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WDVX, and the country authenticity of Gay Street

by Jack Neely

The Knoxville Tourism & Sports Corp is renovating an old brick building on the southwest corner of Gay Street and Summit Hill Avenue. It will house several institutions intended to promote the city of Knoxville, but among the most effective is likely to be maverick public-radio station WDVX. They’ve earned a reputation across the region, and, thanks to the Internet, around the world for their rare mix of bluegrass, blues, and rootsy music known as, for lack of a better term, Americana.

It’s the station famous for broadcasting from a camper parked in a field in Anderson County. It became their hook, their symbol. Even though they left the camper a year or two ago and have been broadcasting of late from the basement of real-estate office in the middle of a suburban housing development, they still call their annual festival Camperfest.

But they’re moving to downtown Knoxville, a fact that’s distressing to some members of their constituency. I say it’s not such a bad thing. For country music, downtown Knoxville is at least as authentic as any camper. Downtown has some country to it, especially when there are farmers on the square. But more than that, country music has a heritage that’s more urban than purists may want to know.

The earliest country musicians didn’t wear straw hats and overalls until music promoters from up north told them to. Before that, they wore derbies and bow ties, like vaudeville performers, which many of them were. They played the cities, where the biggest and best-paying crowds were. And, beginning in the early 1920s, where the radio stations were.

Some of the early stars of country actually spent more of their lives in cities. Roy Acuff, who did more to popularize country music than any other individual before Hank Williams, was indeed born in Union County—but as a child came to Knoxville, a city with a population of over 100,000; it was here he learned to play the fiddle, from a guy who ran a gas station. In his spare time Roy played baseball in city leagues. Some of his first shows were at the then-new Tennessee Theater, an auditorium that then held about 2,000 people.

Knoxville’s legendary country-music phenomenon, the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round, started in the 1930s—not in a barn, but on the top of what was then the tallest building in East Tennessee, the 17-story Andrew Johnson Hotel. It stayed downtown, mostly right on Gay Street, for almost 20 years, as country fans lined up on the sidewalk and musicians sneaked across the street for a kosher sandwich or a beer. Then the country show moved, out of the dirty city’s limits, to the more pastoral northern suburbs on the edge of the real country. It seemed to make sense. But when they did, they yanked the floor out from under their audience. As it turned out, there were more country fans in the city.

A city is where you have bigger concentrations of all sorts of people, including country fans. It’s also where you encounter new ideas. And for over a century, “country” music has proven itself to be adaptable, bending to several new influences from around the world, most of them encountered in, or funneled through, cities. Country’s well-guarded secret is that there’s nothing pure about it. It’s a cosmopolitan form.

Consider the instruments in what’s considered a traditional country or bluegrass band. First there was the fiddle. In the 19th century, one fiddler was sometimes all you needed for a barn dance. Which was a good thing, because that was all some rural communities had.

But beginning a little over a century ago, American folk music of styles that would later be simplified as “country” began incorporating other influences. The banjo’s an instrument of African origin, originally played by and for slaves. It was rarely encountered by whites until the minstrel shows held in vaudeville halls of the cities and towns in the mid-19th century. Some sources cite an obscure description of a street scene in 1798, “a promiscuous throng” of three races as the setting for cultural exchange in progress: the first known instance of whites dancing to banjo music, played by blacks. The then-capital of Tennessee wasn’t a very big city, but it was big enough for disparate folks to encounter each other. After the further familiarization of decades of banjo-fueled minstrel shows in urban vaudeville houses, Uncle Dave Macon was claiming the banjo in the name of country music.

For most of the 19t.h century, even the guitar was considered an exotic species, associated with Europe, especially Spain. I don’t claim to know when the first guitar appeared in the Knoxville area, but the first reference to one that I’ve run across was around 1865, it was in the hands of a Jewish Bavarian immigrant named Julius Ochs. He apparently used it to accompany operatic compositions of his own.

Guitars aren’t seen much in American folk music until the early 20th century. By one account, it started when soldiers returned from the Spanish-American War of 1898 with guitars strapped onto their packs. In the cities, they multiplied in music stores like pigeons.

To some, the true, unadulterated sound of the mountains is the mandolin; purists say you can’t have a real bluegrass band without one. But you didn’t hear it much in the mountains a century ago. It’s an Italian instrument, il mandolino. Until Bill Monroe picked it up, the mandolin was associated mainly with Old World sonatas. You were more likely to hear it in a downtown opera house.

A few years ago, there was a defiant back-to-basics country song bemoaning new country music, longing for the good ole steel guit-tars of yesteryear. The dobro, standard in many bluegrass bands, is not, to my knowledge, used for anything but country music and, rarely, blues. We often think of the steel twang you hear in both styles as the very voice of the kudzu-infested South, the soundtrack of a hundred documentaries about rural life. But that sound is, like kudzu itself, an import from balmy Pacific shores.

The steel guitar, played with a slide, evolved in Hawaii. A couple of Slovakian immigrants in San Francisco, the Dopyeras, were intrigued with Hawaiian music and experimented with refining the steel-guitar sound. They built a wooden-bodied guitar with a steel resonator. Naming it after themselves, they called it the dobro. It caught on among open-minded country musicians in a couple of Southern cities, specifically Knoxville, and proliferated.

Roy Acuff had a Knoxville dobro enthusiast in his band when he moved to Nashville to join the Opry. People tuning in to WSM around the country heard that Hawaiian twang in Acuff’s “Great Speckled Bird” and, to them, it was the very voice of country.

The electric guitar and drums, keyboards, and sometimes orchestral strings came into the music later. Critics praised and reviled the influence as the Nashville Sound, named for the city where it coalesced. But somehow it was still country.

Country music is world music. And it developed many of its promiscuous associations in the impure streets of the city. I wish WDVX good luck in its new digs on Gay Street, where Acuff, Chet Atkins, Flatt and Scruggs, the Louvin Brothers, the Everly Brothers, and Dolly Parton performed for radio, made important connections, and maybe learned a few new licks.

April 1, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 14 © 2004 Metro Pulse