Issue 35 - November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE’S BEST SOURCE FOR VICTORIAN ART NEWS

NOV. 5, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

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NEWS

Knoxville Artists Aim to Spur Tennessee’s Modern Art Scene

JACK NEELY

More Details About Nina Simone’s Elusive Game Day Show

THE VAULT

A Survey of Knoxville’s Forgotten 45s and Their Musicians

FOOD

Are Local Diners Ready for a Vegetarian-Only Food Truck?

Armistice Day and Veterans Day Veterans Day is next Wednesday, and it’s one of Knoxville’s older annual traditions.

When Knoxville first celebrated Veterans Day, it was headline news. At 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918, Germany officially surrendered to the Allies, and the news was cabled around the world.

Allied leaders famously arranged the signing of the armistice, in a train car in the Forest of Compiègne in France, to take effect on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Line. Tyson’s son, Lt. McGhee Tyson, a Navy airman who died in a plane crash in the final weeks of the war, is the honoree of Knoxville’s airport. Tyson Park is named for the same family. Gen. Tyson (1861-1929) later became a U.S. senator.

In 1922, a charging “Doughboy Statue,” similar to others around the country, was erected in front of Knoxville High School, especially to commemorate the many KHS alumni who fought in the war.

Although Knoxville High closed in 1951, the Doughboy Statue is still there, on Fifth Avenue near Central Street.

Thousands assembled on Gay Street, a jubilant crowd watching the tall iron sidewalk clock in front of Hope Brothers Jewelry. They cheered when the minute hand of the Hope Clock reached 12.

Kaiser Wilhelm was hanged in effigy on lampposts all around downtown. It’s said that Prince Street was renamed Market Street during the war because the German leader was a prince.

Historical photograph of the monument to the soldiers of the 117th Infantry Regiment of World War I. It still stands in front of the old Knoxville High School building on Fifth Avenue.

For more than a quarter century, Veterans’ Day was called Armistice Day, and was mainly considered a celebration of the victory in World War I. However, after 1945, a group of World War II veterans, supported

by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, started celebrating Armistice Day as a holiday to honor all U.S. veterans. By an act of Congress, the name was changed to Veterans Day in 1954.

Veterans of previous wars, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican Photo courtesy of the Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-Americmdc.knoxlib.org can War were never celebrated with special days. Memorial Day, which was originally a grave-decorating holiday called In Knoxville, Veterans Day is always celebrated with a parade on Gay Decoration Day, honored the Union dead, and often involved Union veterans.

Street. Soldiers and high-school bands parade in the same direction as recruits in 1917, who marched north toward the troop trains waiting at the During the early years of Veterans Day, it was called Armistice Day, and it Southern Railway station at Gay and Depot. Veterans Day is one of only two celebrated mainly the end of the war. Compared to other wars, the First holidays each year celebrated with a large parade down Gay Street.

World War was rather short, and many of these first veterans had served for only a few months or even weeks. However, some of them had seen some of In the United Kingdom and most other English-speaking countries, the the worst carnage ever witnessed in war. Upon their return to Knoxville, via same day is celebrated as Remembrance Day. However, the emphasis is on train, they were welcomed with a major downtown festival, for which streets those who died in battle. Although veterans always participate in ceremonies, were closed to make room for long dining tables. other countries’ commemorations of Nov. 11 are more similar to America’s Memorial Day, in which the emphasis is on those who lost their lives in battle.

This region was home to America’s most famous veteran of World War I, Sgt. Alvin York (1887-1964). On Oct. 8, 1918, the Fentress County native led a Local veterans’ cemeteries include the original National Cemetery on small squad that killed or captured more than 150 German soldiers and Tyson Street, established during the Civil War and one of the oldest seized 32 machine guns. He later won the Medal of Honor. national cemeteries in the nation.

On the same day as York’s famous assault, Knoxvillian Sgt. J.E. “Buck” Karnes (1889-1966), with only one other soldier, overcame a German machine-gun position manned by 10 enemy soldiers. The Alcoa Highway bridge over the Tennessee River is named for Karnes.

Other Knoxville veterans of World War I included Gen. Lawrence Tyson, who led part of the offensive that broke the Germans’ formidable Hindenburg

A more recent veterans’ memorial is located at World’s Fair Park, near the L&N building.

Hosted as always by the American Legion, the veterans’ organization which has organized the parade since 1921, this year’s Veterans Day Parade will be held at 11 a.m. next Wednesday, exactly the same time and place as the first Armistice Day celebration 97 years ago.

Source: The Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection.

The Knoxville History Project, a new nonprofit organization devoted to the promotion of and education about the history of Knoxville, presents this page each week to raise awareness of the themes, personalities, and stories of our unique city.

Learn more on www.facebook.com/knoxvillehistoryproject • email jack@knoxhistoryproject.org 2

KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

Nov. 5, 2015 Volume 01 / Issue 35 knoxmercury.com

CONTENTS

“We want happy paintings. If you want sad things, watch the news.” —Bob Ross

NEWS

14 A Broad Brush Tennessee is already known across the globe as the home of country music, the artistic expression of the Everyman. A couple of Knoxville artists want to help the state become equally renowned for a much more challenging and complex part of its cultural scene: modern art. They have launched a Kickstarter campaign to create a statewide, online contemporary art community and market it to visitors from other cities, states, and countries. S. Heather Duncan takes a look.

16 A Portrait of the Artist

Courtesy of the Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection, Knox County Public Library

COVER STORY

Lloyd Branson was the first Knoxvillian who made an entire career of art. Though he lived in a practical, industrial city and had no ongoing affiliation with a university, for 50 years he somehow made a living as an artist. But he’s an enigma. Although he was a prominent figure in Knoxville a century ago, and no recluse, many basic details about his life are as blurry as some of his impressionist-influenced canvases.

As the Museum of East Tennessee History mounts a first-ever retrospective of Branson’s work, Jack Neely tries to decipher his life.

Join Our League of Supporters! Man, what a week. Find out how you can help at knoxmercury.com/join.

DEPARTMENTS

OPINION

A&E

4 Letters 6 Howdy

8 The Scruffy Citizen

22 Program Notes: Jenna Jefferson

38 Voice in the Wilderness

23 Inside the Vault: Eric Dawson

FOOD & DRINK

Start Here: Roadside Sketches

by Andrew Gresham, Believe It or Knox!, Public Affairs, Quote Factory PLUS: Words With …

Anelo Lino

44 ’Bye

Finish There: Sacred & Profane by Donna Johnson, Crooked Street Crossword by Ian Blackburn and Jack Neely, Spirit of the Staircase by Matthew Foltz-Gray

Jack Neely gets some help in tracking down Nina Simone’s game day performance at UT.

10 Guest Ed.

Guest columnist Kurt Devol shares his parenting experience.

12 Perspectives

Joe Sullivan examines Colorado’s effort to create a single-payer health insurance program.

OUTDOORS announces her retirement from the blues. surveys some of Knoxville’s tastier 45s.

24 Music: Matthew Everett talks with the Knox County Jug Stompers.

25 Movies: April Snellings is struck by the beauty of The Assassin.

CALENDAR

Kim Trevathan finds a rare catch in a drawn-down Chilhowee Lake.

40 Home Palate

Dennis Perkins checks in with Holly Hambright at her new Gourmet’s Market.

42 Dirt to Fork

Rose Kennedy samples Dinner Bell Fresh’s all-veggie food truck.

26 Spotlights: Stevie Wonder, Angaleena Presley

November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 3

LETTERS Delivering Fine Journalism Since 2015

AN EQUITABLE PARK SWAP?

First info said we would lose some soccer fields. [“Knox County Eyes Land-Swap Deal to Place Walmart at Nicholas Ball Park,” news feature by S. Heather Duncan, Oct. 29, 2015] Now it is soccer fields, softball fields, playground, and tennis courts. For what. A 100-acre park that will have two soccer fields and the rest in slopes with trails up to a scenic view.

Oh, and probably won’t be done for “quite some time.” Where is the benefit to county residents? There is zero, as far as I can see. Who is going to provide security for our children (and adults) to be safe on these trails?

No playground, no tennis courts, no softball fields, less parking, and maybe no walking trail. Tell us again how we will be able to walk around and behind Walmart and Weigel’s.

Sandra Laughlin Eiler via Facebook Knoxville UPDATE: According to Knox County spokesperson Michael Grider, the county is going to ask MPC to delay considering the zoning change for Nicholas Ball Park until next year because they’ve decided to wait until after the holidays to hold the public meeting on the proposed land swap.

WE’LL NEED IT

It’s a great shame that historic sites, when seemingly beyond repair, are simply demolished. [“General Pickle’s ‘Fort Sanders Hall’ Is Apparently Doomed,” Scruffy Citizen by Jack Neely, Oct. 22, 2015] You are correct in saying that, in Scotland, it may well be saved. Groups like English Heritage and Historic Scotland will often preserve an important site as a snapshot, a moment in time, so that the story of a building and its location can be appreciated, rather than “restoring” it, which often removes that story.

I live close to Whitby Abbey in Yorkshire where the old mansion house (built by Sir Hugh Cholmley in 1662) stood in ruins. It has now been encased in a modern glass and steel structure ingeniously constructed in 4

KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

harmony with the ruins, allowing the story of the building to speak to visitors. These places are just too important to destroy. It’s not about bricks and mortar but about the people who made the place what it is.

I wish you luck.

Sue Beanland via Facebook Scarborough, North Yorkshire

MAKING TRACKS

Just wanted to add my 2 cents on your article, “Greenways Frontier” [cover story by S. Heather Duncan, Oct. 22, 2015]. It would be nice to extend into West Knoxville alongside the Southern Railroad right of way, if it were possible. Riders, walkers, and runners could go all the way to South Knoxville bridge without worrying about getting run over.

Too bad we didn’t save all of the old Smoky Mountain Railroad right of way. What a beautiful ride it would have been to ride all the way from Knoxville to Sevierville. Just think of all the people and money it would have brought into the area. Look what the Creeper Trail has done for Virginia.

Ken Akins Knoxville

HEALTH ISSUES

Although I don’t always understand the minutiae of Joe Sullivan’s columns, the gist is always clear, and I appreciate that we have a regular columnist who understands and imparts political and financial information while avoiding partisan rants. That said, when he is truly angry or disappointed, he doesn’t shy away from saying so, then backing up what he says with facts. [“The Ignominious Demise of Community Health Alliance,” Perspectives, Oct. 22, 2015] It seems apparent to me that the insurance companies wrote the Obamacare legislation to benefit only themselves—from what I understand,

everyone’s rates are going up in 2016, while coverage goes down along with doctor’s incomes. But I don’t know the facts, or how to find them all or put all of the numbers together. I am in my second year of Medicare, and finding an affordable supplement or an Advantage Plan which actually seems worth paying for, or which I can depend on to not radically change either premiums or benefits in coming years, is proving to be an elusive target. Is there an insurance company or plan who truly has its customers’ care and confidence in mind? Humana has great PR, but there is not much evidence that actual sufficient insurance is a high priority. Even my insurance agent said last week, “I’m as pissed off as you are!” I lay all the blame on Congress for being too lazy and combative to take care of constituents.

Maybe we could have some more reasonably-conceived columns about this debacle?

Charles Barber via Facebook Knoxville

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR GUIDELINES

• Letter submissions should include a verifiable name, address, and phone number.

We do not print anonymous letters.

• We much prefer letters that address issues that pertain specifically to Knoxville or to stories we’ve published.

• We don’t publish letters about personal disputes or how you didn’t like your waiter at that restaurant.

• Letters are usually published in the order that we receive them.

Send your letters to: Our Dear Editor, Knoxville Mercury 706 Walnut St., Suite 404 Knoxville, TN 37920 Send an email to: editor@knoxmercury.com Or message us at: facebook.com/knoxmercury

EDITORIAL EDITOR Coury Turczyn coury@knoxmercury.com SENIOR EDITOR Matthew Everett matthew@knoxmercury.com CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Jack Neely jack@knoxhistoryproject.org STAFF WRITERS S. Heather Duncan heather@knoxmercury.com Clay Duda clay@knoxmercury.com CONTRIBUTORS

Chris Barrett Ian Blackburn Patrice Cole Eric Dawson George Dodds Lee Gardner Mike Gibson Carey Hodges Nick Huinker Donna Johnson

Rose Kennedy Dennis Perkins Stephanie Piper Ryan Reed Eleanor Scott Alan Sherrod April Snellings Joe Sullivan Kim Trevathan Chris Wohlwend

INTERNS

Jordan Achs Marina Waters

DESIGN ART DIRECTOR Tricia Bateman tricia@knoxmercury.com GRAPHIC DESIGNERS

Charlie Finch Corey McPherson CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

David Luttrell Shawn Poynter Justin Fee Tyler Oxendine CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATORS

Ben Adams Matthew Foltz-Gray

ADVERTISING PUBLISHER & DIRECTOR OF SALES Charlie Vogel charlie@knoxmercury.com SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Scott Hamstead scott@knoxmercury.com Stacey Pastor stacey@knoxmercury.com

BUSINESS BUSINESS MANAGER Scott Dickey scott.dickey@knoxmercury.com

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 706 Walnut St., Suite 404, Knoxville, Tenn. 37902 knoxmercury.com • 865-313-2059 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR & PRESS RELEASES editor@knoxmercury.com CALENDAR SUBMISSIONS calendar@knoxmercury.com SALES QUERIES sales@knoxmercury.com DISTRIBUTION distribution@knoxmercury.com

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Terry Hummel Joe Sullivan Jack Neely Coury Turczyn Charlie Vogel The Knoxville Mercury is an independent weekly news magazine devoted to informing and connecting Knoxville’s many different communities. It is a taxable, not-for-profit company governed by the Knoxville History Project, a non-profit organization devoted to exploring, disseminating, and celebrating Knoxville’s unique cultural heritage. It publishes 25,000 copies per week, available free of charge, limited to one copy per reader. © 2015 The Knoxville Mercury

ONE MORE REASON Y VETERAN’S BENEFIT HEALTH FAIR Join WBIR and the YMCA of East Tennessee in Honoring our Heroes with a free Veteran’s Benefit Health Fair, Tuesday, November 10 from 9am - 1pm.

Please bring your Military ID and let us serve YOU! • Showers • Health Screenings • Haircuts

• Chair Massages • Food • Entertainment

Cansler Family YMCA Tuesday, Nov 10 from 9 am - 1 pm 616 Jessamine St.

THE Y. FOR A BETTER US.™

www.ymcaknoxville.org 865-525-9622

“We started seeing all kinds of views and hits on our Facebook page and realized it was because we were mentioned in the Knoxville Mercury readers’ poll.”

—MARIANE FREITAG, The Bag Lady Boutique Deliver your message to our audience of engaged readers.

sales@knoxmercury.com • 865-333-2048 knoxmercury.com/advertise

November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 5

Illustration by Ben Adams

HOWDY

Believe It or Knox!

BY Z. HERACLITUS KNOX Although Knoxville is hilly and sometimes called a “mountain city,” some cities famous for being flat, like Kansas City, Kan., and Omaha, Neb., are higher in altitude!

Roadside Sketches by Andrew Gresham (agreshamphoto.com)

QUOTE FACTORY “ So, just to be clear, for anyone who doesn’t know me: Don’t be ridiculous.”

Market Street was known as Prince Street until 1917.

Calling it Market Street made logical sense, because it always led from the riverfront to Market Square. However, what prompted the name change was World War I. The United States was at war with Kaiser Wilhelm—who was a prince!

The Tennessee Theatre hosted the first auditorium appearance of fiddler and recording-industry legend Roy Acuff, in 1932. The same room hosted the last auditorium appearance of his colleague, legendary guitarist Chet Atkins, in 1997!

—Mayor Madeline Rogero responding on Monday in a Facebook post to being named on a list posted to PasteBin of politicians whose addresses “appeared in KKK databases,” according to a TechCrunch interview with supposed hacker Amped Attacks. On Nov. 5, the rather disorganized hacker organization Anonymous promises to reveal the identities of Ku Klux Klan members.

PUBLIC AFFAIRS

11/5 KNOXVILLE SOUP DINNER THURSDAY

6 p.m., Woodlawn Christian Church (4339 Woodlawn Pike). $5.

No, not soup, but rather SOUP: the South Knoxville Alliance’s micro-funding program for creative new projects in the 37920 zip code. At this pot-luck dinner, you can network and consider the applicants: Vestal School Pottery, the Family Friendly Drum Circle @ Ijams, SKE Scientists in the Library, and the Joe Hill Roadshow. Performing will be Abdalla Husain. Info: KnoxvilleSOUP.org.

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

11/7 6TH ANNUAL AMBC FALL FESTIVAL 11/8 FURRY FALL FESTIVAL SATURDAY

11 a.m., Knoxville Urban Wilderness Trail. Free.

Mountain bikers unite! The Appalachian Mountain Bike Club is serving up a day of bikes, beer, food, and music. Meet up at 654 Helix Lane; group rides start at 11:30 a.m. There’ll also be bike-demo trailers from a variety of makes, a bike raffle by Harpers Bike Shop, and bike clinics aplenty. Live performances from Southern Cities, The Jonny Monster Band, and Big Bad Oven. Info: facebook.com/ambcsorba.

SUNDAY

Noon-4 p.m., Young-Williams Animal Center (3201 Division St.). Free.

It’s not what you think. Rather, this is a celebration of real furries—your pets, current and soon-to-be. There’ll be pet-supply vendors, a Kids Zone, plus appearances

by Trixie, a rescue horse representing Horse Haven of Tennessee, and K-9 Kelly from the Knox County Sheriff’s Office. You can get those rabies shots out of the way, or adopt a new pet from regional animal rescue groups.

Info: young-williams.org.

11/10BROWN BAG LECTURE: DAVID MADDEN TUESDAY

Noon, East Tennessee History Center (601 South Gay St.). Free.

Okay, we’ve had a lot of talks about the Civil War lately, but this one should be a doozie: Knoxville’s very own David Madden unveils his new book with the longish title, The Tangled Web of the Civil War and Reconstruction: Readings and Writings from a Novelist’s Perspective. Info: EastTNHistory.org.

HOWDY IT’S HARD FOR SMALL BUSINESSES TO GET AHEAD.

WORDS WITH ...

Anelo Lino

Let’s Help!

BY ROSE KENNEDY Anelo Lino is event chair for the Friends of the Knox County Public Library’s book drive to collect new or like-new children’s books to include in holiday baskets from the Knoxville News Sentinel Empty Stocking Fund. People can donate gift-quality books at any KCPL location or at Union Ave Books through Nov. 30, or donate

Public voting begins November 9th!

Help someone win a 40k branding package.

for others to shop for the books online by sending a check or bookstore gift certificate to Friends of KCPL, 500 W. Church Ave., Knoxville, TN 37902.

What books do you need most?

We especially need chapter books for late elementary, middle, and high schoolers. Graphic novels would be highly prized. Another area of need is board books for infants and toddlers.

Whose idea was the book drive?

Every year, the Empty Stocking Fund provides foods and toys for thousands of families in need. FOL’s goal is that along with a toy, children receive a book for the holidays, or maybe two! The ESF book drive began in 2008. Before FOL’s involvement, the KNS received most of the books from Borders. After Borders closed, FOL representatives met with KNS and it was agreed that FOL would gather books in community book drives to cover the donations that had come from Borders in the past.

How will you define success?

FOL would define success as 3,000 books delivered to children this holiday. This is the first year we are encouraging the entire community to participate on this worthy cause for our children.

What are the restrictions on used books?

They should be gift-quality books—no signs of tears, no scribbles.

Do you have a favorite book you will contribute?

