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5
L
AST
B
UT
N
OT
L
EAST
:
The Third of the Three
East Tennessee Location
Recording Sessions
BY
T
ED
O
LSON
T
he Knoxville Sessions, 1929-1930: Knox County Stomp
completes
B
EAR
F
AMILY
R
ECORDS
’ documentation of the three commercial location
recording sessions conducted in East Tennessee during the years 1927-
30. Each of the three sessions was held in a different East Tennessee city by a
different record company, and each was unique in terms of the assemblage of
musicians and the genres of music recorded; what the three sessions had in com-
mon was that they ultimately documented a broad range of the musical sounds,
styles, and repertoires of Appalachia. Building on the musical and cultural rev-
elations of the two previous B
EAR
F
AMILY
sets –
The Bristol Sessions, 1927-1928:
The Big Bang Of Country Music
(2011) and
The Johnson City Sessions, 1928-
1929: Can You Sing Or Play Old-Time Music?
(2013) –
Knox County Stomp
de-
finitively illustrates that the musical life of Appalachia was far more diverse than
previously assumed.
In light of B
EAR
F
AMILY
R
ECORDS
’ commitment to exploring the larger story of the
location recording sessions conducted in Appalachia during the late 1920s and
early ’30s, it was logical after researching and releasing the entire output of the
Bristol and Johnson City sessions to undertake an investigation of the sessions
conducted by B
RUNSWICK
-V
OCALION
in Knoxville during August-September 1929
and March-April 1930. Compared with the legendary if exhaustively discussed
Bristol Sessions and the excellent if underappreciated Johnson City Sessions, the
Knoxville Sessions are virtually unknown outside the city that originally hosted
them. That said, these historic recordings from Knoxville, taken together, show-
case a broader range of music-making than those from Bristol and Johnson City
combined. Accordingly,
Knox County Stomp
navigates a remarkably diverse mu-
sical terrain, incorporating, like the recordings from Bristol and Johnson City,
many strains of “hillbilly music” (from stringband instrumentals to fiddle and
banjo tunes to Jimmie Rodgers-style yodels to white gospel) while also featuring
(
LEFT
) Market House and Square, site of the Knox
County Fiddlers’ Association Convention, May
1896, “the first fiddlers’ contest ever held in the
country.”