Last week's music feature about Sara Jordan, "Lady Sings the Blues," [MP. Vol. 7, No. 7.26] was as welcome as it was overdue. I would have liked it better if it had not come in the form of a back-handed compliment. At the same time Glynn Wilson pays tribute to the Queen of the Knoxville blues scene, he disparages her Queendom.Her loyal subjects here feel no need to apologize for not being in New Orleans or the Mississippi Delta or Chicago, because no other place on earth is, either. This "suspect terrain" theory about Knoxville's musical geography being of no environmental support is only 180 degrees off the mark. We may not be a sprawling metropolis or situated on a moody bayou, but we can boast the world's largest golden microphone, and-thanks to TVA!-we're simultaneously on the banks of a river, like New Orleans and the Delta, and by the lake, as is Chicago.
All the while, we're rocking in the cradle of the oldest mountains on the planet. I'd say the musical geography of Knoxville compares favorably with just about any place in the land.
While surveying this geography, you might lose sight of that back 40 acres of blues behind Knoxville's vast acreage of country and bluegrass, the lush growth of jazz, and the menacingly wild kudzu of punk and metal. And yes, many may think they've latched onto that patch of true blues when what they've really got is what some folks insist on calling Southern rock (what an irritating redundancy, seeing as how rock 'n' roll was born and raised in the South!). But the confusion of identity is understandable, owing to their close kin. As Knoxville blues great Brownie McGhee said: "The blues had a baby, and they called it rock 'n' roll." (OK, OK, so blues purists claim the baby is one of them "outside chil'ren.")
Knoxville's traditional blues roots may not be thick, but they do run deep-all the way back to Brownie and Ida Cox. Sara Jordan and some others have loved and nurtured that pure strain of living, breathing blues, and Johnny Mack's Monday Night Blues Show on WUTK provides a free blues education from remedial through advanced levels. The Knoxville Blues Society recently celebrated its first anniversary and is rearin' to clown. We've had a River Blues Cruise and monthly Blues Nights Out, plus our down-home newsletter, "The Blues Groove."
Limited blues venues? You've gotta be kidding-or else not getting out much. You can hear live blues almost every night of the week, and you can find it in the Old City, on the Strip, on Kingston Pike, in 4th & Gill, even in Oak Ridge. What you say? So you can accuse us of standing on shaky ground-er, "suspect terrain"-and you can try to put us down, but you just better watch out and make room, all you jazzy bluegrass country metal techno-punks, because Knoxville blues is alive and howling.
Michael Gill
Knoxville
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