Yes, my favorite is the Little Engine That Could.

What kind of books would FOL buy with donations?

FOL has a list of appropriate books that we’ll use to make those purchases, and anyone interested in donating or buying for their own family and friends can find a list on the FOL website. We do have an anonymous donor who is matching the

first $200 of cash donations.

How will the books be distributed?

Books will be distributed on Dec. 23 at the Jacobs Building. There will be many great volunteers helping parents to choose age-appropriate books for their children from the books we’ll have, which range from birth to high school level.

How did you get involved with FOL?

Through Centro Hispano de East Tennessee, a nonprofit organization that helps the Hispanic community—I also served on the board of Centro and last year, Centro and FOL got together to create Centro’s library.

Did you like picture books as a child? Did anyone read to you?

Yes, I liked pictures books as a child and I keep loving them. I have an 18-month-old son who I like to read to every night. We love reading the book El Leon, el Elefante y el Dromedario (The Lion, the Elephant, and the Dromedary) because it is very entertaining and educational. It is about this lion that got his mane by overcoming his fear of fire, the elephant that got his trunk by being curious, and the dromedary that got his back because he was lazy.

Watch the website and social channels for updates!

LEARN at ProjectB MORE randAid.co m

Help spread the word, Knoxville!

BROUGHT TO YOU BY:

Do you have some tips for buying books for kids who aren’t Empty Stocking Fund recipients?

Anything that is interesting to both the children and their parents, because the parents will need to read to them to allow them to develop a passion for books.

For more information or to make an online donation: knoxfriends.org

ProjectBrandAid.com | #ProjectBrandAid November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 7

SCRUFFY CITIZEN

Nina Simone on Game Day With readers’ help, a few more details about an elusive show

BY JACK NEELY

A

couple of months ago I asked to hear from readers who might have witnessed Nina Simone’s rare, perhaps only, Knoxville appearance. Until seeing a new movie this past summer, I had never heard that Simone, the extraordinary singer who was best known for her career in New York and Europe, was here even once.

But the new Netflix documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, happens to feature, for a few seconds, a random page of her touring agenda, with the line “University of Tennessee, Knoxville,” and the date, “Nov. 14,” no year indicated.

Simone had never been an easy-listening sort, but in her early years, she seemed daring mainly in a musical sense and did not come across as a political figure. By 1964, though, several incidents of racist violence in the Deep South, especially the murder of Medgar Evers and later three civil-rights volunteers and in Mississippi, and the killing of four girls in a Sunday school in Birmingham, radicalized many American performers and other artists. Simone’s reaction was more radical than most.

During that period she evolved from a unique song stylist to a fierce and often angry advocate for racial justice.

Her UT show was just a few months after the release of her most controversial song, “Mississippi Goddam.” Introduced at Carnegie

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

Hall earlier that year, it was especially controversial in the South. In the lyrics, she singled out three states: Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee.

“Made me lose my rest,” she sang.

Perhaps helped by the condemnations and bans, it naturally became one of the best known recordings.

I talked to one reader who saw her in Atlanta, and heard of others who might have seen her show in Knoxville, but were now deceased or hard to reach. A couple of people directed me to a page of a yearbook showing she had been here as part of UT’s old Nahheeyayli series held at what was then called Alumni Gym (now Alumni Hall, home of Cox Auditorium).

The context in itself suggests an awkward poignancy. Nahheeyayli, the name said to be that of the “Cherokee Green Corn Dance,” was a UT tradition since 1924, and was originally a formal dance. It reached its height during the big-band era, when some of the most popular jazz orchestras in America, including those of Harry James, Glenn Miller, and Tommy Dorsey—featuring young singer Frank Sinatra, in what was probably his last appearance in Knoxville—performed at Nahheeyayli dances at Alumni Gym, as well-dressed couples danced the night away. Back then, even legendary performers were mainly entertainers, and the dance was the main thing.

The 1960s more or less buried

the tradition, and in its later years I doubt the Nina Simone show seemed much like a dance. “Mississippi Goddam” is not a foxtrot.

Whatever it seemed like, I was hoping to hear from at least one person who had attended the Nina Simone concert at UT. And I heard from two, who both happen to be old friends. One was Mary Linda Schwarzbart who is, among many other things, the secretary of the Knoxville History Project.

She attended the show with her husband, Arnold, who died just a few months ago.

The other witness was Kay Newton. Kay is known as a patroness of the jazz arts, the sort of person who would attend a Nina Simone concert today, and probably talk the performer into coming over for wine afterward.

Originally from Memphis, Newton was new to Knoxville and was disappointed in what the lack of interest in one of America’s most talked-about performers suggested about her new home.

It might have seemed a significant event, because Simone, known to attract urbane crowds in big cities, rarely played in this part of the country, which happens to be where she’s from.

Her hometown was Tryon, N.C., about 150 miles from Knoxville. By all accounts her show here did not have the character of a warm homecoming.

It’s been 51 years, and neither of our witnesses, who don’t know each other, recalls it in great detail. Kay remembers the concert as embarrassingly under-attended. Mary Linda remembers it as very short, perhaps consisting of as few as three songs.

It’s likely the show was probably disappointing on both sides of the proscenium.

Regardless of the disappointments, the UT yearbook staff thought the show significant enough to include it as a

special mention, with a head shot of Miss Simone, in the 1965 annual.

Mary Linda recalls one other, apolitical reason the Simone concert might have been under-attended. It was the same day that the Vols lost to Ole Miss, right next door at Neyland Stadium. I looked it up, and sure enough she remembers that right.

That in itself is remarkable, in retrospect, a reminder that even in the days when the Vols were extremely popular—Doug Dickey was coach, in his first year—the city, and even the campus, didn’t shut down in abject supplication. Alumni Gym was right next door to Neyland Stadium, but on the same day as a home game it hosted a major international singer. Almost exactly five years later, Janis Joplin performed to a crowd of over 9,000 at Stokely Athletic Center—immediately after the third-ranked Vols beat South Carolina, nearby, at Neyland.

We don’t ever do that any more, allow other big events to occur in Knoxville on Game Days. Although the Vols aren’t any more nationally prominent now than back then, football crowds are now 40-50 percent bigger than they were in the ’60s. That’s one factor, hard to discount. But the decisive reason may be that due to late-arriving decisions from television networks, we never know when the games are going to be, and therefore we never know when parking and traffic issues will affect the downtown-campus area. Therefore we can’t ever schedule festivals or big concerts on those days.

Knoxville is prostrate before the Vols, and the Vols are prostrate before the TV people. On game days, the West Coast network executives own Knoxville. ◆

I doubt the Nina Simone show seemed much like a dance.

“Mississippi Goddam” is not a foxtrot.

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY 9

GUEST ED.

Parental Guidance When your child doesn’t fit in a time of increasing intolerance

BY KURT DEVOL

A

lmost asleep, I heard a loud caterwauling. I stumbled downstairs and identified the noise as a mix of screaming and crying, and I picked up the pace to head to my teenage daughter’s room in the basement. Two of her friends were there, and they sheepishly admitted that they had imported liquor into the house. They were slightly intoxicated; my daughter, Jennie, was more so. She was at UT-butt-chugging levels of intoxication, though she had consumed her liquor in the traditional way.

Great. Drunk teenager and her merry band in my basement.

I opened her bedroom door, trying to arrange my thoughts. She was curled in a fetal position, crying and screaming in a guttural, wordless way. Then she registered that her father was present, and she screamed the only words I remember from that night.

“I’M AN ABOMINATION! I’M AN ABOMINATION!” And that was the moment a few years ago when my heart broke.

In September, Knoxville reprised its episodic role as a national punchline when the University of Tennessee’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion posted a clumsy exhortation that faculty consider using gender-neutral pronouns with students, or at least ask students what pronoun they prefer. Butt chugging, eliminating the Lady Vols name, and rape allegations 10

KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

against athletes did not generate the same volume of outraged calls to President Joe DiPietro’s office.

When UT removed the website post, Breitbart.com trumpeted the news, and more than 1,500 fans weighed in, including one wit who suggested, bizarrely, that the Volunteers would be renamed the Volunqueers.

Tennesseans are clearly concerned about more than just the sanctity and tradition of English grammar.

When Jennie was a toddler, we called her Smiler, because a wide grin and giggling were the outfits she wore. My older brother, who died when she was 2, painted a portrait of her standing in my hiking boots, holding a baby photo of me standing in cowboy boots—two generations of children tied to a shoe store that my father owned in a small town.

She hates that photo. For me it is a touching reminder of her as a toddler and a meaningful link to a deceased brother and father. I hang it in my work office where she can’t see it.

Our Smiler did not keep her smile, and as she made her way through elementary and junior high, she kept getting a little more withdrawn. She was intelligent and witty with her parents and select friends, but to the world she was opaque—closed off.

My wife and I teased her about being borderline autistic; she laughed and thought it was funny. Her older sister, our social butterfly, was

frustrated with her. Jennie got so depressed that she agreed to see a counselor. It took a bit for her to open up—getting an interior shot into her mind required just the right lighting.

“Gavin is transgender,” the therapist eventually told us, referring to the scared teenage boy we now know as Jennie. Our girl had been keeping a secret for many years. The name change came later. For Jennie, my brother’s painting is a painful reminder that she spent the first dozen-plus years of her life feeling lost and different, and had no vocabulary to express it. And when she did find the vocabulary, she learned from every society clue she received that she was an abomination.

For her parents, however, the revelation that our child was transgender was a narrow escape. I would have felt helpless as a parent with a child on the autism spectrum.

This week, a colleague in UT’s graduate school and a Facebook friend shared a piece from Breitbart headlined “Women Cry Foul as Glamour Magazine names Bruce Jenner as ‘Woman of the Year.’” I gently challenged a friend of a friend’s comment that “HE didn’t do anything special this year to deserve this.”

Those comments make me a little resigned and a lot sad.

Caitlyn Jenner is not the perfect role model for the transgender community—a little too privileged and a little too bathed in Kardashian weirdness. And yet, to my daughter, she is a symbol of change. My daughter is not a pioneer. She doesn’t want to lecture you on bathroom rights— she just wants to pee in the girls’ room without any fuss. She doesn’t

have time to hate people who think she is an abomination—she just wants to earn a degree, find someone to love, have a good-paying job, and live authentically as the woman she is.

I will have to admit, though, that every time I hear someone say that being transgender is a lifestyle choice, I have violent urges. Until my roadrage moment passes, I just want to scream “YOU HAVE NO CLUE, ASSHOLE!” Despite feeling she is hated by many, she is beginning to thrive. She is in college, has a boyfriend, and is trying to find her place in the world within her own skin. My UT student health coverage for her doesn’t meet a lot of her medical needs, and the vigilant pronoun grammarians in the Tennessee Legislature will probably make sure it stays that way.

Not too long ago, I apologized to her. When I thought my children consisted of a boy and a girl, I remember telling my youngest how lucky I was to have one of each. She remembered. I told her that she must have felt terrible when I said that.

Meh, she replied. She said her parents hadn’t turned out too badly.

Relieved, I picked up on this self-praise theme: “Yeah. You were pretty lucky to have us as parents, weren’t you? What would your life had been like with different parents?”

She laughed. “I would have been a homeless dude.”

My daughter was clearly wrong about one thing. She is not the abomination. ◆ Kurt Devol is a pseudonym for a UT doctorate candidate in the humanities. The name of his daughter is also changed.

Got something to share with Knoxville? Send your Guest Ed. submissions to: editor@knoxmercury.com.

Despite feeling she is hated by many, our daughter is beginning to thrive.

She is in college, has a boyfriend, and is trying to find her place in the world within her own skin.

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY 11

PERSPECTIVES

The Colorado Plan States can create alternatives to Obamacare— but only one is trying

BY JOE SULLIVAN

A

little-noticed provision of the Affordable Care Act would allow each state, starting in 2017, to adopt its own alternatives to what’s come to be known as Obamacare.

Object to the requirement that nearly everyone get insured or pay a penalty tax? Then get rid of Obamacare’s much-maligned individual mandate.

Don’t believe that businesses should be required to provide health insurance to their employees? Then do away with Obamacare’s employer mandate for companies with more than 100 workers.

Don’t like the government-run exchanges on which individuals with incomes up to 400 percent of the poverty line can get federally subsidized health insurance? Then do away with the exchanges or the subsidies.

One might suppose that super-red states such as Tennessee would have been quick on the uptake to explore alternative ways of addressing their health care needs while remaining entitled to just about as much federal funding as would go to the state under Obamacare.

But there’s a catch. In order to qualify for a state innovation waiver, as they are known, a state’s plan would have to satisfy a number of conditions. Among them: It would have to cover as many people as ACA with comparable benefits and afford-

12

KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

ability. No one could be excluded for a preexisting condition, premiums would have to be gender-neutral, and plans federally budget-neutral.

That’s a tall order, and only one state appears to be on the path for making fundamental changes that would hurdle all of the conditions.

That state is Colorado. And even there the initiative is coming from reform-minded citizens rather than state government. Under the banner Colorado Care, they are seeking to introduce what would be the first truly universal health care coverage in the nation. (Even with all of Obamacare’s sticks and carrots, nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population remains uninsured.)

Colorado Care would take the form of a single-payer system run by what seems tantamount to a separate branch of state government, independent of both the governor and the legislature but with its own elected board of governors. Proponents have gathered enough signatures on petitions to get it on the ballot in the 2016 election as a constitutional amendment, which is how Coloradans voted to legalize marijuana in 2012.

If approved, Colorado Care would have the authority to levy taxes to cover the cost of health coverage superior to most of the offerings on the Obamacare exchanges with no deductibles and very limited co-payments. Of a 10 percent payroll tax on

earnings, two thirds would be paid be employers and one third by employees. The self-employed would pay the full 10 percent. But there would be a cap on the amount of earnings subject to the tax, just as with employee payments for Social Security. (But unlike the latter, Colorado Care claims all of its collections would be deductible from federal income tax.)

The Colorado Legislative Service has validated that the levy would generate the $25 billion in revenues that Colorado Care’s projections say is needed when it would commence operation in 2019. An additional $11.6 billion would be derived from its assumption of responsibility for Medicaid in the state and presumed entitlement to federal funding equal to what’s now going to subsidize insurance costs on the exchange.

When it comes to outlays, Colorado Care’s planners claim it would reduce the cost of health care from 19 percent of the state’s GDP to 15 percent. The biggest source of savings: a $6.2 billion reduction in administrative expenses. “These savings come from removing redundant insurance industry administration and from decreasing bureaucracy and paperwork in providers’ offices,” a planning document states.

Needless to say, health insurers can be expected to fight a plan that would virtually put them out of business. So will the National Federation of Independent Businesses, which has long championed the proposition that many small businesses can’t afford to be saddled with the cost of health care for their workers.

The Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity may spend millions more bashing the plan as government-run

health care or socialized medicine.

How robust a campaign will Colorado Care’s proponents be able to muster? State Sen. Irene Aguilar, who is in the forefront of the effort and herself a physician, responds by email: “We think we can put on a good campaign with about $2 million. I anticipate the opposition spending significantly more. We have a lot of people power!”

It’s not clear to me what sort of role doctors generally may play in the campaign. A planning document states that, “The national competition to attract and retain providers will create powerful economic pressure on Colorado Care to achieve its savings by cutting waste and keeping administrative costs low for the providers, while keeping compensation competitive and the work experience satisfying.” But they will have to be convinced.

My own biggest criticism of the proposal is that its one-size-fits-all approach to benefits doesn’t allow for consumer choice. Much better, in my view, to provide some leeway for people to opt for coverage with higher deductibles at lower cost.

This could possibly be accomplished by offering some sort of payroll tax rebate to people who so elect. The plan already provides for such a rebate to people on Medicaid, which would still be governed by a federal prohibition on charging them a premium.

Virtually every other advanced nation in the world has universal health care with a single-payer system.

If the Colorado Care initiative is successful, it could serve as a model for the U.S., just as Romneycare in Massachusetts served as a model for Obamacare, warts and all. ◆

Under the banner Colorado Care, they are seeking to introduce what would be the first truly universal health care coverage in the nation.

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Photo by Shawn Poynter

Left: Brian Jobe answers questions about the LOCATE Arts project at the Knoxville Museum of Art in August. Above: Carri and Brian Jobe, LOCATE Arts co-founders

Photo by A. McQuain

A Broad Brush Knoxville artists sketch out a statewide modern art scene with a new nonprofit, LOCATE Arts

BY S. HEATHER DUNCAN

T

ennessee is already known across the globe as the home of country music, the artistic expression of the Everyman. A couple of Knoxville artists want to help the state become equally renowned for a much more challenging and complex part of its cultural scene: modern art. They have launched a Kickstarter campaign to create a statewide, online contemporary art community and market it to visitors from other cities, states, and countries.

Carri and Brian Jobe, who met as art students at the University of Tennessee and married, are launching a nonprofit called LOCATE Arts.

The group aims to establish a website with a calendar of contemporary art

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

shows statewide and a registry of the state’s contemporary artists. It would also coordinate a simultaneous statewide “gallery night” to showcase modern art annually.

Carri is a painter originally from Nashville, and Brian is a sculptor from Memphis who teaches at Pellissippi State Community College and has worked for the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum in San Antonio.

“We want to strengthen the dialogue between cities and also show it to the world,” says Carri Jobe in an interview on behalf of both the project founders. “That way, Tennessee gets recognition for what’s happening

here, which is a lot, and it also helps us grow contemporary art scene and get us on the bigger stage.”

David Butler, executive director of the Knoxville Museum of Art, says the project could help claim a new status for the visual arts in Tennessee. “I just don’t think we’ve thought much of ourselves as a state, as a unit,” he says.

Butler says the state tourism bureau markets Tennessee culture, but with an emphasis on the state’s music brand. “I think what Brian and Carri want to do is grab some of that prestige for the visual arts,” he says.

“We’re also a big visual arts state, and we’re really starting to figure out how to (market that).”

To get off the ground, LOCATE Arts launched a Kickstarter campaign last month to raise $50,000 by Nov. 9.

It’s been slow going. Late last week, the campaign had raised less than $7,000—but it moved up to almost $18,800 by Tuesday. The group has held Kickstarter parties during October in Chattanooga, Memphis, and Knoxville (at the Striped Light gallery) and has another slated for Nashville on Nov. 7.

Although the LOCATE Arts Kickstarter video describes contemporary art as “art that is being made today,” the project is really using a narrower definition. The short explanation might be: You know what you think of when you think “modern art?” The kind of art you might see at the Guggenheim or the Museum of Modern Art in New York? That’s it.

“We would define it as art that could also be having a dialogue with other contemporary art in bigger cities or internationally,” Jobe says. It includes visual art, installation and multi-media art that pushes boundaries. In Knoxville, venues that display this kind of art include KMA, the Ewing and UT Downtown galleries, Gallery 1010, the Zach Searcy Project, Fluorescent Gallery, and Striped Light. But Jobe says she wants the online calendar to include “underground” venues, too, like garage shows and “pop-up” galleries.

The website would be modeled on a Texas site called glasstire.com, which the Jobes frequently used to plan trips when they lived there several years ago. After moving back to Knoxville, “We plugged into

“Sometimes in Knoxville, spectatorship happens only on opening night. LOCATE Arts might give a chance for people to come from other cities to see a show at other times.”

—BRYAN BAKER, Striped Light

Knoxville art scene really quickly, but we have a hard time fi nding out what’s going on in other cities,” Jobe says.

Bryan Baker, one of the founders of the Striped Light letterpress studio and gallery, says a clearinghouse website for modern art shows could help casual spectators decide when it’s worth trying a gallery they’ve never visited.

