine, and Luttrell, home of several talented musicians; another well-known weekly bluegrass jam session at the Bradbury Community Center on Buttermilk Road, in Roane County; Newport-Cosby in Cocke County, which hosts bluegrass festivals, and the Front Porch, a popular Mexican restaurant long known for its live bluegrass shows on weekends; Hamblen County, home of musicians, weekly jam sessions, and more than one annual festival; and Maryville, home of Roy's Records, the Palace Theater, and some of the best bluegrass musicians and music teachers around. Plot them on a map, and they form an imperfect circle around Knoxville, well outside its city limits.

Perhaps the most influential of these points of interest is public-radio station WDVX, which for the last seven years has been Knoxville's only reliable source of bluegrass. It broadcasts from well outside of town from a pastoral location in Anderson County, almost as if bluegrass were something that was illegal in town, broadcasting across civil borders like rural propaganda.

Even more than any blockbuster soundtrack, the hero of the third act of this play is radio station WDVX. The 200-watt public station, which has been broadcasting from Anderson County for the last seven years, has earned some national and even international attention for itself, as well as its dominant idiom, bluegrass.

From its first weak signals in 1996, long before O Brother, the station has played a mix of both new and classic bluegrass (as well as a variety of other country-influenced music, known loosely as "Americana"). They've also hosted and/or broadcast bluegrass festivals, and, more or less, gigged us into remembering the music this neck of the woods was once known for.

First known for broadcasting pirate-like from a Norris trailer, WDVX has been, in recent months, working from an only slightly more traditional locale, the basement of a promotional house in a new suburban development called Arcadian Springs in Andersonville, just down the road from Norris.

The DJ known as "Red" is on the air today, playing a selection from singer/mandolinist Dan Tyminski, who earned unexpected fame by becoming George Clooney's musical alter-ego in the movie, O Brother Where Art Thou. "We get requests all the time for the Soggy Bottom Boys," the fictional band in the movie, she says. "People think they're a real band. Everybody thinks that voice came out of George Clooney's mouth, but it was really Dan Tyminski. We don't ever get requests for Dan Tyminski."

She appreciates the unusual freedom WDVX affords her. "Few disc jockeys have such control over the music they play," she says. "Most have to deal with a playlist prepared out of an office in New York." (Okay, she does have some restrictions. "I get spanked a lot," she says. "I get a little too honky-tonk sometimes, but that's where my taste lies.")

One of the founders of the station, and its director, is Tony Lawson. A big guy of 45, Lawson spent his early years in an eastern Kentucky mining camp, son of a miner and a gospel singer, grandson of a miner-banjoist. At 20 he got work as a DJ at a progressive station in Johnson City, and later teamed with bluegrass freak Benny Smith to host a La Follette-based bluegrass show called "Soppin' the Gravy."

Lawson loves bluegrass, which he calls "mountain soul music." But mainly he wanted to start a radio station. He says they chose to broadcast bluegrass for practical reasons. "We had to have a support base, a base he knew was there, that would support a radio station. That was the bluegrass community. It's a large community, thousands of people, very active, very passionate. And very opinionated about what is and isn't bluegrass."

On that problematic subject, Lawson calls himself "very traditional. Bluegrass is fiddle, banjo, guitar, mandolin, doghouse bass. Some folks throw in a dobro these days."

By "these days," of course, he means the last 50-odd years. Many, like Lawson, are strict about how they define bluegrass. Most agree that bluegrass never includes drums or electric bass; some go further, raising questions about the dobro's place, and arguing that female singers have no place in a bluegrass band because they can't affect the high-lonesome timber pioneered by Bill Monroe. Some fundamentalists are affectionately known as Grassholes.

For a low-watt station, WDVX's reach is astonishing. They claim a big chunk of East Tennessee as their broadcast area, though "some of it's spotty," as Lawson admits. Arbitron says WDVX is getting about 43,000 listeners; about 17,500 of them tune in to the morning drive-time bluegrass show.

But well beyond those modest but respectable Arbitron numbers, WDVX has earned a remarkable reputation around the world. The station has been profiled in one way or another on PBS, ABC, BBC, and the Canadian Broadcasting Co. Thanks mainly to their website, wdvx.com, they get cards and letters and e-mails from all over the globe. A world map in the control room is pricked with birdshot patterns of pins representing WDVX listeners in most of the world's continents. "We have a picture of a guy going down the Yangsze River in China in a WDVX T-shirt," says Lawson. "We got an e-mail from a fellow in Germany—he went to France, and saw a WDVX sticker on the vehicle in front of him. We have a lot of listeners in Japan. In order, it's the U.S., then Canada, then Japan, then United Kingdom. We've gotten contributions from 37 states, and six different countries.

"The web is a transmitter we never dreamed of," he says. "We're like WSM in the '40s."

Several WDVX DJ's have their devotees, but no one enjoys quite the celebrity of a skinny 13-year-old whose presence in a black derby hat has become a fixture at bluegrass festivals throughout the region. La Follette native Alex Leach has become the station's voice of youth. He hosts one of the station's all-bluegrass shows, every Tuesday night. He recently MC'd the Jerusalem Festival, on the sacred grounds of Bill Monroe's birthplace in Kentucky.

