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6
T
HE
K
NOXVILLE
S
ESSIONS
several music genres – jazz, blues, black string-
band music, black gospel – underrepresented
during the earlier East Tennessee recording ses-
sions. The documentary window into Ap-
palachia is remarkably different from the
windows opened by the Bristol and Johnson
City sets, and this view is in many respects
more interesting because it illustrates that cer-
tain genres generally associated with African
Americans, all too often ignored in the stan-
dard narrative about Appalachian music, flour-
ished historically in Appalachia.
Knox County
Stomp
is timely because public understanding
of Appalachia and its musical culture sorely
needs the reality check that these recordings
provide.
Serious aficionados of vernacular American
music have known about a few of the record-
ings from the Knoxville Sessions, such as the
title track, recorded on April 3, 1930, by The
Tennessee Chocolate Drops, an acclaimed East
Tennessee black stringband fronted by the ir-
repressible fiddler Howard Armstrong. Most of
the 102 released recordings from Knoxville,
though, have remained obscure, with several
exceedingly rare. The Knoxville Sessions, gath-
ered here for the first time and presented digi-
tally in shimmering remastered sound, provide
us with a glimpse into the worlds of the people
who gathered together in one urban Ap-
palachian hotel at the cusp of the Great De-
pression.
Knox County Stomp
presents all
these recordings, in chronological order. Lis-
tening to this exuberant music reanimates a
lost era when music was one of the few emo-
tional and spiritual releases of a people who re-
fused to surrender to the socioeconomically
and racially biased system in which they had
been forced to live.
By compiling the recordings of a diverse group
of amateur and professional musicians, this set
features powerful expressions of resistance as
well as exclamations of pure delight in being
alive. These recordings are not bound by the
time and place in which they were made or
limited in any way by their relative obscurity.
When these recordings were waxed, the hope
of those musicians was to be heard – an aspi-
ration thwarted by the Depression. Having
outlasted the silence into which they had been
cast, the Knoxville recordings reveal worlds
both lost and found.
(
BELOW
) View of downtown Knoxville from across the Tennessee
River, early twentieth century.