“Contemporary art by nature isn’t something that has a following already,” Baker says. “If you’re inventing a new way of making laser cookies and no one’s ever heard of it, you aren’t going to have 150 people at your fi rst opening. So we need all the help we can get. This allows (artists) to step up and get seen more quickly.”

And that helps with sales—which, face it, are needed for artists to afford making more art (not to mention eating). “For contemporary art there isn’t that much extra funding for promotion, because people aren’t buying contemporary art in Knoxville,” Baker says.

Baker says an online modern-art calendar could help galleries attract viewers more than once a month on First Friday. “Sometimes in Knoxville, spectatorship happens only on opening night,” he says. “LOCATE Arts might give a chance for people to come from other cities to see a show at other times.”

Often the people who attend Knoxville modern art shows are other artists, not buyers, Jobe says. “We see a lot of art spaces close, because they feel burned out because they’re doing a lot of work, but no one seems to be supporting them,” she says.

Modern art can be a hard sell in East Tennessee. In the early 2000s, KMA tried focusing on cutting-edge contemporary art, putting on some nationally significant shows. Although they were met with good reviews in

The New York Times and the Washington Post, Butler says, “it didn’t really seem to resonate locally with a big enough audience.” Now KMA structures its exhibits around East Tennessee, which provides opportunities to feature both modern and traditional art.

Butler says cities need to develop an ecosystem to attract and support artists, including museums, galleries, experimental spaces, patrons, people who buy art, and colleges. “It takes a whole bunch of money to make a coherent scene,” he says. “I think we’re just at the really early stages of having an art market.”

Kim Bumpas, president of Visit Knoxville, says the Knoxville Convention and Visitors Bureau supports any new tool that helps visitors and residents enjoy the city. The bureau already promotes the arts and offers an online calendar that visitors use to plan their trips. But it relies on galleries to add their events, and participation can be hit and miss, Bumpas says.

A website offering First Friday listings went up for sale late last year because owner and local artist Steve Lareau got sick of trying to work with galleries that wouldn’t provide information about their shows.

(Nothing has changed on the site since, so he apparently didn’t get any takers.)

Bumpas calls herself a novice when it comes to art.

“I love it when I see it, but I don’t necessarily seek it out,” she says. “I have to hear about it. That’s the only way to get people that aren’t already in the know. If you’re not part of that inner circle, you might not know some of the stuff that’s going on. How do you create the engagement part where someone thinks, ‘If I don’t put my information on there, I’m going to be left out?”

Jobe acknowledges that sometimes contemporary art seems exclusive, which is why it’s important to create an access point to help the public get more familiar and comfortable with it. “In Texas, it was a normal social thing to go to shows for people who weren’t in the art community,” she says.

LOCATE Arts is currently a sponsored project of the nonprofit Arts and Business Council of Greater Nashville, but it’s in the process of becoming its own 501(c)(3). Although based in Nashville, it won’t present the state’s various modern art communities as mere offshoots of the capital’s, Jobe says.

Carri acknowledges the group has no board members from Knoxville, but says she and Brian are taking nominations for more board members “to give some concrete accountability there.” (Of course, the whole thing is the brainchild of Knoxville residents.)

The Jobes also held a question-and-answer forum in each of the state’s four major cities, including one at the Knoxville Museum of Art in August.

“I think one of our goals is to help the contemporary art scene in some of the mid-size and smaller cities grow, become more populated with galleries,” says Jobe. She says LOCATE Arts is already talking with smaller cities, especially those with universities, because they tend to have contemporary art galleries.

If artists from other cities begin checking out each others’ shows and building relationships, that creates more opportunities to swap shows so Knoxville artists are seen in other cities, Baker says. That could also help reveal common characteristics in Tennessee modern art. For instance, Striped Light has curated a couple of shows that involved skateboarding as a common thread, with another coming up. “Is that happening in Memphis?” Baker wonders. “You could recognize cool trends that would be hard to see otherwise.”

Local artist Cynthia Tipton went to the Kickstarter party and wants to help. But she says she’s not sure the LOCATE Arts project has been planned out enough to have the impact that is envisioned.

“I didn’t walk away going, ‘Yes! This is the answer,’” she says. “I did walk away thinking, “Yes, this is a start.’” ◆

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

Robert James McKinney, the scion of a wealthy family who lived in a mansion on Main Street, died in 1888 of meningitis.

Branson’s portrait of the 6-year-old boy with his riding crop was so beloved it was interpreted in marble as McKinney’s grave statue. Sometimes called the “Little Lord Fauntleroy” statue, after the then-recent novel by former Knoxvillian Frances Hodgson Burnett, it originally stood at Old Gray, but was later moved to Greenwood Cemetery.

Courtesy of Thomas L. Howard and Heiskell M. Howard

L

loyd Branson was the first Knoxvillian who made an entire career of art. Though he lived in a practical, industrial city and had no ongoing affiliation with a university or other educational institution, for half a century he somehow made a living as an artist. But to pull it off, he couldn’t discriminate much. He answered the demand for art wherever he found it.

Few figures embraced both the high and the low to the extent Branson did. He was a transitional figure, beginning with the flat, conservative, almost primitive styles of painting he started with in the years just after the Civil War—some of his earliest paintings look, stylistically, like they belong to the pioneer days. But as he matured, the same Branson flirted with impressionism and even more-modern styles.

And he’s an enigma. Although he was a prominent figure in Knoxville a century ago, and no recluse, many basic details about his life are as blurry as some of his impressionist-influenced canvases.

Was he married? His family has mostly held that he was a lifelong bachelor. In 1957, both daily newspapers ran obituary articles about an elderly woman named Mollie Branson, dominated by descriptions of her husband, the famous artist. But scholars have determined that woman was married to another man named Lloyd Branson. The artist’s younger brother, also an artist, married three times. Lloyd was a handsome young man who enjoyed the association of women. But the best evidence at the

moment is that in his 72 years, Lloyd Branson never married at all.

Others have claimed, without any clear evidence, that he was quietly gay. It would have to have been very quiet, obviously, during the Victorian era. Even John Singer Sargent, an artist a little younger than Branson who lived in cosmopolitan cities of Europe and who’s much better studied, leaves biographers guessing.

Others, citing the very vague evidence of a 1911 nude portrait of a woman shielding her eyes, that he had a longtime love affair with Catherine

Wiley, the impressionist remembered today as the most accomplished painter of her time and place. She never married, either, and her career ended abruptly, months after Branson’s death, when she was committed to a mental institution in Pennsylvania. Is there meaning in that coincidence? We don’t know, because she’s quite a mystery, too.

Did he travel extensively in Europe? There are claims published in his own time that he sojourned among the art centers of Paris and elsewhere at least twice, once when

he was studying at the famous Barbizon school, and once when he was exhibiting. But details and evidence of these trips are scant to nonexistent. Although some of his paintings were on exhibit at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, a stray comment in a letter suggests he may never have crossed the ocean in his life.

Even the simplest questions—was he rich or poor?—are elusive. Until he was an old man, he never lived in his own house, often boarding with other families or residing in his walk-up studio. He lived like a pauper. In his later years, he sometimes seemed a philanthropist, helping younger artists financially. At the time of his death, his savings were enough to live on very comfortably for years.

About his paintings, it’s hard to make blanket statements or draw conclusions about the art, or the artist.

Most of his paintings are conservative or even old-fashioned in style, often commercial, sometimes pandering to racial stereotypes and lowbrow sensibilities. But a few Bransons, especially his outdoor scenes, could be called brilliant, and might not be out of place in the major museums of the world. His 1890s work began to show suggestions of the then-current style known as impressionism. And the reason Branson has been mentioned in some nationally published books and articles is that as an old man he nurtured the career of Beauford Delaney, one of the 20th century’s most accomplished black abstract expressionists.

He liked people, and liked to tell stories, but sometimes declined to talk about himself.

November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 17

This large portrait of Ellen McClung Berry (1894-1992) was a product of Branson’s later career, completed in 1920, when he was about 66. Just 26 at the time she posed for this portrait, Berry was wealthy and went on to live a very long life, much of it in the family’s mansion, Belcaro, above Fountain City. But she suffered multiple tragedies, including the 1951 murder of her mother by her son. Her exploitation by a con man became the subject of an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. A member of one of Knoxville’s oldest families, she was the donor of UT’s McClung Tower.

Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art

18

KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

H

ere’s what we do know about Lloyd Branson: He was born on a farm in what was then part of northeast Knox County, but a part that split off to become Union County when he was a small boy. Some authoritative sources give him a birth date in 1854, but research proves it was 1853, the year of the birth of Vincent Van Gogh.

His family moved to Knoxville in 1868, and the teenaged Branson found work in a local brickyard. There are several slightly different versions of the story of exactly how and when some local philanthropists led by railroad magnate Charles McClung McGhee (who later endowed the Lawson McGhee Library) and leading Knoxville physician John Mason Boyd (a pioneer in gynecological surgery, and the same guy memorialized on the Knox County Courthouse lawn as “Our

Beloved Physician”) noticed Branson’s talent and offered to help. Boyd had observed the boy creating, on a cigar box, a painting with homemade paints of Gen. Grant. By some accounts it was a charcoal sketch, by others a woodcut.

Some have claimed it was from life—Grant was here for a short time in the winter of 1863-64, but by another story Branson saw Grant here just after the war. In any case, Branson’s rich new friends helped subsidized his education at East Tennessee University, just before it was known as UT. Branson made some of his earliest paintings without any training. Two of his earliest known pieces, conventional portraits of a man and a woman, hang with some honor at the McClung Collection’s Reading Room. They were completed when Branson was barely 20. About that time, with the encouragement and support of his early patrons, he took the train north to New York to

study at the National Academy of Design. He won awards, including a first-place medal in 1875 for a drawing of a gladiator. However, his original money ran out, and though his patrons kept offering him portrait work, his formal training ended before he wanted it to.

Back in Knoxville, first working with Prussian-born photographer Theodore Schleier, who had a studio at Gay and Jackson, near the train station, Branson got into the portrait-painting business.

The demand for portraits would dog his life. In the early 1880s he formed a partnership with photographer Frank McCrary to found a portrait studio and framing shop in the second floor of a gabled storybook building on the 600 block of Gay Street. For 20 years, the McCrary & Branson studio was where middle-class and wealthy Knoxvillians went to get their portraits made, or to

get a favorite print framed. It was also where a few of Knoxville’s affluent learned the craft of painting, with lessons from Branson himself. Among his early students was Adelia Armstrong Lutz, who later studied art in Paris, and Mortimer Thompson (father of the famous photographer Jim Thompson), who made something of a career as an artist himself.

The firm sometimes included Branson’s photographer/painter brother Oliver Branson, as well as Oliver’s first wife, Laura, who later led her own firm using the Branson name. So a painting or photograph associated with the Branson name is not always immediately attributable to Lloyd Branson.

By 1891, he was privately complaining about the portrait-production industry he’d created. He had produced “hundreds of the stiff things… ‘ground out’ hundreds of portraits at $25 to $50 the head,” he wrote in a letter discovered just last month by Museum

Perhaps Branson’s masterpiece, “The Toilers,” sometimes called “The Hauling of Marble,” was the star of the Fine Arts Pavilion at the Appalachian Exposition of 1910. The artist began working with the theme around 1890, and several versions exist. The finished painting suggests some influences of French impressionism.

Courtesy of the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture, bequest of Judge John Webb Green and Ellen McClung Green

November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 19

of East Tennessee History curator Adam Alfrey. “My chief drawback is having to do such drudgery.”

To make a living, portrait artists are required not only to flatter the subject but to match a patron’s aesthetic sense. They’re not always a reliable gauge of an artist’s talent.

Some of his portraits glow with life.

Others seem like quick illustrations.

Others just seem unfi nished, or just

odd. Together, they wouldn’t seem to suggest the same artist painted them.

He worked harder on the entries he sent to exhibitions, and two Bransons were accepted for a prestigious exhibition at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1891. At the time, Branson was especially proud of his painting, “Women at Work.”

Another piece depicted a team of horses straining to pull a heavy load of

Courtesy of the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture

marble over a hill. A Knoxville Daily Tribune article described it in 1890: “The piece is so real you feel when looking at it that it cannot be a picture but the real scene so often viewed upon our streets.” For the next 25 years, through various reworkings and various titles—“Hauling Marble,” “Rock Haulers,” “The Toilers”—it would be Branson’s most talked-about group of artwork. Today, the big oil still seems to generate light and motion.

Through a collection in Boston, Alfrey discovered a cache of letters to Massachusetts politician George Crocker, who bought Branson’s portrait of a “poor, gray girl” in the mountains. The letters give us a rare glimpse into Branson’s life in the summer of 1891.

Branson deflected Crocker’s request for biographical information.

“There is a great sameness in most biographical sketches and my own is not different from many thousands of others and it has been just such that it is not pleasant for me to think of. I would rather think of painting.

“This is my native place,” he said of Knoxville. “Born near this town within a few miles of [the] birth place

of Admiral Farragut.”

Reversing the migration pattern favored by geese, and Knoxville’s wealthier families, Branson spent winters in New York, and summers in Knoxville, with occasional vacations to Hot Springs, N.C. “I am not well known at N.Y.,” he wrote. “Not known widely in the art world and misunderstood at home is my—This is my blue tide of it.” It’s not known what he meant by that truncation of a sentence, and that colorful phrase, but at this most creative period of his life, he was obviously frustrated, perhaps depressed.

Branson did very little sculpting in his life, but carved, out of soap, a model carved by others to become the Confederate statue at Bethel Cemetery in East Knoxville. He attended the 1892 unveiling. He does not seem to have been a partisan. Branson also painted Union heroes, and one of his best friends and supporters was John Bell Brownlow, son of “Parson” W.G. Brownlow, the fierce Unionist.

Branson exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901. He won a medal at Atlanta’s

Branson became more and more interested in early regional history as he got older, and reportedly worked for 14 years on this image of “The Gathering of Overmountain Men at Sycamore Shoals” before the Revolutionary War Battle of King’s Mountain.

Completed in 1915, when Branson was in his 60s, it’s the one painting referenced on his gravestone. Branson’s “Knoxville City Flag,” designed in response to a Chamber of Commerce contest for a cash prize, was unveiled at a Knoxville Fall Trade Carnival of 1896. It was used for some years, but is now almost forgotten.

Courtesy of the Tennessee State Museum, Nashville

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

Cotton States Exhibition in 1895.

Historians have long assumed, and occasionally claimed, that Lloyd Branson studied in Europe. His close friend and sometime student Adelia Armstrong Lutz did live in Paris for several months, studying art. Branson was not as wealthy as she was.

Through letters, Alfrey has concluded that though Branson hoped to get to Europe a couple of times in his life, and exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1900, he never crossed the ocean in person.

Sometimes, though, the world came to him.

By happenstance, one of the Wild West’s most notorious outlaws, Harvey Logan, aka “Kid Curry,” landed in a jail in Knoxville. Branson found his way into the jail to sketch the desperado, a few months before his final escape and disappearance in 1903. It may be the last image ever made of Logan.

By 1900, Branson was central to a fairly cosmopolitan organization called the Nicholson Art League, which included architect George Barber, Austrian-American photographer Joseph Knaffl, and impressionist Charles Krutch. Branson was central to the NAL during its most dynamic years, and through that organization he was personally prominent at the three big expositions at Chilhowee Park of 1910 to 1913, whose Fine Arts pavilion drew works by some of America’s groundbreaking artists, including Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, and many others.

At the 1910 fair, Branson’s “The Toilers,” perhaps his masterpiece, took a top prize.

In middle age, Branson seems to have tilted toward historical and patriotic subjects. The state centennial of 1896-97 increased interest and demand for heroic scenes of the Revolutionary War and early pioneers, and the First World War brought a second wave of patriotic fervor in art.

Much talked about was Branson’s painting of the key Battle of King’s

Courtesy of the Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection

“Women at Work” is one of the artworks of which Branson was proudest. Exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1891, it is now owned by the Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection in Knoxville.

Mountain, which multiple sources from the era say was prominent in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel at Gay and Clinch. But even that’s another Bransonian puzzle. Other sources state that painting was the work of James Wallace. Maybe that battle was a theme in the lobby, and both artists had interpretations there. In any case, the hotel, and all the artwork in it, was destroyed by fire in 1916.

In 1919, for the new Farragut Hotel that replaced the Imperial, Branson painted a large oil of Admiral David Farragut, from a photograph. It hung there for 50 years, and now adorns the McClung Collection’s Reading Room.

Around that time, he was nurturing the career of a young black kid from East Vine Street. Beauford Delaney showed an early talent for art, and got a job as a “porter” at Branson’s Gay Street studio. Branson helped train Delaney in the basics of light and color. Branson’s tutelage and support is outlined in David Leeming’s 1998 biography, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney, which got national attention.

In old age, Branson finally settled in a house of his own, on a rise above Broadway in North Knoxville, on

Rhode Island Street, which the city soon renamed Branson Street.

One of Branson’s last works was a portrait of Tennessee hero Sgt. Alvin York, likely from life; York then lived about 100 miles away in Fentress County.

His tombstone at Old Gray Cemetery references only one painting, as if it were the main accomplishment of Branson’s career: “The Tennessee artist whose genius created the picture ‘Sycamore Shoals,’ and by it immortalized the turning point that meant lasting victory in the American Revolution 1780.” Although Branson reportedly worked on the painting for many years, it was not one of the paintings most celebrated during his career. The stone has no mention of his prizes at the Academy, the paintings that got him attention at expositions from Knoxville to Paris.

It was not at all unusual for markers to be installed years or even decades after the subject’s death. It could be that an individual donor or organization was especially fond of that painting, and deemed it Branson’s most notable work.

In 2012, Branson’s cousins produced a book, The Art of Lloyd Branson: A Family Connection.

Meanwhile, Knox Heritage has purchased his final home, the simple house on Branson Street, with plans to renovate it for future use as a residence.

The East Tennessee Historical Society’s Branson exhibition offers a unprecedented perspective on an important local artist. ◆

WHO

Lloyd Branson, 1853-1925

WHAT

Celebrating a Life in Tennessee Art

WHERE

Museum of East Tennessee History

WHEN

Nov. 7-March 20

INFO

easttnhistory.org/ lloydbranson

November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 21

A&E

P rogram Notes

She’s Ready Local blues belter Jenna Jefferson announces her retirement from the stage

J

enna Jefferson remembers the first time she played a show at Manhattan’s in the Old City. “If they had booked me at Madison Square Garden, I couldn’t have been happier,” Jefferson says. “I’m a little country girl from Harrogate, Tenn., and to come to the big city, that was such a big deal. ‘Oh my god! I’ve hit the big time now!’”

For more than 30 years, Jefferson has been one of Knoxville’s most popular singers, first with the rock band Strange Cargo and then with a succession of blues and R&B groups—Jenna and the Joneses, the Accidentals, and, for the last several years, Jenna and Her Cool Friends, the classic old-school blues band she had dreamed of putting together (and which just won this year’s Top Blues Band in the Mercury’s Top

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Inside the Vault: Forgotten 45s

KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

Knox readers’ poll). But she surprised her fans in late October with a Facebook post announcing her retirement at the end of the year: After much thoughtful consideration, I have decided to hang up my microphone as of December 31, 2015.

It has been, without a doubt, an experience full of wonderment, passion, new friendships, challenges, gratification, creativity and incredible fun.

To the musicians I have had the pleasure of playing with, I am grateful for your teachings, ability to turn a deaf ear, giving me many free reins and helping me grown as an artist. …

To my Cool Friends, I am grateful for the music, revival of my creative

24

spirit and for reminding me music is about love, emotion, perseverance and reverence for the musicians who have gone before us.