"He's just eat up with bluegrass," Lawson says. (Leach says he discovered bluegrass not at a grandfather's knee, but on the World Wide Web.)

WDVX has relied on its 200-watt transmitter to reach a mainly rural audience at 89.9. It recently boosted its Knoxville presence with a 10-watt transmitter on Sharp's Ridge, at 102.9 FM. If things go according to plan, they'll boost their Knoxville presence in a bigger way this winter. Lawson, who lives in Knoxville, is planning to move the station's studio to a building on Gay Street and Summit Hill, which will have room for a 75-seat auditorium: shades of the days of WROL and WNOX, which in the 1940s both had influential live-broadcast studios on Gay.

It's a void that many believe needs filling. The dearth of live bluegrass in the population center of the nation's biggest market for bluegrass is striking, and odd. Bev Paul of Sugar Hill notes that bluegrass performances in Knoxville, as opposed to the metro area, are "light," and adds that the urban void in the center of a regional hotbed isn't typical. "That's not necessarily the case everywhere," she says. "A lot of bluegrass gets played in performing-arts centers these days."

The Tennessee Theater is closed, but previously only programmed major acts, like the Downtown Hoedowns, which often drew the likes of bluegrass pioneer Ralph Stanley. The Bijou, which some call a perfect venue for bluegrass, scheduled several big shows like Del McCoury and Doyle Lawson in the '90s, but has recently favored dramatic productions over musical performances. A few bluegrassers express some mild frustration with the 200-seat Laurel Theatre, which sometimes schedules bluegrass, but not enough for some. Director Brent Cantrell admits he sees it as the theater's mission to program some less commercial and mainstream acts, like pre-bluegrass Old Time music. "There's so much bluegrass around here: big, big acts."

Perhaps the most regular place to find bluegrass in Knoxville for the last four years has been a WDVX-sponsored weekly event called "Behind the Barn," at Barley's in the Old City. Hosted by fiddle-guitar duo Jeff Barbra and Sarah Pirkle, it's a live acoustic show for an hour every Wednesday night; they feature bluegrass about half the time. In the past, the show has packed the place, with a hundreds of fans, standing room only, often with dancing up front. Sometimes they've drawn a few too many fans; one over-capacity crowd drew the attention of the fire marshal. "He had such a good time," Barbra claims, "he started coming back to see the show."

The show tends to attract bands looking for exposure in this major market; some, like Yonder Mountain String Band, recording artists currently high on the national charts, played "Behind the Barn" just before they hit it big.

Last week, for two bucks, bluegrass fans had a chance to see Lynwood Lunsford and the Misty Valley Boys, an entertaining Flatt & Scruggs-style quintet from Virginia. They'll be among the featured performers at the IBMA convention in Louisville next week. The quintet drew a lively crowd of about 60, but there were empty chairs. By 11 p.m., during their second set, it was clear that most of the people in the room weren't there for the show. Barbra and Pirkle admit numbers are down this fall, even as compared to the healthy summer, and they're not sure why. (Next week will be an atypical bluegrass show, Shanti Groove, described as "Jam Grass.")

There are rumors of an impending WDVX-Barley's split; representatives of both sides say they want to keep featuring live bluegrass downtown; the word is that Barley's has been talking to WNCW, and that WDVX has been talking to other downtown clubs. In the best-case scenario, the rift could result in two competing downtown bluegrass shows.

Knoxville does have some things going for it, including the Disc Exchange, which may be the most comprehensive purveyor of bluegrass in the region. Shane Tymon, one of the co-founders of WDVX, runs the bluegrass bins at the Chapman Highway store. "Nobody in this market sells as much as we do," Tymon says. "We have a dozen bins full of bluegrass. Wal-Mart might have a tenth of that." The Disc Exchange sells several thousand bluegrass CDs a year—which is remarkable considering that much bluegrass-CD commerce goes on at festivals.

The Disc Exchange promotes bluegrass with some impressive in-store performances. Del McCoury, the bluegrass-family patriarch who still leads one of the most popular bands in the country, will be performing there on Oct. 15. "Ricky Scaggs has been here twice," he says. He adds the bluegrass in-stores do better than some of the rock ones, partly, he suspects, because bluegrass fans are "probably a little less techno," less likely to swipe music off the web.

Local acts are especially popular, and a few current local bands have earned national exposure. Robinella and the CCstringband's new CD is outselling Alison Krauss, Nickel Creek, and Ricky Scaggs at the Disc Exchange. Though the band combines mandolin, guitar, fiddle, and bass, their music's a little too jazzy and bluesy to pass for bluegrass except by the most liberal definitions. There's obvious respect for their musicianship among successful bluegrass performers, but it rankles a few local bluegrass pickers that Robinella is a perennial winner of the Metro Pulse readers' poll in the bluegrass category. As one says, "They're great, but they're not bluegrass."

