Country music has never been more popular than it is now, thanks to several current figures who had their starts in or near Knoxville, from Dolly Parton to Kenny Chesney to Kelsea Ballerini. But the national country-music phenomenon has much deeper roots, with a dramatic story that unfolded in downtown Knoxville.
The Knoxville History Project’s “Walking Music Guide,” new this year, is a free 40-page hip-pocket booklet that tells the whole complicated and frequently surprising story of how some forms of popular music evolved, in specific places where you can still stand and imagine it.
One of our most mind-blowing surprises is that country music, as a performance-based phenomenon, appears to have grown out of the popularity of European opera. Other than churches, the first places where mid-19th-century Tennesseans gathered to pay attention to music were in opera halls, where European immigrants organized operatic singing performances in the 1860s. The first known country-music show was a surprise fiddler’s jamboree in May 1883, at what was otherwise an all-opera program at Swiss immigrant Peter Staub’s 1872 Opera House, at the southeast corner of Gay and Cumberland. Unfortunately, Staub’s landmark building is no longer there to behold, but several other buildings associated with more recognizable country-music performers are still part of downtown’s landscape.
The Andrew Johnson building, a towering former hotel near the Gay Street Bridge, was where young fiddler and singer Roy Acuff performed for WNOX in 1935, but was soon evicted because his shows were too popular for the operation of a fancy hotel. The very same building was, on the last day of 1952, where one of Acuff’s admirers, Alabama native Hank Williams, spent his last conscious hours before his death. We can only wonder whether Williams knew of that connection.
Built in 1909 in the rear of a much-older hotel, the Bijou Theatre has witnessed a lot of music history, ranging from several performances by John Philip Sousa and his famous orchestra to a wacky 1913 musical starring the Marx Brothers. In recent decades, the theater has earned plaudits from national critics for its near-perfect acoustics, most evident at audio-centric events like the annual Big Ears Festival, when the Bijou hosts as many as 40 performances of performers in all genres, from blues to experimental minimalism. But in 2024, Dolly Parton was on the same stage, taping a four-part video series about her family.
By the way, the place where Dolly Parton began her broadcasting career as a girl in the 1950s was the first studio of radio station WIVK, on the second floor of a now-empty building on North Gay.
The 1928 Tennessee Theatre was a “motion-picture palace” best known for movies and vaudeville shows, but was also the first place Roy Acuff performed, in 1932—and, some 65 years later, the final place guitar wizard Chet Atkins performed. That extraordinary hall has seen performances by a wide variety of artists from Diana Ross to Bob Dylan to Loretta Lynn. It was also the setting for the late Nanci Griffith’s 2002 live album, Winter Marquee.
The nearby Mechanics Bank Building, at 612 Gay Street, hosted radio station WROL, when it was broadcasting some future stars like Carl Butler—and the Everly Brothers, who were broadcasting here as teenagers, ca. 1954, trying out this new kind of music called rock ‘n’ roll. Even if their sponsor didn’t like it, their unusual combination of gospel harmonies and Bo Diddley guitar riffs caught on. Simon and Garfunkel, the Beach Boys, and even the Beatles regarded them as an early inspiration. That building is now in the process of being converted into an extension of the Tennessee Theatre for receptions, rehearsals, and even recording.
The Holston Building’s third floor was in the 1940s home to radio station WROL. (In its early days, the announcer was a young Tennessee Ernie Ford, soon to be a nationally popular singer. But later the building earned the nickname “the Capitol of Bluegrass.” Whether that’s deserved or not, several early bluegrass bands did perform for broadcast there, before the up-tempo form of country music known as bluegrass was widely familiar. None were more famous than Flatt and Scruggs, who had recently quit Bill Monroe’s seminal bluegrass band in Nashville. The duo, probably the most popular bluegrass band in history, made their first recordings as a duo there in 1948.
Market Square was central to music for many years since it was founded in the 1850s, and farmers would play fiddle to attract shoppers to their stalls, and where by the 1890s, fiddling championships would draw performers from several states. Once home to a central building with a large auditorium, it hosted a lot of different performers—even Duke Ellington and his orchestra performed here in 1934—but the Saturday-afternoon shows by the young, aggressive fiddler Roy Acuff drew such big crowds that downtown movie theaters were complaining to the city that he was stealing their cowboy-matinee audiences.
Market Square has an extra feather in its cap in that Sam Morrison’s unusually liberal record store at 22 ½ Market Square was where scouts from RCA first observed the Elvis Presley phenomenon—even though Elvis himself was probably never there, his first record, “That’s All Right, Mama,” was an unprecedented phenomenon here in the summer of 1954, selling thousands of copies at this store alone. At the time, RCA came to consider Market Square as a bellwether for recordings that had the chance to go national.
And the north end of Market Square was the site of the St. James Hotel, now gone, where during a two-year experiment in 1929 and 1930, several now-legendary performers, including the Tennessee Ramblers, blues singer Leola Manning, and the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, featuring Howard Armstrong and Carl Martin, and many others made their first recordings for a national record label.
The oddly named “Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round” was a variety show, with all sorts of music from classical to jazz, with a fair dose of daily comedy, but it became most famous for launching country-music talent, including Chet Atkins, Don Gibson, Kitty Wells, Pee Wee King, and many others. From 1936 to 1955, the live-audience radio show was on the east side of Gay Street. Though the building burned in the 1970s, long after the radio show had left, its façade remains as a sort of ruin.
But the show was deliberately revived by public radio station WDVX, which hosts a live noontime musical show at the Visitors Center almost every weekday. Not everyone who plays on the show becomes famous, but a few have.
We’ve even identified the street corner where street musician George Reneau performed his version of “On Top of Old Smoky”—during his brief moment of fame in New York in 1925, he would be the first to record it.
Those and several other highlights of country, blues, jazz, classical, and rock ‘n’ roll music are all detailed in our “Walking Music Guide.” You can walk all or parts of it, and don’t be surprised if you start hearing tunes in your head.
Pick up a copy of the guide at Visit Knoxville (301 S. Gay), East Tennessee History Center (601 S. Gay), or Lawson McGhee Library (500 W. Church); it’s also available to read online.
Images & Captions:
Bijou Theatre. (Shawn Poynter/Knoxville History Project.)
Tennessee Theatre on Gay Street. (Shawn Poynter/Knoxville History Project.)
Jack is the Executive Director of the Knoxville History Project, an educational nonprofit whose mission is to research and promote the history of Knoxville. He is a journalist who has been writing about his hometown’s character and heritage for many years. He has written several books about Knoxville and its history, and they can be purchased in various places throughout the city including Union Avenue Books and the Visit Knoxville Gift Shop.