JENNA & HER COOL FRIENDS have but a few public performances left in 2015 so I hope you will stop by for a final Big Hug!!

I hope you will continue to support my friends, Michael Crawdaddy Crawley, Ben Maney, Keith Ford, Glyn Loyd, Kevin Redding, Michael Jordan and Matt Reynolds in their ongoing projects. They are such talented musicians.

REST ASSURED!!!!!! I am happy and healthy but have obligations that I both want and need to make time for.

I am forever with you.............

JENNA

Music: Knox County Jug Stompers

25

Jefferson says that the emotional commitments of leading a band finally caught up with her. “After 35 years, the long hours, the travel—my gig days are 12 hours long,” she says.

“And I’ve just had some friends that passed away in the last couple of years, and they were the ones saying to me, let’s go do this, Jenna, let’s go do that. And I was always the one saying I’ve got a gig scheduled. I reached a point where I don’t want to be the one saying that anymore.”

Jenna and Her Cool Friends have three final performances scheduled before Jefferson’s retirement: the WDVX-Travaganza fundraising concert at the Standard on Jackson Avenue on Friday, Nov. 20; one last set at Mulligan’s in Turkey Creek on Saturday, Nov. 28; and the Alive After Five New Year’s Eve Party at Knoxville Museum of Art on Thursday, Dec. 31.

Jefferson says the other band members—harmonica player Michael “Crawdaddy” Crawley, lead guitarist Michael Jordan, bassist Glyn Lloyd, keyboard player Ben Maney, drummer Kevin Redding, and rhythm guitarist (and Jefferson’s husband) Keith Ford—don’t have any plans to continue the Cool Friends without her. She and Ford, she says, are still writing songs together, but they don’t have any immediate plans for performing or recording. But, she adds, it’s hard for to imagine that retirement means she won’t ever play music again.

“You never know—the Cool Friends will probably get together and do some kind of a reunion show in the future,” Jefferson says. “But it won’t be a full-blown gig schedule like it’s been the last six years.”

And she sounds like she means it: “If I say I’m hanging up my microphone and don’t hang it up, I’m going to be in big trouble with a lot of people.”

—Matthew Everett

Movie: The Assassin

Inside the Vault

Singles Going Steady A survey of Knoxville’s forgotten 45s

BY ERIC DAWSON

T

here are hundreds of 7-inch 45 singles in the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound collection, all with some connection to Tennessee. Many of these are by forgotten artists on small labels that operated out of East Tennessee, with scant information available. We can do some Internet digging, and collectors and eBayers have done an amazing job listing information about the most obscure records, which can help us track down some of the artists or their families. Failing that, we can turn to obituaries and birth and death records, but we don’t have the time to do that with everything we come across, so the origins of some records remain a mystery. Here are a few; to listen to these records, visit TAMIS’s YouTube channel.

FRANKIE DAVIS “Time Will Take My Mind From You” b/w “Pretending So Well” (Spann Records, circa early 1960s)

There were thousands of doo-wop singles released in the 1950s and 1960s, many on fly-by-night labels that might release only a handful of

records. So it makes sense that we’ve come across several Knoxville-spawned doo-wop records and this great single out of Chattanooga.

Frankie Davis sounds awfully young, almost feminine, and has the perfect voice for this kind of music. Spann Recording Company is mentioned as a new label in the February 1959 issue of Billboard, along with Vak Records at the same address on South Broad Street. (To give you an idea of how prolific small labels were then, 42 new labels were announced in Billboard that week.) Google Maps shows an empty lot there now.

Someone in Chattanooga probably knows all about Spann and Frankie Davis; it’s just a matter of finding the right person.

MARLENE DENTON “Softly He Calls Me” b/w “Tennessee Sun” (Red Hed Records, circa 1970s)

Red Hed Records was Red Speeks’ label, which he used to release his own records as well as those by acts that he shared the stage with on his Saturday Nite Radio Show out of Clinton. He ran it out of his house on East Morelia

Avenue, a few houses down from Chicken City on Central Street. The Red Hed records we’ve come across tend to be mostly country or rockabilly, but “Tennessee Sun” is something else. Starting off with a plaintive flute solo, the song kicks into what is probably best described as Native American country funk, with lyrics lamenting the fate of the Cherokee people. We have yet to locate Marlene Denton, but this is such a bizarre release for Red Hed that we’d like to find out more. It has a small reputation outside of Knoxville; someone uploaded the “incredible” track to YouTube, and a seller on Collectors Frenzy went so far as to describe it as “psych country,” which was done more for the sake of marketing than accuracy.

Anyway, it’s a great track, just waiting to be rediscovered and reissued by the Numero Group.

DALE EVANS “I Love You” b/w “When My Memory of You Flashes on Again” (Betty Jo Records, circa 1960s)

This is the most recent 45 to enter the TAMIS collection, on the new-to-us Betty Jo Records label. Both sides are produced and published by Betty Jo O’Dell, of Route 1 in Speedwell, Tenn.

Dale Evans (not the famous one) is a pretty good singer, and she nails both the upbeat love song and the slow-tempo tearjerker. The songwriting credits go to the mysterious Tennessee Carson, who managed to make the B-side title both ungainly and grammatically incorrect. We found this at an estate sale just last week, so we haven’t looked into it yet, but I would love to hear more from Betty Jo.

A&E

E.F.J. SIEGEL “Our Heritage” b/w “Letter to the President” (Patriotic, 1976)

This record is as advertised, from the song titles to the label name. At first listen you might think you’ve come across the most elaborate John Bean prank yet, a thickly Southern-accented bicentennial record made to slip into a thrift store and be unearthed years later. Probably inspired by Barry Sadler’s album Ballads of the Green Berets, “America the Beautiful” plays in the background while Siegel recites proto-Tea Party patriotic prose. This was self-released, and Siegel put his home address on the label, so we could probably find out more. But it may be best to leave it alone for now.

BEN SILVER “Good Neighbor Ben” b/w “Crawl to Me” (Slipper Records, circa 1960s)

Recorded in Nashville, “Good Neighbor Ben” is a pretty decent backdoor-man rockabilly number, but “Crawl to Me” is the attention-getter here. Silver comes off like the poor man’s Roy Orbison in his peak early-’60s days, from the forlorn lyrics to the cha-cha rhythm to the faux Spanish guitar runs to the vocals.

Silver didn’t really have the chops to completely pull this off, but he was obviously enamored of Orbison and managed to create a pretty great two-minute simulacrum. The catalog number is 1001, so this could well be a vanity record and his only release. ◆ Inside the Vault features discoveries from the Knox County Public Library’s Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, a collection of film, video, music, and other media from around East Tennessee.

At first listen you might think you’ve come across the most elaborate John Bean prank yet, a thickly Southern-accented bicentennial record made to slip into a thrift store and be unearthed years later.

November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 23

A&E

Music

Photo by Barry Smith

Knoxville Stomp The Knox County Jug Stompers are keeping the regional music of the 1920s and ’30s alive

BY MATTHEW EVERETT

I

n 1964, not long before they formed the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan were part of a Bay Area band that played music from the 1920s and ’30s on traditional acoustic instruments— guitar, mandolin, fiddle—and an assortment of homemade pieces, including washtubs, washboard, kazoos, and a glass or ceramic jug.

Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions never released an album, but some rough recordings were dug up in the late 1990s and issued under the band’s name through Grateful Dead Records. It was a few years after that, around 2006 or ’07, that Drew Fisher heard the Mother McCree’s album.

“That was the first album that I heard that made me want to play straight-up jug-band music,” Fisher says. “I’d played bluegrass and old-time music, but when I heard that—those guys sounded like they were having a great time with that style of music. It

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

was like, that’s what I want to do. I started researching old jug bands and Gus Cannon blew me away. You could tell from his banjo playing—he’d just make music and go crazy at it.”

Over the next few years, Fisher’s band, the Gander Mountain String Band, switched from old-timey country music to old-timey jug-band music—a minor adjustment for casual listeners, but a significant one for hardcore aficionados. The Knox County Jug Stompers come from all kinds of backgrounds—bluegrass, rock, acoustic blues, country music— but have settled on a more or less authentic reproduction of the jug music made popular throughout the South nearly a century ago by Gus Cannon and the Jug Stompers and other bands with similar names, like Clifford Hayes’ Old Southern Jug Band, the Dixieland Jug Blowers, and the Seven Gallon Jug Band. “‘Jug bands’ is kind of a loose

term,” Fisher says. “It’s like ska— there are different waves of it. The first wave was the 1920s—Gus Cannon, the Memphis Jug Band. But then they had jug bands in the ’60s that came up with the folk revival that would play those old tunes but would also play those ’20s popular songs— they’d play blues songs and mix old-time music in there, too. That’s kind of where we’ve sprung from, that folk, roots, eclectic mix of music.”

The list of songs on the Jug Stompers’ new self-titled CD covers the same kind of broad territory from a very specific time period. Some of the tracks—“Georgia Buck,” “Carve That Possum,” “Liza Jane/Shortening Bread”—are straight from the traditional repertoire, with an old blues pick (Bo Carter’s “Your Biscuits Are Plenty Big Enough for Me”) thrown in, along with the Tennessee Chocolate Drops’ Knoxville standard “State Street Rag,” written by Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong.

“One thing about old-time music is that it was regional,” Fisher says.

“People in East Tennessee played a particular style, and not just blues and not just jug-band music, but all kinds of music. It was regional, because of the old methods of communication. To stay with tradition, we played a Howard Armstrong song—right downtown, State Street, that was the happening spot back then. …

“Being from this region, I wanted to keep the tradition alive. When people think about this region, they think about bluegrass. ‘Do you play bluegrass banjo? Do you play Earl Scruggs?’ To me, that’s commercial bullcrap. Not that I don’t like bluegrass, but the true form of music and how people played music before ever hearing a radio—people learned from hearing each other. Hearing those old fiddlers like Tommy Jarrell and Charlie Acuff and those guys, that’s how they learned to play. Those people who taught them learned from hearing people. It’s got more roots and soul to it, to me.”

Fisher wrote two songs on the new disc and co-wrote two more with guitarist Buck Hoffman. Biscuits are a common subject for him—three of

Fisher’s songs are winners from the songwriting contest at the International Biscuit Festival, but biscuits also happened to be a favorite double entendre in jug-band music. (Maybe it’s not a coincidence that one of Knoxville’s most popular annual events is based on a dirty joke.)

“We didn’t put them on this album because we wanted to keep it kind of wholesome, but we’ve got a good list of the oldie innuendo tunes, like ‘Grind So Fine’ and ‘Tapping That Thing,’” Fisher says. “We’re going to make an album called Adults Only. The old blues and jug-band stuff—not what was recorded but what was played on the stret—had that ‘Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy’ kind of thing, so we have some of those, like ‘Mama Don’t Make Those Biscuits Anymore.’”

The Knox County Jug Stompers will officially celebrate the release of their new CD at Boyd’s Jig and Reel in the Old City on Saturday, Nov. 14, but the band has a full schedule of shows around the area next week: an appearance at the WDVX Blue Plate Special on Tuesday, Nov. 10, followed by a set at Wild Wing Cafe in West Knoxville the same night, and a live-broadcast performance on WFIV’s Behind the Barn series at Barley’s Taproom in Maryville on Thursday, Nov. 12. ◆

WHO

Knox County Jug Stompers

WHERE

Boyd’s Jig and Reel (101 S. Central St.)

WHEN

Saturday, Nov. 14, at 10 p.m.

HOW MUCH Free

INFO

jigandreel.com

Movies

A&E CLASSICAL TICKETS start at just $15

Killing Time Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin could use a kick in the pants

BY APRIL SNELLINGS

V

iewers who like their martial-arts epics fast-paced, or even medium-paced, will certainly find challenges in The Assassin, a Taiwanese film that inserts a lovely professional killer into the even lovelier court of a provincial governor in ninth-century China. It’s not really a criticism to say that the movie is glacially paced; it’s designed to lull more than thrill, to tantalize more than engage. If it’s often frustrating as a narrative, though, it’s wholly satisfying as a cinematic art exhibit. The Assassin is, without doubt, one of the most beautiful movies of the year (perhaps of the decade). It’s hard to call it entertaining, but it’s certainly rewarding.

Even director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s most fundamental creative choices seem calculated to evoke classical art rather than the wuxia conventions he’s appropriating. Hou shoots in a nearly square Academy ratio rather than widescreen, so his frames automatically lend themselves more readily to breathtaking landscapes than breathless action sequences.

Actually, even calling The Assassin a martial-arts fi lm creates expectations that might be left unsatisfied—perhaps as many as five of its 107

minutes are devoted to the gliding, gravity-defying combat that has come to defi ne the genre.

Instead, The Assassin unfolds like a treasure hunt. Hou often favors static camera setups and long takes, so you’re left to search the frame for subtle nuances—the turn of a head, or even the quick shift of a glance—that stand in for any broader sense of character or plot development. It’s a technique that’s often more interesting than effective.

The Assassin takes place mostly in Weibo, a military province on the outskirts of Tang-dynasty China. The eponymous killer is Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi), a young woman who was abducted when she was 10 years old and raised by warrior-nun Jiaxin (Sheu Fang-yi), the enigmatic leader of a clan of female assassins.

As a killer, Yinniang is nearly without parallel; she is swift, patient, and utterly deadly. But for all her lethal ability—she bats away a flying sword as if it’s a carelessly thrown dart and hardly breaks a sweat as she fends off a half-dozen royal guards— Yinniang is a gentle soul. When she can’t bring herself to kill a politician in front of his young son, Jiaxin

punishes her by sending her to Weibo to slay its governor, Lord Tian (Chang Chen). The catch is that Tian and Yinniang have a history that stretches back to their childhood, and his royal court includes the family from which she was abducted 13 years ago.

For much of the fi lm, Yinniang feels more like an otherworldly force than a character. She doesn’t so much stalk her prey as haunt him, a presence lurking in the corner of his eye as she bides her time and watches the political turmoil that’s unfolding behind the gates of his palace.

As Yinniang watches, so do we, often from behind gauzy, billowing curtains and clouds of ceremonial smoke. Lengthy policy discussions stand in for elaborate martial-arts sequences, and the central question in The Assassin doesn’t concern Yinniang’s actions, but whether she will act at all.

It’s a wholly different experience than what you might expect. The Assassin is, by Western measures, elusive at best and plodding at worst; it doesn’t benefit from comparisons to the infi nitely more exportable Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. As a storyteller, Hou seems bent on frustrating his viewers, or at least keeping them at a distance.

But as a visualist, it’s the highlight of his career so far. The Assassin is rich, densely textured, and impeccably shot, with images so stunning they’re impossible to forget. Not that you’ll want to—there’s no onscreen bloodletting, and not a single frame that would look out of place on a museum wall.

As loved as he is by international critics, Hou has mostly eluded popularity in America. The Assassin isn’t likely to change that. It earned rapturous applause at Cannes—not to mention the festival’s Best Director award for its filmmaker—and it’s an obvious choice for Taiwan’s Best Foreign Language Film bid in next year’s Oscar race. For all its sumptuous visuals and technical mastery, though, it’s a tough sell for audiences hoping for something a little more accessible.

It’s not always an easy film to watch, but it’s a great film to have seen. ◆

TWO WEEKS!

KUWAHARA

Music Director candidate

TCHAIKOVSKY PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 Thursday, Nov. 19 • 7:30 p.m.

Friday, Nov. 20 • 7:30 p.m.

Tennessee Theatre Shizuo “Z” Kuwahara, conductor Stewart Goodyear, piano SHCHEDRIN: “Naughty Limericks” TCHAIKOVSKY: Piano Concerto No. 1 RACHMANINOFF: Symphony No. 3 Sponsored by Circle of Friends

NEW! CLASSICAL CHRISTMAS SUN., NOV. 29 • 2:30 P.M. Bijou Theatre James Fellenbaum, conductor Knoxville Chamber Chorale Presented with support from the Aslan Foundation Sponsored by Asbury Place Continuing Care Retirement Communities

CALL: (865) 291-3310 CLICK: knoxvillesymphony.com VISIT: Monday-Friday, 9-5 November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 25

CALENDAR MUSIC

Thursday, Nov. 5 DAVE GLEASON • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE MIC HARRISON AND THE HIGH SCORE • Scruffy City Hall • 6PM • Part of WDVX’s 6 O’Clock Swerve series.

THE HIGH DIVERS WITH CAITLIN HARNETT • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

KITES • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM AUSTIN MILLER • Sugarlands Distilling Co.(Gatlinburg) • 7PM • FREE KIP MOORE WITH MICHAEL RAY • Tennessee Theatre • 8PM • Singer-songwriter Kip Moore combines a raw and rustic voice with compelling lyrics of honesty to create a unique sound that’s simultaneously hypnotic and edgy. • $32.50-$119 MOTION THEATRE • Longbranch Saloon • 9PM RODNEY PARKER AND CHARLIE SHAFTER • Scruffy City Hall • 9PM SANDY PATTY • Niswonger Performing Arts Center (Greeneville) • 7:30PM • As one of the most highly acclaimed performers of our time with five Grammy awards, four Billboard Music Awards, three platinum records, and five gold records, Sandi Patty is simply known as The Voice. Sandi is the most awarded female vocalist in contemporary Christian music history with 40 Dove Awards. She was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2004 and as an Indiana Living Legend in 2007. She has released over 30 albums, including her latest album Everlasting, which features notable hymns and songs of worship in an intimate and acoustic setting.

• $30-$100 SIOUX CITY KID WITH RYAN MARTIN • Preservation Pub • 8PM • 21 and up.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN BLUES SOCIETY SARA JORDAN BIRTHDAY BASH • Relix Variety Theatre • 7PM • The Smoky Mountain Blues Society will produce an 8 Band extravaganza in a heartwarming remembrance to Knoxville Blues Diva, Sara Jordan. Before her untimely death in May 2001, Sara Jordan was known as Knoxville’s “Queen of the Blues”, and to this day her crown remains unclaimed. With a big earthy voice and the stage presence to go with it, she lived and breathed the Blues like no one in this town has since the legendary Ida Cox. Featuring Tommy John, Tractorhead, Filibilly, the Jukejoint Drifters, Mighty Blue, the Romeo Kings, Smoking Section, and Voodoo Bone. For this special evening all musicians donate their talent to honor the Queen and raise much needed funds for The InterFaith Health Clinic. The Clinic supported Sara with essential services and comfort in her final days. • $8 THE THIRST QUENCHERS • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM • The Ps and Qs house band.

WDVX WORLD CLASS BLUEGRASS: BLUE HIGHWAY AND TONY JOE WHITE • Bijou Theatre • 7PM • WDVX presents World Class Bluegrass featuring an evening with Blue Highway and American music legend Tony Joe White at the Bijou Theatre on Thursday, November 5th. Blue Highway will preform familiar favorites and new songs.

Tony Joe White will play his classic hits like “Rainy Night in Georgia”, “Polk Salad Annie” and songs from his recent Hoodo release. • $28.50 WSP TRIO • Red Piano Lounge • 8PM Friday, Nov. 6 AMERICAN FOLK • Preservation Pub • 8PM • 21 and up. • FREE 26

KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

Thursday, Nov. 5 - Sunday, Nov. 15

BADLANDS • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

BOLING-HAMMER-HARRIS • Red Piano Lounge • 9PM THE CELTS • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 8PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early jazz and more. • FREE MARK HOSLER • Pilot Light • 10PM • Mark Hosler is a founding member of the group Negativland, which since 1980 has created records, video, radio and live performance using appropriated sound, image and text.