Several other area bands, like Sevier County-based Pine Mountain Railroad, which combines campy banter with straight-ahead bluegrass (they're sponsored, Martha-White style, by Tennessee Pride sausage), and Mountain Heart, an especially popular band with Cumberland Gap roots, have current recordings that are available nationally, and are big sellers locally.

Blue Moon Rising is a young four-piece bluegrass band based in Lake City; their album, Where Wood Meets Steel, is currently one of the bluegrass bestsellers at Disk Exchange. Leader Chris West is pleased with the bluegrass surge. "It's an exciting time, right now. To me, the appeal is it's just so real, so non-pretentious," he says. "Bluegrass singing is raw and gutsy." He mentions Barley's in particular when he says, "Knoxville is a tremendous place to play. Knoxville crowds are really responsive—they're good crowds to play to. They're there 100 percent to hear the music—they don't need the stage-show banter."

Many other bluegrass musicians are similarly complimentary of the Knoxville audience, but not all. Several wish there was at least one small venue in Knoxville that supported bluegrass music.

Phil Leadbetter of Corryton is one of the area's bona-fide bluegrass celebrities, currently one of five nominees for Dobroist of the Year at the International Bluegrass Music Association. (Awards will be presented at the association's annual ceremony in Louisville next week.) The nomination is an honor he has earned seven times before. He's currently the heart of the band Wildfire, and tours all over the country and the world.

Born in Knoxville, raised in the rural Gibbs area, Leadbetter cut his teeth at the now-legendary bluegrass shows at the Bearden Buddy's Bar-b-q in the '70s. He's less sanguine than many of his colleagues about Knoxville's bluegrass status quo.

"It's kind of strange, sometimes," he says. "The whole South has changed a whole lot. In the '70s, people would get in a fistfight over a seat in a big show. Now, the only real interest is in the big-name stuff. People come out for the big shows, at the Tennessee and Down From the Mountain," the post O Brother bluegrass jamboree at the baseball stadium, he says. "But overseas, out West, up North, the crowds seem more appreciative." He says part of it's that there's more competition here: "real bluegrassers saying, 'I saw them seven months ago, I'm not gonna see them again.'" He talks of playing a theater in London, twice the size of the Tennessee, which sold out. "For some of them, it was a once-in-a-lifetime moment; everybody who liked this at all was there."

But he thinks there's more to it. He sorely misses Knoxville events like the Buddy's weekend shows, the bluegrass shows WIVK used to sponsor, the Dogwood Arts Festival's bluegrass competitions, and downtown festivals like the original iteration of Saturday Night On the Town, which in the mid-'80s sponsored several musical performances at once, allowing visitors to sample various kinds of music, and maybe learn something they didn't know.

"I get to see Knoxville a whole lot," he says. "I play a lot of places, and they're like Knoxville 20 years ago. And I say, 'How did we ever lose that?' A certain politician or administration, that said, 'We want to do this, but not this, and change this'? It's not like it was broke. Sometimes, certain things around here, they get downsized."

He'd particularly like to see a family-style restaurant that featured bluegrass—he's not sure he would have gotten where he did without Buddy's, and the excitement of going there every weekend as a teenager.

One obvious example is just outside Knoxville's metro area. The Front Porch is a Mexican restaurant in Cocke County that has featured bluegrass on an almost nightly basis for many years. It's a more consistent venue for the music than any place in Knoxville, and has profited from it, drawing Knoxville audiences unusually long distances to enjoy what would otherwise be just a Mexican meal.

Leadbetter would also like to see a restoration of bluegrass competitions in town, especially those once sponsored by the Dogwood Arts Festival, which disappointed many bluegrass followers when they dropped the event in the '90s. Leadbetter likens grassroots bluegrass contests to Little League—competitions give young bluegrass talents an incentive, a reason to improve for next year.

He also hints darkly that there's some snobbishness behind Knoxville's resistance to bluegrass.

"Some of the downtown theaters are a little snooty when bluegrass comes in," he says. "But I saw some of those highbrows at the Down From the Mountain show."

He'd also like to see Knoxville jockey to get major bluegrass conventions, like next week's award show in Louisville, which he thinks could have worked, maybe better, at the Knoxville Convention Center.

WUOT's Paul Campbell, whose bluegrass and old-time show is now a quarter-century old, has also observed some anti-bluegrass snobbishness here. "In the urban areas, they just want the yuppie stuff," he says. And he remarks on an irony. He's not sure how many people listen to his show, and he's not sure who they are. But he suspects a majority of the people who e-mail him are newcomers to the area, attracted to this appealing symbol of their new home.

Meanwhile, with or without Knoxville's fickle stamp of approval, bluegrass is popular, if not right here, and may be subtly changing lives. Campbell says, "I'm amazed at how many people I know, professors with Generation X kids, who say this is the first music we can agree on."

Despite the dysfunction in organized events and coordination of venues, musicians say it's easy to pick up a good band here. Everybody agrees it's easy to find bluegrass recordings here. And if there aren't festivals here, there are plenty of them within an hour's drive, especially this time of year. It's catching on with skateboarders, professionals, and, despite Campbell's suspicions, even a few yuppies.