Mark has been aggressively and publicly involved in advocating a significant reform of copyright laws, publishing on these issues for Billboard Magazine, Keyboard Magazine, College Music Journal, NYU Law Commentator and others.18 and up. • $6 JASON ISBELL WITH CORY BRANAN • Tennessee Theatre • 8PM • Every once in a while, and not that often, a popular musician comes along whose work is both profoundly personal and evocative of the larger moment, merging the specifics of lived experience in a particular time and place to the realities of our shared journey as a community, a people. The work of such artists as Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, and Kurt Cobain – and now Jason Isbell, I would argue, with his new album Something More Than Free – spreads irresistibly outward from the soul, that private well of vision and emotion, into the broader realm of cultural history, sharpening our ability to see, expanding our ability to feel, and restoring our sense that we belong not only to ourselves but to an extended spiritual family. The songs create a space to be together, and closer together than we were before. • $35-$45 CHRIS JANSON • Cotton Eyed Joe • 10PM • $10 J. LUKE • Bearden Field House • 9PM • FREE KELSEY’S WOODS • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM • The new album from Kelsey’s Woods, When the Morning Comes Around, has the full complement of roots-rock signifiers, from pedal-steel guitar, Hammond organ, and mandolin to songs about the open highway and references to Merle Haggard. And, of course, there’s more than one drinking song. Its country roots are evident, but there’s plenty of heartland rock—think Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and John Mellencamp—in the mix, too, as well as echoes of everything from Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones to the Black Crowes.

PAMELA KLICKA • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz.

• FREE MARTY AND TRACE • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM CHUCK MEAD AND HIS GRASSY KNOLL BOYS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • After leading several popular ‘80s cult bands in and around his hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, Chuck Mead landed on Nashville’s Lower Broadway where he co-founded the famed ‘90s Alternative Country quintet BR549. The band’s seven albums, three Grammy nominations and the Country Music Association Award for Best Overseas Touring Act would build an indelible bridge between authentic American Roots music and millions of fans worldwide. In 2009, he released his acclaimed solo debut album, Journeyman’s Wager, and toured clubs, concert halls and international Rock, Country and Rockabilly festivals with his band The Grassy Knoll Boys MIDNIGHT VOYAGE LIVE: GOVINDA AND MAGMABLOOD • The Concourse • 10PM • Presented by Midnight Voyage and WUTK. 18 and up. • $10-$15 THE STACY MITCHART BAND • Knoxville Museum of Art • 6PM • The “Blues Doctor” comes to Knoxville to make a much needed house call. • $10-$15

STEVIE WONDER Thompson-Boling Arena • Tuesday, Nov. 10 • 8 p.m. • $45-$125 • tbarena.com

For those who are not longtime fans, Stevie Wonder may be viewed as that singer of innocuous pop ditties and golden Motown oldies, veteran of several forgotten movie soundtracks. But throughout the 1970s he was a stone-cold musical genius with a non-stop string of classic albums that not only produced massive hits but also brandished a soulful funk that was uniquely his own. In an era when countless bands attempted to follow the funky trails blazed by James Brown, Sly Stone, and George Clinton, no one dared take a step in Wonder’s surprising new direction. (Except, years later, Prince—well after funk had been subsumed by disco as the ’80s dawned.) Largely jettisoning the carefully crafted, harmonica-happy tunes of his ’60s Motown output, Wonder looked inward for Music of My Mind in 1972, playing nearly all the instruments himself for an album of much more personal songs—his first shot across Berry Gordy’s bow.

Then, just seven months later, came Talking Book and its immortal blast of one-man-band funk: “Superstition.” (Who knew that the Hohner Clavinet Model C could produce such slamming, timeless voodoo?) The searing funk just kept coming with each new album: “Higher Ground” from Innervisions (1973) and “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” on Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974), as well as pitch-perfect R&B songs like “Too High,” “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing,” and “Boogie on Reggie Woman,” among others, plus treacle-free love songs such as “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” This amazing run of truly unique radio-friendly musical experiments culminated in 1976’s Songs in the Key of Life, an iconic achievement that stands as Stevie Wonder’s magnum opus—and which he’ll be performing in full at Thompson-Boling Arena. Although expansive—it was originally issued as a two-record set, along with a four-song bonus EP—Songs in the Key of Life doesn’t falter. It’s an epic journey through all of Wonder’s strengths as a songwriter at the time: gospel-tinged soul (“Love’s in Need of Love Today”), jazz (“Sir Duke”), straight-up funk (“I Wish”), pop (“Isn’t She Lovely”), ballads (“Knocks Me Off My Feet”), and R&B (“Summer Soft”), with subjects ranging from social issues to his children to (of course) love. It’s the sort of all-encompassing album that listeners would actually listen to, from start to finish, back when playing music meant more than just having a nice background for other activities. The opportunity to see and hear Stevie Wonder perform this epic in person could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for many of us—and a reminder of what a true pop-music genius can create at the height of his songwriting powers. (Coury Turczyn)

29

Spotlight: Angaleena Presley

CALENDAR MATT PRATER WITH CITY HOTEL • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE ROOTS OF A REBELLION WITH TREEHOUSE • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Instrumental and vocal jazz standards. • PAUL THORN WITH ANGALEENA PRESLEY • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, raised among the same spirits who nurtured the young Elvis generations before, Thorn has rambled down back roads and jumped out of airplanes, worked for years in a furniture factory, battled four-time world champion boxer Roberto Durán on national television, signed with and been dropped by a major label, opened for Bonnie Raitt, Mark Knopfler and John Prine among many other headliners, and made some of the most emotionally restless yet fully accessible music of our time. • $20-$22 • See Spotlight on page TK. TUT AND THE HOUSE BAND WITH THELO-QUE • Longbranch Saloon • 9PM WILLIAM WILD • The Square Room • 8PM • William Wild’s inaugural release pays homage to the musical pioneers of the counterculture revolution with their uniquely dynamic synthesis of 1960’s folk and 1970’s rock ‘n’ roll.

The group’s distinct blend of acoustic instrumentation, layered vocals and lush strings embellished by heavy percussion and dark guitar tones draw comparisons to Crosby, Stills & Nash, Led Zeppelin, and Fleetwood Mac.• $12 MATT WOODS WITH JEFF SHEPHERD AND RYAN SHELEY • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8:30PM • After the 2014 release of With Love From Brushy Mountain, Matt has done little else but tour constantly and, before getting to work on his 3rd studio album, he’s taking the show on the road one more time with the band in tow, presenting the songs like you’ve never heard them before.

Saturday, Nov. 7 AMERICAN FOLK WITH ADDISON JOHNSON • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE WILL BOYD • Red Piano Lounge • 9PM THE BURNIN’ HERMANS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM THE CELTS • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • • FREE CYPHER: A HIP-HOP SHOW • The Birdhouse • 9PM • Open mic for the first half of the night, then two featured artists to close out the night. 18 and up. • $5 THE DEADBEAT SCOUNDRELS • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM STEVE KOVELCHECK • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE JEFFREY LEWIS AND LOS BOLTS • Pilot Light • 10PM • Born and raised New Yorker Jeffrey Lewis leads a double-life, as both a comic book writer/artist and a musician (or is that a triple-life?). His band also has a multi-faceted existence, restlessly exploring a stylistic swath from contemplative folk narratives to distortion-fueled garage rock to soundscape abstractions and more. 18 and up. • $6 SAM LEWIS WITH RYAN JOSEPH ANDERSON • The Shed at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson (Maryville) • 8PM • $10 MARADEEN WITH FRAUG • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

NUTHIN’ FANCY • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM

RODNEY PARKER, CHARLIE SHAFTER, AND RED SHAHAN • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • For over a decade, Rodney Parker & 50 Peso Reward have lingered on the fringes of the Texas Music Revolution, building a cult following of fans who thirst for a sound more cerebral and musical than what the status quo has had to offer. Charlie Shafter is a young singer-songwriter with an old soul – and a knack for forging a connection with just about anyone who crosses paths with his songs. And while Red Shahn has only a total of seven recorded songs to date, he’s arguably the most influential voice Lubbock has seen in the past decade. • FREE PLACE OF SKULLS WITH ENCOUNTER ETERNAL AND CRITICAL SITUATION • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Local Christian doom band Place of Skulls, led by guitar hero Victor Griffin (of Pentagram) headline a heavy-music benefit for Share Our Soles. Admission is one pair of new or lightly worn shoes, or a cash donation.

THE RERUNS • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Knoxville’s premier TV band plays your favorite television themes. • BEN SHUSTER • Bearden Field House • 9PM • • FREE SMOOTH SAILOR • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM WARCLOWN WITH KINGSLAYER, SOMETHING WICKED, AND ROT IRON • The Bowery • 8PM • $5-$9 WINTER SOUNDS • Preservation Pub • 8PM • 21 and up.

IRVING BERLIN’S

Sunday, Nov. 8 LOOK HOMEWARD • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 8PM • Look Homeward is a band of brackish brethren hailing from the piedmont of North Carolina.

SHIFFLETT AND HANNAH • The Bistro at the Bijou • 12PM • Live jazz. • FREE SIRENS WITH THE FINE CONSTANT, THE ART OF, VERSE VICA, AND DIALECTS • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 6PM • All ages. • $10 DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 1PM • Live jazz.

SUNDAY JAZZ BRUNCH • Downtown Grill and Brewery • 12:45PM • Knoxville’s coolest jazz artists perform every Sunday. • FREE Monday, Nov. 9 THE BRUMMY BROTHERS WITH ULTRAFAUX • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE THE BRUMMY BROTHERS • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • Bursting on to the scene mid-2012, The Brummy Brothers’ inspiring rhythms, infectious melodies, and undeniable ability to plow through a set with fiery passion and intensity keep them busy with over 100 shows a year up and down the East Coast. • FREE OPEN CHORD BATTLE OF THE BANDS • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Each band will be playing full original sets. The only cover they’ll be doing is a song of their choice by Simon & Garfunkel. A new artist will be chosen to cover each week. Come out to support your favorite local band and hear some great live music.

Winner will advance to the finale night on Dec. 14.

Judging is based on songwriting, performance, originality, entertainment value, and audience vote. Come out for some drinks with family and friends and support local music. • $5 SOUTHERN BROTHERS TOUR • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Featuring Jason Eady and Adam Hood.

ULTRAFAUX • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up. • $3 Tuesday, Nov. 10 JOSH BUCKLEY WITH THE KNOX COUNTY JUG STOMPERS • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a

www.TennesseeTheatre.com

November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 27

CALENDAR six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE • See story on page TK. JOSH BUCKLEY • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up. • $3 JASON EADY AND ADAM HOOD • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • FREE THE KNOX COUNTY JUG STOMPERS • Wild Wing Cafe • 5:30PM • Free • See story on page TK. THE LOST FIDDLE STRING BAND • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM SHINEDOWN AND BREAKING BENJAMIN WITH SEVENDUST • Knoxville Civic Coliseum • 7PM • Shinedown’s unprecedented ascendancy over multi-format rock radio commenced with their platinum certified 2003 debut, Leave a Whisper, and its gold follow-up, Us and Them.

The band’s most recent album, Amaryllis, debuted at #1 on Billboard’s “Rock Albums” chart and at #4 overall on the Billboard 200 upon its 2012 release, marking Shinedown’s highest chart debut. Shinedown has already begun work on the highly anticipated follow-up to Amaryllis and the as-yet-untitled album will be released in 2015. • $44.50-$49.50 STEVIE WONDER • Thompson-Boling Arena • 8PM • Legendary singer, songwriter, musician and producer Stevie Wonder will bring the critically-acclaimed live adaptation of the iconic Songs in the Key of Life album, to Knoxville. • See Spotlight on page TK. Wednesday, Nov. 11 FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 6:30PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early

Thursday, Nov. 5 - Sunday, Nov. 15

jazz and more. • FREE BEN GAINES IMPROV NIGHT • Preservation Pub • 9PM • 21 and up.

TIM HUGHES AND ANDREW LAPRISE • Red Piano Lounge • 8PM JAMESON RISING WITH MILES OVER MOUNTAINS • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-aweek lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE AMYTHYST KIAH • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7PM • Johnson City-based Amythyst Kiah is a Southern Gothic, alt-country blues singer/songwriter who is equally inspired by old-time music (Mississippi Sheiks, Son House, Carter Family) as she is R&B and country vocalists of the past (Big Mama Thornton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Mahalia Jackson) and present (Adele, Florence and the Machine, Janelle Monae, Thom Yorke). Her solo album, “Dig,” is raw and sparse, with heavy lyrical content addressing loss, betrayal, and murder. • $10 THE MATT NELSON SOUND • The Bistro at the Bijou • 7PM • Live jazz. • FREE CALE TYSON • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • FREE Thursday, Nov. 12 AUTUMN ATTICS WITH MILES OVER MOUNTAINS • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM WILL BOYD • Red Piano Lounge • 8PM THE KNOX COUNTY JUG STOMPERS • Barley’s (Maryville) • 8PM • See story on page TK.

PONY BRADSHAW • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Pony Bradshaw is an American roots band based out of Chatsworth, Ga. Heavily influenced by artists such as Lightnin’ Hopkins and Townes Van Zandt, Pony Bradshaw looks to create the type of intoxicating, toe-tappin’ music that fueled honky tonks and dance halls across the Mississippi Delta and American South, all the way down to the lonesome howls of disrepair that echo through a troubled mind.

THE RHINOS WITH ADRENALINE KID AND MAYEST • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • The Rhinos are a band that stands for everything that the youth deal with—everything from the logistics of young love, battles behind closed doors, to even stating what’s afraid to be said. They’re celebrating the release of their first album. • $5 ED SCHRADER’S MUSIC BEAT • Pilot Light • 10PM • Ed Schrader is a natural, albeit unconventional, storyteller.

The Baltimore-based musician, comedian, and sometimes pasta chef, who is best known for his sweaty performances as half of the postpunk duo Ed Schrader’s Music Beat , writes loosely autobiographical songs that are full of witty observations. But while it’s not unusual for storytellers to set their tales to music, Schrader’s words pack a punch on stage—literally. • $6 THE THIRST QUENCHERS • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM • The Ps and Qs house band.

THE CHARLES WALKER BAND • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

DAVID WAX MUSEUM • The Square Room • 8PM • David Wax and Suz Slezak front the David Wax Museum, and

together with their band they fuse traditional Mexican folk with indie rock and American roots to create a Mexo-Americana aesthetic. • $12-$15 WELL WORN SOLES WITH THE JAKOB FERRY STRAGGLERS • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE Friday, Nov. 13 AMOUR WITH HEARTSICK, AMONG THE BEASTS, INWARD OF EDEN, AND INDIE LAGONE • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 7PM • All ages. • $10 BLIND JOE WITH ELISIUM AND AUTUMN REFLECTION • The Bowery • 8PM • 18 and up. • $6-$10 WILL BOYD • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE THE DEAD RINGERS • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

FREE THE OPTIMUS WITH FUNKMASTER FERB AND A BANKS • Longbranch Saloon • 9PM KATY FREE AND WENDEL WERNER • Red Piano Lounge • 9PM FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 8PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early jazz and more. • FREE THE GRAVITY TOUR • NV Nightclub • 9AM • Figure presented by Ultimo Productions and Disco Donnie comes to NV Nightclub for The Gravity Tour. 18 and up.

COL. BRUCE HAMPTON • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Col. Bruce has been in constant motion ever since leaving a trail of memorable live performances with his

s y ! a d i l o h e h t r o f e m i t n i just Monday, Nov. 2 & 9

6:30 p.m. — COMMUNITY READINGS

The Sufferings of Young Werther KNOX. PUBLIC LIBRARY

Sequoyah Branch 1140 Southgate Rd, Knoxville TN 37919 long sleeve: orange.

short sleeve: grey, black, and white.

For the WUTK Fan on your list!

Available at Disc Exchange, Fizz, and Open Chord.

All sAlEs hElp suppOrt WutK.

Thursday, Nov. 12

4:30 p.m. — OPENING RECEPTION 5:15 p.m. — FILM SCREENING INTERNATIONAL HOUSE

1623 Melrose Ave, Knoxville, TN 37996

Friday, Nov. 13

3:45 p.m. — KEYNOTE

“Goethe and the Anthropocene” 5:15 p.m. — RECEPTION McCLUNG MUSEUM

1327 Cir Park Dr, Knoxville, TN 37916

Streaming 24.7.365 at WUTKRADIO.COM 28

KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

mfll.utk.edu/goethe

Thursday, Nov. 5 - Sunday, Nov. 15

many bands, including The Late Bronze Age and Col. Bruce Hampton and The Aquarium Rescue Unit. Since 2006, The Colonel has been playing a unique blend of blues and jazz with his band Col. Bruce & The Quark Alliance.

THE JAILHOUSE REVIEW • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM JESCOE • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM KELLE JOLLY AND THE WILL BOYD PROJECT • Knoxville Museum of Art • 6PM • Special guests include saxophonist Erena Terakubo from Sapporo, Japan, guitarist Mark Boling, drummer Keith Brown, and pianist Ben Dockery. • $10-$15 JUBAL • Laurel Theater • 8PM • $14 THE CLAIRE LYNCH BAND WITH THE RAILSPLITTERS • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7:30PM • Claire Lynch is a pioneer who continually pushes the boundaries of the bluegrass genre. The Railsplitters operate with the instrumentation of a bluegrass band while making music that is not limited to tradition.

THE WILL OVERMAN BAND • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime

CALENDAR Brandon Beavers.

WENDEL WERNER • Red Piano Lounge • 6PM

concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE ANGELA PERLEY AND THE HOWLIN’ MOONS • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE STS9 • Tennessee Theatre • 7:30PM • Instrumental electronic rock band STS9’s meteoric rise to the forefront of the international music scene began nearly 17 years ago in Atlanta, GA, and since that time they’ve headlined America’s most classic theaters, arenas, amphitheatres, and large music festivals. The band’s eleventh album, WHEN THE DUST SETTLES, keeps with XLR8R Magazine’s exclamation that STS9 is “one of the country’s most intriguing, innovative outfits around.” • $30-$35 DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Instrumental and vocal jazz standards.

MIKE SNODGRASS • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM SPANKALICIOUS AND YHETI • The Concourse • 10PM • STS9 afterparty—free with a ticket stub, $5 for everybody else.

18 and up.

VACATIONIST LEAGUE • Saw Works Brewing Company • 6PM • Knoxville jazz-folk duo featuring John Tilson and

Photo by Blu Sanders

ANGALEENA PRESLEY Bijou Theatre (803 S. Gay St.) • Friday, Nov. 6 • 8 p.m. • $20 • knoxbijou.com

When they first appeared in 2011, it was tempting to call the Pistol Annies a country-music supergroup. Miranda Lambert, after all, is a genuine Nashville superstar—a multi-platinum recording artist, red-carpet celebrity, and—at the time of the Pistol Annies’ debut—half of Music City’s heaviest power couple, with her now ex-husband, Blake Shelton. But her bandmates didn’t have the same credentials: Knoxville native Ashley Monroe had recorded a solo album in 2006 that had been buried by her label, and Angaleena Presley had been writing songs on Music Row for more than a decade, without a single hit to her credit.

The association has worked out to everybody’s benefit. Besides a pair of hit Pistol Annies records, Monroe has now released two of the best country albums of the 21st century (2013’s Like a Rose and this year’s The Blade), and Presley’s not far behind. Her 2014 solo debut, American Middle Class, is a smart and incisive shitkicker of an album, its muckraking rhetoric and detailed portrait of small-town downward mobility set to honky-tonk shuffles and ripping guitar solos. American Middle Class is a gorgeous contemporary country record—just check out the old-fashioned ballad “Life of the Party”—and an essay on rural America’s economic decline.

Opening for Paul Thorn. (Matthew Everett)

Saturday, Nov. 14 JOE BONAMASSA • Knoxville Civic Coliseum • 8PM • Bonamassa’s career began onstage opening for B.B. King in 1989, when he was only 12 years old. Today, he is hailed worldwide as one of the greatest guitar players of his generation, and is an ever-evolving singer-songwriter who has released 16 solo albums in the last 14 years, all on his own label, J&R Adventures. • $73-$104 KEITH BROWN AND THE KB3 • Red Piano Lounge • 9PM THE BURNIN’ HERMANS • Scruffy City Hall • 9PM CONNOR CHRISTIAN AND SOUTHERN GOTHIC • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM JUSTIN FEDOR AND THE TENNESSEE STIFF LEGS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM HEISKELL WITH THE FRENCH AND THE JANK • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Heiskell is the latest project by former Judybats frontman Jeff Heiskell. • $5 HOME FREE • Niswonger Performing Arts Center (Greeneville) • 7:30PM • Home Free, Season 4 winner of NBC’s The Sing Off, is an a cappella sensation that has become a national phenomenon. This five man a cappella group has wowed audiences around the nation with their high-energy show peppered with quick witted humor that meshes Nashville standards with pop hits dipped in country flavor. • $25-$125 JUBAL WITH NED VAN GO • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE KILL WITH MANTICORE • Pilot Light • 10PM • Black/death metal from Sweden. 18 and up. • $7 KNOX COUNTY JUG STOMPERS • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE • See story on page TK. THE CHUCK MULLICAN JAZZ BONANZA • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE ANGELA PERLEY AND THE HOWLIN’ MOONS • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • FREE THE RERUNS • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Knoxville’s premier TV band plays your favorite television themes.

STEVE RUTLEDGE • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM SCHATZI AND THE STRING BOFFIN • Longbranch Saloon • 9PM BEN SHUSTER • Bearden Field House • 9PM • FREE SOUTHERN BELLES WITH CHEW • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

Sunday, Nov. 15 ABHORRENT DEFORMITY WITH FILTH • Longbranch Saloon • 7PM PALE ROOT • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 8PM • Aaron Freeman’s taste for contemporary songwriters like Ryan Adams and Darrel Scott provides a balance to Jordan Burris’ penchant for bluegrass and traditional folk. As Pale Root, they’ve quietly settled into their own spot in Knoxville’s crowded Americana scene—intimate, confessional music grounded in tradition. At various times, the duo’s music recalls Neil Young, Jackson Browne, the Everly Brothers, and the Avett Brothers. It’s a surprisingly full and mature sound from just two people.

SHIFFLETT AND HANNAH • The Bistro at the Bijou • 12PM • Live jazz. • FREE DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 1PM • Live jazz.

SUNDAY JAZZ BRUNCH • Downtown Grill and Brewery • 12:45PM • Knoxville’s coolest jazz artists perform every Sunday. • FREE

November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 29

CALENDAR OPEN MIC AND SONGWRITER NIGHTS

Thursday, Nov. 5 OPEN CHORD OPEN MIC • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Come show off your skills or come practice with your band. We supply the backline, you supply the talent! Sign up when you arrive and claim your slot.

Three songs or 10 minutes.

Sunday, Nov. 8 SING OUT KNOXVILLE • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 7PM • A folk singing circle open to everyone. • FREE Tuesday, Nov. 10 PRESERVATION PUB SINGER/SONGWRITER NIGHT • Preservation Pub • 7PM • A weekly open mic.

OLD-TIME JAM SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • Hosted by Sarah Pickle. • FREE Wednesday, Nov. 11 TIME WARP TEA ROOM OLD-TIME JAM • Time Warp Tea Room • 7PM • Regular speed old-time/fiddle jam every Wednesday. All instruments and skill levels welcome.

BRACKINS BLUES JAM • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM • A weekly open session hosted by Tommie John. • FREE LONGBRANCH ACOUSTIC OPEN MIC NIGHT • Longbranch Saloon • 9PM

Thursday, Nov. 5 - Sunday, Nov. 15

Thursday, Nov. 12 SCOTTISH MUSIC SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • Held on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month.

• FREE Friday, Nov. 13 TIME WARP TEA ROOM OPEN SONGWRITER NIGHT • Time Warp Tea Room • 7PM • Songwriter Night at Time Warp Tea Room runs on the second and fourth Friday of every month. Show up around 7 p.m. with your instrument in tow and sign up to share a couple of original songs with a community of friends down in Happy Holler. • FREE Saturday, Nov. 14 MUMBILLY OLD TIME SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 4PM • Bring an instrument, but definitely watch out in case there’s some Mumbillies there. • FREE Sunday, Nov. 15 FAMILY FRIENDLY DRUM CIRCLE • Ijams Nature Center • 4PM • Bring a drum or share one of ours. All ages from toddlers to grandparents welcome. Free. Call Ijams at 865-577-4717 ex 110 to register. • FREE

DJ AND DANCE NIGHTS Friday, Nov. 6 RETRO DANCE NIGHT • Hanna’s Old City • 9PM • 80s and Top 40 hits with DJ Ray Funk.

TEKNOX 23 • The Birdhouse • 10PM • Knoxville’s monthly sounds of the underground: techno, house, and more.

With a live modular set by Oliver Dodd. Will Azada, and the Teknox Boyz. 21 and up. • FREE Saturday, Nov. 7 RETRO DANCE NIGHT • Hanna’s Old City • 9PM • 80s and Top 40 hits with DJ Ray Funk.

TEMPLE DANCE NIGHT • The Concourse • 9PM • Knoxville’s long-running alternative dance night. 18 and up.

Sunday, Nov. 8 LAYOVER BRUNCH • The Concourse • 12PM • Brunch food

By Localmotive. Music on the patio. Presented by Midnight Voyage Productions. All ages. • FREE Friday, Nov. 13 RETRO DANCE NIGHT • Hanna’s Old City • 9PM • 80s and Top 40 hits with DJ Ray Funk.

Saturday, Nov. 14 RETRO DANCE NIGHT • Hanna’s Old City • 9PM • 80s and Top 40 hits with DJ Ray Funk.

Sunday, Nov. 15 LAYOVER BRUNCH • The Concourse • 12PM • Brunch food

by Localmotive. Music on the patio. Presented by Midnight Voyage Productions. All ages. • FREE

CLASSICAL MUSIC

Sunday, Nov. 8 KNOXVILLE CHORAL SOCIETY: IN PRAISE OF HEROES • Tennessee Theatre • 6:30PM • The Knoxville Choral

Society, accompanied by members of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra presents its fall concert, “In Praise of Heroes,” with a pre-concert talk by Dr. Eric Thorson at 5:45 P.M.. This concert pays tribute to heroes throughout our nation’s history, from the forging of our nation through the tragedy on 9/11. The program is comprised of musical Americana and patriotic pieces, including Crocker’s “Festival of Freedom” and Kirkland’s “Salute to the Armed Forces”. The concert will conclude with a tribute to the 9/11 victims entitled “Memorial”, by Rene Clausen. • $20 Wednesday, Nov. 11 KSO Q SERIES • The Square Room • 12PM • The Knoxville Symphony launched the recital series in its 2013-14 season featuring performances from both ensembles.

Principal Quartet members are: Gordon Tsai, violin; Edward Pulgar, violin, Kathryn Gawne, viola and Andy Bryenton, cello. The Woodwind Quintet members are: Nicholas Johnson, flute; Claire Chenette, oboe; Gary Sperl, clarinet; Aaron Apaza, bassoon and Jeffery Whaley, French horn. • $15 Friday, Nov. 13 INNER VOICES: MIXED TAPE • The Hive • 7PM • The brand new Knoxville-based string quartet Inner Voices will make its debut at the Hive in Old North Knoxville with a program called Mixed Tape, featuring select movements from some of history’s best-known string quartets as well as stand-alone works. The program includes the first movement of Ravel’s String Quartet in F and single movements from Beethoven’s Op. 18, no.4 and Mozart’s String Quartet No. 14. The audience will also have the

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

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pleasure of hearing Tango Ballet by Astor Piazzolla, and Is Now Not Enough? by University of Tennessee graduate and Asheville resident Dosia McKay.Inner Voices String Quartet is Ruth Bacon and Rachel Loseke, violin; Christy Graffeo, viola; and Jeanine Wilkinson, cello. • $10 UT OPERA THEATRE: THE CONSUL • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • Visit www.music.utk.edu for more information. • $20 Saturday, Nov. 14 UT OPERA THEATRE: THE CONSUL • Bijou Theatre • 2:30PM and 8PM • Visit www.music.utk.edu for more information.

• $20 Sunday, Nov. 15 UT OPERA THEATRE: THE CONSUL • Bijou Theatre • 2:30PM • Visit www.music.utk.edu for more information. • $20 OAK RIDGE CIVIC MUSIC ASSOCIATION: DAVID BURGESS • Oak Ridge High School • 3PM • The Oak Ridge Civic Music Association is pleased to present guitarist David Burgess in a solo recital. Hailed by the Washington Post for his “impressive technique and fine sense of style,” David Burgess is recognized as one of today’s outstanding guitarists, appearing internationally as a soloist and chamber musician. Visit orcma.org or call (865) 483-5569. • $25

THEATER AND DANCE

Thursday, Nov. 5 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE: QUOTH THE RAVEN: TALES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 7PM • Knoxville Children’s Theatre will present Quoth The Raven: Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, a stage adaptation of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe for children and families, especially for Halloween. Oct. 23-Nov. 8. Visit knoxvillechildrenstheatre.com. • $12 LET IT SHINE • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7PM • Let It Shine is a play to raise your hearts and spirit in song and fellowship. Nov. 1-8. Visit www.claytonartscenter.com. • $14 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • It’s the end of everything in contemporary America. A future without power! What will survive? In post-apocalyptic Northern California, a group of strangers bond by recreating an episode of “The Simpsons.” From this meeting, memories of Marge and Homer become the basis for shaping a new society as the play travels decades into the future. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. Oct. 28-Nov. 15.

TENNESSEE STAGE COMPANY: MY THREE ANGELS • Historic Southern Railway Station • 8PM • The Tennessee Stage Company, known to Knoxville audiences for Shakespeare on the Square and the New Play Festival, returns to our Timeless Works series this autumn with the Sam & Bella Spewack’s classic comedy, My Three Angels. This (almost) gentle comedy is the story of a three desperate, but unconventional, criminals who provide a loving, but struggling family with a most happy and unexpected Chruisdtmas. Nov. 5-15. Visit tennesseestage.com. • $15 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: DIAL “M” FOR MURDER • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Tony Wendice has married his wife, Margot, for her money and now plans to murder her for the same reason. He arranges the perfect murder. Unfortunately, the murderer gets murdered and the victim survives. Oct. 23-Nov. 8. Visit theatreknoxville. com. • $15 Friday, Nov. 6 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE: QUOTH THE RAVEN: TALES

CALENDAR

OF EDGAR ALLAN POE • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 7PM • Oct. 23-Nov. 8. Visit knoxvillechildrenstheatre.com. • $12 LET IT SHINE • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7PM • Let It Shine is a play to raise your hearts and spirit in song and fellowship. Nov. 1-8. Visit www.claytonartscenter.com. • $14 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 2PM • Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. Oct. 28-Nov. 15.

TENNESSEE STAGE COMPANY: MY THREE ANGELS • Historic Southern Railway Station • 8PM • Nov. 5-15. Visit tennesseestage.com. • $15 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: DIAL “M” FOR MURDER • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Oct. 23-Nov. 8. Visit theatreknoxville.com. •$15 Saturday, Nov. 7 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE: QUOTH THE RAVEN: TALES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 1PM and 5PM• Oct. 23-Nov. 8. Visit knoxvillechildrenstheatre. com. • $12 LET IT SHINE • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7PM • Let It Shine is a play to raise your hearts and spirit in song and fellowship. Nov. 1-8. Visit www.claytonartscenter.com. • $14 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 2PM • Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. Oct. 28-Nov. 15.

TENNESSEE STAGE COMPANY: MY THREE ANGELS • Historic Southern Railway Station • 8PM • Nov. 5-15. Visit tennesseestage.com. • $15 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: DIAL “M” FOR MURDER • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Oct. 23-Nov. 8. Visit theatreknoxville.com. •$15 Sunday, Nov. 8 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE: QUOTH THE RAVEN: TALES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 3PM • Oct. 23-Nov. 8. Visit knoxvillechildrenstheatre.com. • $12 LET IT SHINE •Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) •2PM • Let It Shine is a play to raise your hearts and spirit in song and fellowship. Nov. 1-8. Visit www.claytonartscenter.com. •$14 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 2PM • Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. Oct. 28-Nov. 15.

TENNESSEE STAGE COMPANY: MY THREE ANGELS • Historic Southern Railway Station • 3PM • Nov. 5-15. Visit tennesseestage.com. • $15 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: DIAL “M” FOR MURDER • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 3PM • Oct. 23-Nov. 8. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $13 Tuesday, Nov. 10 IRVING BERLIN’S WHITE CHRISTMAS • Tennessee Theatre • 7PM • The timeless movie “White Christmas” is adapted for the stage in a lavish new production. Irving Berlin’s White Christmas tells the story of a song-and-dance team putting on a show in a magical Vermont inn and falling for a stunning sister act in the process. • $37-$77 Wednesday, Nov. 11 IRVING BERLIN’S WHITE CHRISTMAS • Tennessee Theatre • 7PM • The timeless movie “White Christmas” is adapted for the stage in a lavish new production. Irving Berlin’s White Christmas tells the story of a song-and-dance team putting on a show in a magical Vermont inn and falling for a stunning sister act in the process. Full of dancing, laughter and some of the greatest songs ever written! Give everyone the gift they’re dreaming of with this merry and bright holiday musical. • $37-$77

CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 2PM • Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. Oct. 28-Nov. 15.

Thursday, Nov. 12 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 2PM • Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. Oct. 28-Nov. 15.

TENNESSEE STAGE COMPANY: MY THREE ANGELS • Historic Southern Railway Station • 8PM • Nov. 5-15. Visit tennesseestage.com. • $15 Friday, Nov. 13 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 2PM • Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. Oct. 28-Nov. 15.

SHE KILLS MONSTERS • Pellissippi State Community College • 7:30PM • Enter into the fantasy realm of role-playing games in “She Kills Monsters,” a dramatic comedy by playwright Qui Nguyen. Nov. 13-22. Purchase tickets at www.pstcc.edu/tickets. • $12 TENNESSEE STAGE COMPANY: MY THREE ANGELS • Historic Southern Railway Station • 3PM • Nov. 5-15. Visit tennesseestage.com. • $15 Saturday, Nov. 14 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 2PM • Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. Oct. 28-Nov. 15.

SHE KILLS MONSTERS • Pellissippi State Community College • 7:30PM • Nov. 13-22. Purchase tickets at www. pstcc.edu/tickets. • $12 TENNESSEE STAGE COMPANY: MY THREE ANGELS • Historic Southern Railway Station • 3PM • Nov. 5-15. Visit tennesseestage.com. • $15 Sunday, Nov. 15 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY’ • Clarence Brown Theatre • 2PM • Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. Oct. 28-Nov. 15.

SHE KILLS MONSTERS • Pellissippi State Community College • 2PM • Nov. 13-22. Purchase tickets at www. pstcc.edu/tickets. • $12 TENNESSEE STAGE COMPANY: MY THREE ANGELS • Historic Southern Railway Station • 3PM • Nov. 5-15. Visit tennesseestage.com. • $15

COMEDY AND SPOKEN WORD

Friday, Nov. 6 FIRST FRIDAY COMEDY SHOW • Saw Works Brewing Company • 7PM • Give thanks for a November edition of the First Friday Comedy Show at Saw Works Brewing.

This month’s show is headlined by Columbus, Ohio’s Sumukh Torgalkar, along with performances from Asheville, North Carolina’s Minori Hinds, and Knoxville’s own Matt Chadourne. Tyler Sonnichsen is hosting this month’s show.

Sunday, Nov. 8 UPSTAIRS UNDERGROUND COMEDY • Preservation Pub • 8PM • A weekly comedy open mic.

Monday, Nov. 9 QED COMEDY LABORATORY • Pilot Light • 7:30PM • QED ComedyLaboratory is a weekly show with different theme every week that combines stand-up, improv, sketch, November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 31

CALENDAR music and other types of performance and features some of the funniest people in Knoxville and parts unknown.

It’s weird and experimental. There is no comedy experience in town that is anything like this and it’s also a ton of fun. Pay what you want. Free, but donations are accepted. • FREE Tuesday, Nov. 10 OPEN MIC STAND-UP COMEDY • Longbranch Saloon • 8PM • Come laugh until you cry at the Longbranch every Tuesday night. Doors open at 8, first comic at 8:30. No cover charge, all are welcome. Aspiring or experienced comics interested in joining in the fun email us at longbranch.info@gmail.com to learn more, or simply come to the show a few minutes early. • FREE EINSTEIN SIMPLIFIED • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM • Einstein Simplified Comedy performs live comedy improv at Scruffy City Hall. It’s just like Whose Line Is It Anyway, but you get to make the suggestions. Show starts at 8:15, get there early for the best seats. No cover. • FREE Thursday, Nov. 12 FRANK CALIENDO • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7PM • Comedian, actor, and impressionist Frank Caliendo has been making people laugh his entire life. He is well known for his impressions of famous actors Morgan Freeman, Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro; politicians George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama; broadcasters John Madden, Charles Barkley and Jon Gruden; and talk show hosts Dr. Phil, Jay Leno, and David Letterman. • $25-$30

Thursday, Nov. 5 - Sunday, Nov. 15

Friday, Nov. 13 SCRUFFY CITY COMEDY FESTIVAL • Downtown Knoxville • The Scruffy City Comedy Festival is returning to downtown Knoxville on Friday, Nov. 13, through Sunday Nov. 15. All venues will be within walking distance of Market Square. Nearly three dozen comedians will be traveling to Knoxville to perform from all over the United States. In addition to these featured comedians the festival will also have nationally recognized headliners performing each night at Scruffy City Hall. Visit scruffycitycomedy.com. • $15-$30 Saturday, Nov. 14 SCRUFFY CITY COMEDY FESTIVAL • Downtown Knoxville • The Scruffy City Comedy Festival is returning to downtown Knoxville on Friday, Nov. 13, through Sunday Nov. 15. All venues will be within walking distance of Market Square. Nearly three dozen comedians will be traveling to Knoxville to perform from all over the United States. In addition to these featured comedians the festival will also have nationally recognized headliners performing each night at Scruffy City Hall. Visit scruffycitycomedy.com. • $15-$30 Sunday, Nov. 15 UPSTAIRS UNDERGROUND COMEDY • Preservation Pub • 8PM • A weekly comedy open mic.

SCRUFFY CITY COMEDY FESTIVAL • Downtown Knoxville • The Scruffy City Comedy Festival is returning to downtown Knoxville on Friday, Nov. 13, through Sunday Nov. 15. All venues will be within walking distance of

Market Square. Nearly three dozen comedians will be traveling to Knoxville to perform from all over the United States. In addition to these featured comedians the festival will also have nationally recognized headliners performing each night at Scruffy City Hall. Visit scruffycitycomedy.com. • $15-$30 .

FESTIVALS

Thursday, Nov. 5 KNOXVILLE SOUP • Woodlawn Christian Church • 6PM • A dinner and micro-funding event designed to raise money for creative projects that are proposed, voted on and enacted by members of the community. Diners will have about an hour to eat, share and connect with others while voting for the project they like best.

SOUL OF CREATIVITY ART AND YOGA EVENT • Breezeway Yoga Studio • 4PM • Local artists will display and sell their work, there will be a yoga class and Qi Gong demonstration and a performance by NAMA winning (Native American Music Awards) recording artist Randy McGinnis. Food and beverages will be offered at the event. The event will be located in the breezeway area between Ross the Boss and Petco in Knox Plaza, 4830 Kingston Pike. • FREE Sunday, Nov. 8 YOUNG-WILLIAMS ANIMAL CENTER FURRY FALL FESTIVAL • Young-Williams Animal Center • 12PM • pet owners and animal enthusiasts are invited to attend the Furry Fall Festival to learn more about pet-related resources in the

Knoxville community. And, of course, furry friends are welcome, too. From noon-4 p.m., the Furry Fall Festival, which is free and open to the public, will include a host of booths and activities for pets and their families to enjoy. Special animal guests at the festival will include Trixie, a rescue horse representing Horse Haven of Tennessee, and K-9 Kelly from the Knox County Sheriff’s Office. The Knoxville Zoo also will have an on-site exhibit.

To learn more about Young-Williams Animal Center, visit www.young-williams.org or check out Young-Williams Animal Center on Facebook.

Tuesday, Nov. 10 UT ARBORETUM SOCIETY ANNUAL DINNER AND SILENT AUCTION • Elks Club (Oak Ridge) • 6PM • The UT Arboretum Society’s Annual Dinner and Silent Auction will begin at 6:00 p.m. with a social hour (cash bar) and silent auction followed by a buffet dinner at 7:00 p.m.

The speaker for the dinner will be Morton Massey, president of the Friends of Seven Islands State Birding Park which helps raise funds and manages volunteers for the Seven Islands State Birding Park. In addition to spending several days a week walking and volunteering at Seven Islands, he is also on the board for the Institute at Tremont where he volunteers. • $25 Friday, Nov. 13 IRONWOOD ART FAIR • Ironwood Studios • 6PM • Join us for a night of amazing indie art, bands, local food trucks, and more. Doors open at 6pm and the fun lasts until 10pm.

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

Thursday, Nov. 5 - Sunday, Nov. 15

Sunday, Nov. 15 BELLEZA’S 2015 HAIR-FASHION SHOW FUNDRAISER: ONCE UPON A FAIRY TALE • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 6PM • Proceeds from the evening’s event will benefit local charity, The Dream Connection. The event will start off with social hour that includes delicious hors d’oeuvres, cash bar, silent auction, and raffle, followed by the main event as talented stylists of Belleza Salon and Spas showcase their creative ideas. If you’re looking for a fun evening of fashion, talent, food, and entertainment, you don’t want to miss this wonderful event. Tickets are available online (www.blza.com), at our salons, or at the door. • $35

FILM SCREENINGS

Monday, Nov. 9 THE BIRDHOUSE WALK-IN THEATER • The Birdhouse • 8:15PM • A weekly free movie screening. • FREE Tuesday, Nov. 10 TWIN PEAKS VIEWING PARTY • The Birdhouse • 7PM • Bi-weekly viewing parties for every single episode of the cult TV series. Attendees encouraged to dress as their favorite characters. Trivia, Twin Peaks-themed giveaways, donuts and coffee, plus some surprises. Trivia begins at 7:00pm with viewing to follow at 8:00pm. • FREE Wednesday, Nov. 11 THE PUBLIC CINEMA: HOMEMAKERS • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM • Part-time Austin indie rocker and full-time harbinger of chaos Irene (Rachel McKeon) arrives in Pittsburgh to claim her inheritance: the crumbling, abandoned three-story row house built by her great-grandfather. With the help of a drinking buddy who happens to be her long lost cousin, Irene attempts a boozy restoration project and discovers in the forgotten home a hidden urge to settle down, but when shit gets shitty, Irene’s newfound domesticity may not be strong enough to subdue the rampaging child within. • FREE Friday, Nov. 13 SUFFERLAND • Striped Light • 8:30PM • Linear Downfall, an experimental band from Nashville, is known for seamlessly blending psychotic noise along with beautiful melodies. Their music taps into the highs and lows of life and challenges one to look inward. Their live show is intense and jarring captivating the audience from beginning to end. Sufferland is a full-length album that is accompanied by a film. It is described as, “A walk through the many compartmentalized landscapes in the mind of a tormented girl who is under the control of a tormented man.” The film was chosen to be a part of the Nashville Film Festival 2015.

SPORTS AND RECREATION

Thursday, Nov. 5 WHOLE FOODS GAME NIGHT • Whole Foods • 6PM • Join us for everything from Candy Land to chess, and feel free to add a pint and a pizza. • FREE Saturday, Nov. 7 AMBC FALL FESTIVAL • Urban Wilderness • 11AM • Join the Appalachian Mountain Bike Club for a day of bikes, beer, food and music. We’ll meet up at 654 Helix Lane in South Knoxville, with group rides starting at 11:30 am, open

CALENDAR

pump track and food all day, and live music into the night. Onsite parking is limited, so please park at Anderson School and bike in on the Lost Chromosome trail. Ample camping is available, and our friends at Tennessee Valley Bikes will even cook breakfast for campers on Sunday morning.

Sunday, Nov. 8 SUBWAY RACE AGAINST CANCER 5K • World’s Fair Park • 2:30PM • Now in its 22nd year, the 5K race benefits the cancer outreach and education services of Thompson Cancer Survival Center. • $35 Tuesday, Nov. 10 WHOLE FOODS GAME NIGHT • Whole Foods • 6PM • Join us for everything from Candy Land to chess, and feel free to add a pint and a pizza. • FREE Thursday, Nov. 12 WHOLE FOODS GAME NIGHT • Whole Foods • 6PM • Join us for everything from Candy Land to chess, and feel free to add a pint and a pizza. • FREE Saturday, Nov. 14 KTC NORRIS DAM HARD TRAIL RACE • Norris Dam State Park • 6AM • The Norris Dam State Park and Norris Municipal Watershed provides miles and miles of scenic and challenging single-track trails and off-road jeep trails to the delight of avid and competitive trail runners.

The 2015 race will include the traditional 25k and 50k races, but this year we will be adding a 50 mile race.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN HIKING CLUB: APPALACHIAN TRAIL • 8AM • This out and back hike, mostly on the AT, from Newfound Gap to the Jumpoff that is near the Boulevard Trail, will give a good view of the Greenbrier watershed area of the Park. Hike is about 6 miles. Meet at Comcast, 5720 Asheville Highway, ready to depart at 8:00 AM. Leaders: Ray Payne, rpayne10@bellsouth.net and Ron Shrieves, ronaldshrieves@comcast.net.” • FREE Sunday, Nov. 15 SMOKY MOUNTAIN HIKING CLUB: INJUN CREEK TRAIL • 10:30AM • Although this is not an official trail, it is maintained by the park service to the cemetery and widely used. We will see several former home sites, the school site, a few other grave sites, and some interesting large stone stacks. Lunch will be at one of the home sites. Hike around 4 miles, rated easy. Meet at the Greenbrier Ranger Station at 10:30. Leader: Ed Fleming, edwrdflm@aol.com. • FREE

ART

Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts 556 Parkway (Gatlinburg) SEPT. 11-NOV. 7: Time, a collaborative exhibit of ceramic work by Blair Clemo and Jason Hackett.

Art Market Gallery 422 S. Gay St. NOV. 3-29: Artwork by Nelson Ziegler and jewelers of the Art Market Gallery. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Nov. 6, at 5:30 p.m.

Bennett Galleries 5308 Kingston Pike THROUGH NOVEMBER: Artwork by Scott Duce, Charles Kieger, Ann Mallory, Robine Surber, and John Taylor.

Bliss Home

24 Market Square NOV. 6-30: Local Nostalgia, mixed-media artwork by Christi Shields. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Nov. 6, from 6-9 p.m.

Clayton Center for the Arts 502 E. Lamar Alexander Parkway (Maryville) NOV. 2-20: Real Drawings of Imaginary People, mixed-media portraits and paintings by Steve Foster.

The District Gallery 5113 Kingston Pike NOV. 6-28: Paintings by Brad Robertson. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Nov. 6, from 5-8 p.m.

Downtown Gallery 106 S. Gay St. NOV. 6-28: Mixed-media art by John Messinger. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Nov. 6, from 5-9 p.m.

Emporium Center for Arts and Culture 100 S. Gay St. NOV. 6-8: 18th Master Woodworkers Show. NOV. 6-25: Ribnica Handicraft Centre: Traditional Woodenware From Slovenia; artwork by Luna Lewis; Recessive, photographs

by Abby Malone; and Natural Woman, mixed-media artwork by Jackie Holloway. Opening receptions will be held on Friday, Nov. 6, from 5-9 p.m.

Ewing Gallery 1715 Volunteer Blvd.

NOV. 11-DEC. 13: Distilled: The Narrative Transformed, a 30-year survey of the art of Pinkney Herbert. An opening reception will be held on Wednesday, Nov. 11, from 5-8 p.m.

Fountain City Art Center 213 Hotel Road OCT. 30-NOV. 30: Fountain City Art Guild Annual Holiday Show and Sale. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Oct. 30, from 6:30-8 p.m.

Knoxville Museum of Art 1050 World’s Fair Park Drive AUG. 21-NOV. 8: The Paternal Suit, paintings, prints, and objects by conceptual artist F. Scott Hess. ONGOING: Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in Tennessee; Currents: Recent Art From East Tennessee and Beyond; and Facets of Modern and Contemporary Glass.

Liz-Beth and Co. 7240 Kingston Pike NOV. 2-21: Legendary Ladies of Art, a gallery exhibit and sale of new paintings by Jeanne Leemon, Cynthia Markert, and Ursula Brenner. A reception will be held on Friday, Nov. 13, from 5-8 p.m.

Marc Nelson Denim 700 Depot Ave. THROUGH NOVEMBER: Photographs by Lindsey Teague. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Nov. 6, from 6-9 p.m.

McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture 1327 Circle Park Drive SEPT. 11-JAN. 3: Embodying Enlightenment: Buddhist Art of the Himalayas. Ongoing: The Flora and Fauna of Catesby, Mason, and Audubon and Life on the Roman Frontier.

Zach Searcy Projects 317 N. Gay St. November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 33

CALENDAR THROUGH NOVEMBER : Merciful Heavens, new paintings by Zach Searcy. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Nov. 6, from 7-10 p.m.

Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church 2931 Kingston Pike SEPT. 11-DEC. 3: An exhibit of artwork by TVUUC members.

University of Tennessee John C. Hodges Library 1015 Volunteer Blvd.

THROUGH DEC. 11: Marginalia in Rare Books, a display of centuries-old books with notes, ownership marks, and inscriptions.

LECTURES, READINGS, AND BOOK SIGNINGS

Thursday, Nov. 5 JOHN MESSINGER ARTIST LECTURE • University of Tennessee Art and Architecture Building • 7:30PM • John Messinger combines elements of photography and tapestry to create large-scale, 3-dimension mixed media artworks. Messenger’s work will be on display at the Downtown Gallery from Nov. 5-28. • FREE PAUL M. COBB: “CHARLEMAGNE’S MUSLIM ELEPHANT” • University of Tennessee • 5:30PM • The Marco Institute’s 12th Annual Riggsby Lecture on Medieval Mediterranean History and Culture will feature Paul M. Cobb, a noted

Thursday, Nov. 5 - Sunday, Nov. 15

historian of Middle Eastern culture. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be in the Lindsay Young Auditorium of John Hodges Library. Cobb’s lecture, titled “Charlemagne’s Muslim Elephant: Kinship, Nature, and Monotheism in the Early Middle Ages,” will explore the meanings, apparent and hidden, of elephants in Muslim culture and the significance that attached to one famous but highly unusual gift. • FREE ELIMINATING CANCER AND HEATH DISPARITIES IN OUR COMMUNITY • Beck Cultural Exchange Center • 6PM • Beck Cultural Exchange Center and Cancer Support Community invite you to an important community forum.

Dr. Keith Gray, Surgical Oncologist, will moderate this community-wide discussion on health disparities and the social determinants of health as they pertain to cancer in the community.

Friday, Nov. 6 UT SCIENCE FORUM • Thompson-Boling Arena • 12PM • The Science Forum is a weekly brown-bag lunch series that allows professors and area scientists to discuss their research with the general public in a conversational presentation. Free and open to the public, each Science Forum consists of a 40-minute presentation followed by a Q-and-A session. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own lunch or purchase it at the cafe in Thompson-Boling Arena. For more information about the UT Science Forum, visit http://scienceforum.utk.edu. • FREE Saturday, Nov. 7 UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE PREGAME SHOWCASE LECTURE SERIES • McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture

• 2PM • It’s football time in Tennessee—which kicks off another game day tradition: the Pregame Showcase.

Football fans are invited to hear from some of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s exceptional faculty during the 26th annual College of Arts and Sciences Pregame Showcase, which begins Saturday, Sept. 12. • FREE Sunday, Nov. 8 PRASAD HUTTER LECTURE AND MEDITATIVE EXPERIENCE • McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture • 2PM • Prasad Hutter, Director of the Acupuncture and Awareness Center of Knoxville, TN will lead a lecture and meditative experience focusing on several of the mudras featured in objects in Embodying Enlightenment: Buddhist Art of the Himalayas. This event is free and open to the public. • FREE Monday, Nov. 9 ROBERT B. CHURCH III MEMORIAL ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN LECTURE SERIES • University of Tennessee Art and Architecture Building • 5:30PM • Internationally recognized architects and designers will visit the University of Tennessee this year to talk about the latest ideas in the field during the Robert B. Church III Memorial Lecture Series. The series, which is free and open to the public, features lectures, films and exhibits. • FREE BUSINESS WITH CHINA: TRADE FINANCING, TAX, AND CURRENCY CONSIDERATIONS • East Tennessee History Center • 5:30PM • TN-China Network and U.S. Bank will jointly host a panel discussion event on Business with China: Trade Financing, Tax, and Currency Considerations.

Complimentary hors d’oeuvres and cocktails will be provided. For more information, please contact Elizabeth Rowland (ERowland@TNChinaNetwork.org, 865-387-7012), or visit the online event posting. To RSVP, please contact Lisa Birmingham (Lisa.Birmingham@USBank.com, 865-540-5848).

ROSE MCLARNEY • Maryville College • 7PM • Rose McLarney will read from her poetry during a lecture in the Clayton Center for the Arts’ Harold and Jean Lambert Recital Hall. McLarney’s first book, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, is available from Four Way Books.

Her second book, Its Day Being Gone, was published by Penguin in May 2014 and won the National Poetry Series award. • FREE Tuesday, Nov. 10 DAVID MADDEN: “THE TANGLED WEB OF THE CIVIL WAR” • East Tennessee History Center • 12PM • Celebrated author David Madden will talk about his new book, The Tangled Web of the Civil War and Reconstruction: Readings and Writings from a Novelist’s Perspective. Madden’s new book highlights the interconnectedness of fiction and nonfiction by placing essays reflecting on the work of James McPherson, William Faulkner, and others alongside pieces from his own novel, Sharpshooter. For more information on the lecture, exhibitions, or museum hours, call 865-215-8824 or visit the website at www.

EastTNHistory.org. • FREE “ENERGY OF THE EARTH: A NON-LINEAR VIEW OF THRU HIKING THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL” • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 7PM • A free public

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CLAYTON CENTER FOR THE ARTS on the campus of Maryville College 502 E. Lamar Alexander Pkwy.

Maryville, TN 37804

BOX OFFICE: 865-981-8590 ClaytonArtsCenter.com

Thursday, Nov. 5 - Sunday, Nov. 15

presentation sponsored by the Harvey Broome Group of the Sierra Club by Joan Tomlinson. Joan, trail name Blue Jay, is a retired computer analyst who started serious running late in life to stay in shape for hiking and getting outdoors. After completing a few marathons and spending a couple of months of general planning followed by a couple of months of intense planning, she started her AT thru hike at Springer Mountain in Georgia in March 2014. Six months and 8 days later, she completed her journey at lovely • FREE KNOXVILLE CIVIL WAR ROUNDTABLE • Bearden Banquet Hall • 8PM • Edwin C. Bearss, chief historian emeritus of the National Park Service and special assistant for military sites, winner of numerous history and preservation awards, author of 20 books and countless articles, and recently nominated for the U.S. Congressional Gold Metal in recognition of his contributions to our history will lecture on “The Impact of Native Americans in the Civil War.” Lecture only cost $5, students free.

Dinner at 7PM, $17 including lecture. RSVP by noon on Monday, Nov. 9, by calling 865-671-9001. • $5-$20 Thursday, Nov. 12 ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM • Howard H. Baker Center for Public Policy • 1PM • Charles Perrings is a professor of environmental economics and director of ecoSERVICES at Arizona State University. • FREE Friday, Nov. 13 UT SCIENCE FORUM • Thompson-Boling Arena • 12PM • The Science Forum is a weekly brown-bag lunch series that allows professors and area scientists to discuss their research with the general public in a conversational presentation. Free and open to the public, each Science Forum consists of a 40-minute presentation followed by a Q-and-A session. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own lunch or purchase it at the cafe in Thompson-Boling Arena. For more information about the UT Science Forum, visit http://scienceforum.utk.edu. • FREE

FAMILY AND KIDS’ EVENTS

Thursday, Nov. 5 BABY BOOKWORMS • Lawson McGee Public Library • 11AM • For infants to age 2, must be accompanied by a parent or guardian. • FREE CHESS AT THE LIBRARY • Blount County Public Library • 1PM. • FREE Friday, Nov. 6 SMART TOYS AND BOOKS ART CLASS • Smart Toys and Books • 10AM • Reservations and payment are required in advance. Class fees are non-refundable. Ages 2+. • $10 Saturday, Nov. 7 CHESS AT THE LIBRARY • Blount County Public Library • 10AM • FREE SATURDAY STORIES AND SONGS • Lawson McGee Public Library • 11AM • A weekly music and storytelling session for kids. • FREE Sunday, Nov. 8 KMA ART ACTIVITY DAY • Knoxville Museum of Art • 1PM • Every second Sunday of each month, the KMA will host free drop-in art activities for families. A local artist will be on-site to lead hands-on art activities between 1pm and 4pm on the second Sunday of each month. • FREE

CALENDAR

Monday, Nov. 9 MUSICAL MORNINGS • Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge • 10AM • This activity is designed for toddlers and their caregivers. Children can explore tone, melody, and rhythm in an age-appropriate environment. Singing and dancing are encouraged. Musical Mornings also are free with paid admission or museum membership. http:// childrensmuseumofoakridge.org/musical-mornings/ • SMART TOYS AND BOOKS STORYTIME • Smart Toys and Books • 11AM • Storytime with Miss Helen is every Monday at 11:00am. No charge. No reservations required. • FREE MCCLUNG MUSEUM STROLLER TOUR: ART AND BUDDHISM • McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture • 10AM • Join us for a morning out as our museum educator leads engaging gallery tours for parents and caregivers and their young ones. Crying and wiggly babies welcome!

This month we explore the special exhibit, Embodying Enlightenment: Buddhist Art of the Himalayas. The event is free, but limited, and all attendees must register to attend online. Registration opens a month in advance and closes the day before the tour. • FREE Tuesday, Nov. 10 TODDLERS’ PLAYTIME • Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge • 10AM • Toddlers’ Playtime is designed for children aged 4 and younger, accompanied by their parents, grandparents, or caregivers. Little ones have an opportunity to play with blocks, toy trains, and puppets; they can “cook” in the pretend kitchen, dig for dinosaurs, and look at books. The adults can socialize while the children play.

Free with paid admission or museum membership. http:// childrensmuseumofoakridge.org/toddlers-playtime/ • PRE-K READ AND PLAY • Lawson McGee Public Library • 11AM • Pre-K Read and Play is a pilot program specifically designed to prepare children to enter kindergarten. While the format of the program will still feel like a traditional storytime with books, music, and other educational activities, each weekly session will focus on a different standard from the Tennessee Department of Education’s Early Childhood/Early Learning Developmental Standards.

• FREE EVENING STORYTIME • Lawson McGee Public Library • 6:30PM • An evening storytime at Lawson McGhee Children’s Room to include stories, music, and crafts. For toddlers and up. • FREE CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY KID-TO-KID: FUN WITH A PURPOSE • Cancer Support Community • 3:30PM • Your children will gain coping skills and have opportunities to talk about a loved one’s cancer diagnosis while also having fun. Please call before your first visit and RSVP. 865-546- 4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

Wednesday, Nov. 11 BABY BOOKWORMS • Lawson McGee Public Library • 10:20AM • For infants to age 2, must be accompanied by a parent or guardian. • FREE PRESCHOOL STORYTIME • Lawson McGee Public Library • 11AM • For ages 3 to 5, must be accompanied by an adult.

• FREE Thursday, Nov. 12 BABY BOOKWORMS • Lawson McGee Public Library • 11AM • For infants to age 2, must be accompanied by a parent or guardian. • FREE CHESS AT THE LIBRARY • Blount County Public Library • 1PM • Middle and high school students (or any age) are invited to play chess. Tom Jobe coaches most Saturdays in the Teen Central area of the library. On one Saturday of

every month, there will be a rated tournament at the Blount County Public Library. • FREE Friday, Nov. 13 SMART TOYS AND BOOKS ART CLASS • Smart Toys and Books • 10AM • Mommy, Daddy & Me Art Classes are every Friday at 10:00am & 11:00am. Reservations and payment are required in advance. Class fees are non-refundable. Ages 2+. • $10 KNOXVILLE CHALLENGER TENNIS TOURNAMENT KID’S NIGHT • University of Tennessee • 5PM • The Knoxville Challenger Tennis Tournament will host a Kid’s Night at the University of Tennessee’s Goodfriend Tennis Center.

Children ages 12 and under will receive free admission and the first 100 kids will receive a goody bag upon entry. The bag will contain a rally towel, which can be signed by the professional tennis players competing in the tournament, along with other goodies. The Knoxville Challenger, a USTA Pro Circuit event, is the largest professional men’s tennis tournament in our region. The Challenger series is designed to provide opportunities to aspiring young professional tennis players to advance to the top levels of the game.

CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS

Thursday, Nov. 5 AARP DRIVER SAFETY CLASS • Oak Ridge Senior Center • 9:30AM • Call (865) 382-5822. • BACKPACKING BASICS II: WHAT’S IN YOUR PACK? • REI • 7PM • So you have your backpack loaded with all the necessary items for your next backpacking trip. Still think you might be carrying too much? Join REI for this small group session on how to cut weight and tailor your gear to best suit your needs. Registration required at www.rei. com/knoxville. • FREE BELLY DANCE LEVELS 1 AND 2 • Knox Dance Worx • 8PM • Call (865) 898-2126 or email alexia@alexia-dance.com. • $12 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted.

CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY: KNIT YOUR WAY TO WELLNESS • Cancer Support Community • 1PM • Whether you are a novice knitter or an old pro, you are invited to bring your own project or join others in learning a new one. Supplies provided. 865-546-4661. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

Saturday, Nov. 7 MARBLE SPRINGS OPEN HEARTH COOKING WORKSHOP • Marble Springs State Historic Site • 10AM • This hands-on workshop will teach visitors about open hearth cooking methods of the 18th century, focusing on cooking with the Dutch oven. Space is limited to 10 guests so make your reservations by Tuesday, Nov 3. To register for the workshop or to find out more information email info@ marblesprings.net or call (865)573-5508. • $20 IMPROV COMEDY CLASS • The Birdhouse • 10AM • A weekly improv comedy class. • FREE Monday, Nov. 9 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 5:30PM • Call 865-5772021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted.

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November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 35

CALENDAR KMA WINTER ADULT WORKSHOPS • Knoxville Museum of Art • 10AM • All classes are held at the KMA with easy access and plenty of free parking. Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis. Classes and workshops are taught by professional artists, living and working in the East Tennessee area. For a full description of classes and registration information, visit www.knoxart.org.

Tuesday, Nov. 10 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted.

CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY NUTRITION AMMUNITION • Cancer Support Community • 12PM • Call (865) 546-4611.

All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

Wednesday, Nov. 11 FLOW AND GO YOGA • Illuminations Alternative and Holistic Health • 12:15 PM • Call 985-788-5496 or email sandylarson@yahoo.com. • $10 BELLY DANCING CLASS • Illuminations Alternative and Holistic Health • 7PM • Call 985-788-5496 or email sandylarson@yahoo.com. • $15 Thursday, Nov. 12 BELLY DANCE LEVELS 1 AND 2 • Knox Dance Worx • 8PM • Call (865) 898-2126 or email alexia@alexia-dance.com. • $12 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted.

Thursday, Nov. 5 - Sunday, Nov. 15

AARP DRIVER SAFETY CLASS • East Tennessee Medical Group • 8AM • Call (865) 382-5822.

CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY: HEALING THROUGH ART • Cancer Support Community • 1PM • Join us as we glaze ceramic wall plaques to be hung indoors. No experience necessary, just a willingness to enjoy the creative process. RSVP. Call 865-546-4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

Friday, Nov. 13 AARP DRIVER SAFETY CLASS • Farragut Town Hall • 8:15AM • Call (865) 382-5822.

Saturday, Nov. 14 IMPROV COMEDY CLASS • The Birdhouse • 10AM • A weekly improv comedy class. • FREE KNOX COUNTY MASTER GARDENERS: COMPOSTING FOR HOME GARDENERS • Cedar Bluff Branch Library • 1PM • Learn how to create the secret ingredient for growing gorgeous vegetables and ornamentals: rich organic matter in your soil. Get a head start on your spring garden by learning from Knox County Extension Master Gardeners Dr. Annie Gray and Bill Menius the why’s and the how-to’s of composting. (865) 470-7033 or knoxlib.org . • FREE

MEETINGS

Thursday, Nov. 5 OVEREATERS ANONYMOUS • Recovery at Cokesbury • 5:30PM • This is an OA Literature Meeting. After a short

18th Master Woodworkers Show at The Emporium Center 100 South Gay Street Knoxville, TN 37902 Free Admission 865-523-7543 A juried exhibition of fine woodworking by regional artists featuring furniture, turnings and sculpture.

Friday Nov. 6 4pm-9pm

Saturday Nov. 7 10am-5pm

Sunday Nov. 8 11am-5pm

Thanks to our Sponsors:

Woodcraft • Jeffries Woodworks Everhart Lumber Company • Lee Valley Tools, Ltd Peach State Lumber Products • DeVol Millwork Kevin Adams Cabinetry www.masterwoodworkers.org 36

KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

reading from a book, members may share their experience, strength and hope. • FREE ATHEISTS SOCIETY OF KNOXVILLE • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 5:30PM • Weekly atheists meetup and happy hour. Come join us for food, drink and great conversation.

Everyone welcome. • FREE KNOXVILLE WRITERS’ GUILD • Laurel Theater • 7PM • The Knoxville Writers’ Guild’s monthly program will feature special guest Tawnysha Greene, author of “A House Made of Stars” (Burlesque Press, 2015). Additional information about KWG can be found at www.KnoxvilleWritersGuild. org.

CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY FAMILY BEREAVEMENT GROUP • Cancer Support Community • 6PM • CSC is committed to providing bereavement services to those who have lost a loved one to cancer. Please contact our clinical staff before attending. Call 865-546-4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY BREAST CANCER NETWORKER • Thompson Cancer Survivor Center West • 6PM • This drop-in group is an opportunity for women who have or have had breast cancer to come together to exchange information, offer support, education and encouragement. Bring your favorite seasonal snack to share. Call 865-546-4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer Saturday, Nov. 7 AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 11AM • Al-Anon’s

purpose is to help families and friends of alcoholics recover from the effects of living with the problem drinking of a relative or friend. Visit our local website at farragutalanon.org or email us at FindHope@ Farragutalanon.org. • FREE SEEKERS OF SILENCE • Church of the Savior United Church of Christ • 9AM • Brenda Rasch, a certified Healing Touch practitioner and instructor, will give an “Introduction to Healing Touch.” The ecumenical group’s program begins at 9 a.m. and is free and open to all. More information at www.sosknoxville.org. • FREE Sunday, Nov. 8 SILENT MEDITATION SUNDAYS • Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center • 11AM • The gatherings are intended to be inclusive of people of all faiths as well as those who do not align themselves with a particular religious denomination. For more information contact Mitzi Wood-Von Mizener at 865-497-3603 or community@ narrowridge.org. • FREE Monday, Nov. 9 ASPERGER’S SUPPORT GROUP • Remedy Coffee • 6PM • Are you an adult with asperger’s and looking for others who have the same strengths and challenges in life? Contact Saskia at (865) 247-0065 ext. 23. • FREE GAY MEN’S DISCUSSION GROUP • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 7:30PM • We hold facilitated discussions on topics and issues relevant to local gay men in a safe and open environment. Visit gaygroupknoxville.org.

ADVERTISING EQUALS SUPPORT. Thanks to our advertisers for their help in keeping our presses running. Let’s return the favor by supporting them.

CALENDAR Wednesday, Nov. 11 COMITE POPULAR DE KNOXVILLE • The Birdhouse • 7PM • A weekly meeting of the local immigrant advocacy organization.

CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY THANKSGIVING POTLUCK LUNCH • Cancer Support Community • 12PM • Join your CSC family and friends for food, fellowship and the taste and smells of Thanksgiving. We will provide the turkey and drinks. You are invited to bring yourself, family, friends and your favorite side dish, salad or dessert.

RSVP. Call 865-546-4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

Thursday, Nov. 12 OVEREATERS ANONYMOUS • Recovery at Cokesbury • 5:30PM • This is an OA Literature Meeting. After a short reading from a book, members may share their experience, strength and hope. • FREE ATHEISTS SOCIETY OF KNOXVILLE • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 5:30PM • Weekly atheists meetup and happy hour. Come join us for food, drink and great conversation.

Everyone welcome. • FREE CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY LEUKEMIA, LYMPHOMA, AND MYELOMA NETWORKER • Cancer Support Community • 6AM • This drop-in group is open for those with leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma and myeloproliferative disorders and their support persons. Participants will be able to exchange information, discuss concerns and share experiences. Call 865-546-4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

SCIENCE CAFE • Ijams Nature Center • 5:30PM • The November meeting of the STFK Science Cafe takes place on Thursday, November 12 from 5:30 P.M. until 7:00 at Ijams Nature Center. The discussion topic this month is “Outbreak: By the Numbers”, mathematical models for predicting the spread of contagious diseases. Our guest scientist is Dr. Suzanne Lenhart, Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Tennessee, and Associate Director of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis. • FREE Saturday, Nov. 14 AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 11AM • Al-Anon’s purpose is to help families and friends of alcoholics recover from the effects of living with the problem drinking of a relative or friend. Visit our local website at farragutalanon.org or email us at FindHope@ Farragutalanon.org. • FREE CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY PROSTATE CANCER NETWORKER • Cancer Support Community • 10AM • This drop-in group is an opportunity for men to network with other men about their experiences with prostate cancer.

Call 865-546-4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

CAVETT STATION CHAPTER OF THE NATIONAL DAR SOCIETY • Bearden Branch Public Library • 10:30AM • The program will feature information about the United States Vietnam War Commemoration. Women interested in proving lineal descent to a patriot of the American Revolution are welcome to visit. The DAR is a non-profit, non-political volunteer women’s service organization dedicated to promoting patriotism, preserving American history, and securing America’s future through better education for children. For more information, please visit the chapter website at http://www.tndar.org/~cavettstation/. • FREE

ETC.

Thursday, Nov. 5 NEW HARVEST PARK FARMERS MARKET • New Harvest Park • 3PM • The New Harvest Park Farmers Market will be open every Thursday through November from 3 to 6 p.m. The market features locally-grown produce, meats, artisan food products, plants, herbs, flowers, crafts and much more. • FREE

THE SANTALAND DIARIES

TICKET GIVEAWAY

Show us yours! We all have one!

Friday, Nov. 6 LAKESHORE PARK FARMERS’ MARKET • Lakeshore Park • 3PM • FARM vendors will offer a wide variety of spring bedding plants, fresh produce, grass-fed and pasture-raised meats, artisan bread and cheese, local honey and fresh eggs. As the season goes on, they offer the freshest produce possible, including just-picked strawberries, peaches, sweet corn and heirloom tomatoes. • FREE BARNES & NOBLE MINI MAKER FAIRE • Barnes & Noble • 9AM • FREE Saturday, Nov. 7 CRYSTALLINE LIGHT ANGEL CONFERENCE • Holiday Inn (Cedar Bluff) • Join Speakers Charlaine Jones, Maureen Aruta, Michael Lott, Pamela Nine, Randy and Victoria Farley, & Theresa Richardson for a day of Angel fun. Must pre-register by 10-31 to guarantee your reservation. www. theresarichardson.com. • OAK RIDGE FARMERS’ MARKET • Historic Jackson Square • 8AM MARKET SQUARE FARMERS’ MARKET • Market Square • 9AM • FREE BARNES & NOBLE MINI MAKER FAIRE • Barnes & Noble • 9AM • FREE Sunday, Nov. 8 BARNES & NOBLE MINI MAKER FAIRE • Barnes & Noble • 11AM • Barnes & Noble will hold the first-ever retail Mini Maker Faire, from Friday, November 6, through Sunday, November 8. Throughout the weekend, customers will have the opportunity to participate in interactive product demonstrations to learn about programming, coding and 3D printing, and to take part in collaborative hands-on experiences designed to stretch their imaginations and creative thinking as they work cooperatively to make something original. Customers should contact Barnes & Noble Knoxville to find out event times and visit BN.com/ MakerFaire for more information on the Mini Maker Faire.

• FREE ALTERNATIVE GIFT FAIR • First United Methodist Church Maryville • 9AM • This year more than 15 vendors representing non-profit, fair trade and church groups come together in one place to help you find just the right gifts for people on your Christmas list. By shopping at the AGF, your purchases actually help you “give twice.” • FREE

Send in your worst Santa photo for a chance to win tickets to

The SantaLand Diaries (Mature Audiences)

Thursday, Dec. 3rd, 2015

by David Sedaris at the Clarence Brown Theatre Submit your photo along with name and phone number to: contests@knoxmercury.com

Each week’s winning photo will be published in the following week’s issue of the Knoxville Mercury.

Brought to you by:

Tuesday, Nov. 10 EBENEZER ROAD FARMERS’ MARKET • Ebenezer United Methodist Church • 3PM • FREE Wednesday, Nov. 11 MARKET SQUARE FARMERS’ MARKET • Market Square • 9AM • FREE

Send your events to calendar@knoxmercury.com

*Disclaimer: By entering the contest you are giving permission to have your submission (photo) published in the Knoxville Mercury and / or on the Knoxville Mercury and CBT Facebook pages. Winners will be chosen by the Knoxville Mercury Editors from weekly submissions. Winners will be notified weekly. (1 pair of tickets per week.)

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Void where prohibited. Must be a legal U.S. resident, 18 years of age or older, and not be a sponsor or an employee, family member, or household member of a sponsor. Once notified, winner has 24 hours to respond. Odds of winning depend on number of entries received.

Sponsor: Knoxville Mercury, 706 Walnut Ave., Suite 404, Knoxville, TN 37902.

November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 37

OUTDOORS

Voice in the Wilder ness

Photos by Kim Travathan

The Big Drawdown Historically low water levels at Chilhowee Lake offer up a surprising catch

BY KIM TREVATHAN

“W

hat is that thing?” biologist Drew Crain said when the fish on my line came into view, shimmering in the clear water.

People standing on the bank of drawn-down Chilhowee Lake began murmuring the same sentiment. It had vertical stripes, yellow and green, and when it turned, it flashed bright orange pelvic fins.

“Don’t lose it!” said Crain, who had been fishing nearby, at the mouth of Abrams Creek, which gushed muddy water into the clear lake.

Crain, retired chemistry professor Terry Bunde, and I had arrived at the lake early, just as the thin layer of clouds above the mountains blushed pink from the rising sun. We were anxious to be casting our lures and our red worms into a lake that had been lowered 40 feet for repairs on the dam.

38

KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

The fish, we reasoned, would have less territory to elude us; they would be “corralled,” as one fisherman would later say, in concentrated pools.

Bunde, a lifelong fisherman, said, “If we can’t catch fish after the drawdown, we might have to surrender our fishing credentials.”

We would see the lake at a historic low (it was lowered 25 feet in 2008), and the drawdown, I thought, would surely reveal secrets concealed from human eyes since the completion of the dam in 1957 and the rising of water that followed.

We parked at a boat ramp that ended a football field away from water and contemplated the Little Tennessee River, meandering through a vast mud flat toward the dam, a sad vestige of the once free-flowing river. To get to the water, we stumbled and slid down

a steep embankment of shale and loose dirt to stand on the bottom of a lake. Drew and I cast lures with one rod and reel, and baited another rig with red worms. Bunde had changed lures three times before I got my worm on the hook. He snatched them from the retractable fly keeper on the front of his fishing vest and tied them on so fast it seemed like sleight of hand. Bunde could really fish, and he knew people who caught fish. He told us a friend of his had recently caught 100 white bass in Fort Loudoun Lake.

Crain and I were crowded onto an outcropping the size of a pitching mound, and Bunde, on higher ground, remarked that one of his friends predicted carp would be all we would catch in the drawdown.

It was killing me not to be able to boat the lake in my kayak, but it was

prohibited, as was fishing upstream of Abrams Creek.

Bunde was talking about catching redfish in Florida when Crain hollered and grabbed his worm-baited rig. I tried to get out of his way as he danced sideways playing the fish.

“He got off! And he was a good one,” Crain said.

Bunde headed toward the mouth of Abrams Creek and I followed. I climbed onto a huge tree stump that jutted out over the water and cast the drop-shot rigged red worm.

In no time I had a fish on, a small one, but still the first one of the day, always a thrill. It was a little catfish, more yellow than any catfish I’d ever caught. Bunde, about 300 yards upstream, was casting to the side of the silty water coming out of what was left of Abrams Creek.

Drew and I saw him land a good-sized fish and release it. He came over to us and gave us the report: a smallmouth, caught with a plastic worm. Bunde had no use for the red worms I’d gotten from the cooler at the big store the night before, where a kid walked past and murmured, I could have sworn, “Bait fishing ain’t real fishing.” Kid was maybe 10 years old.

He didn’t even look at me.

Crain soon took Bunde’s place at the mouth of the creek, and I stayed at my perch, casting out into muddy water only a few feet deep.

Motorcycles began to blast down Highway 129, and more and more people stumbled down the steep banks to fish or take pictures. You could see two other bridges that had

OUTDOORS

Photo by Drew Crain

The only thing worse than throwing back a state record fish would be to clean him and eat him, so at least I had that consolation.

crossed the mouth of Abrams Creek, each of them underwater at normal pool. Tiny mussel shells littered the exposed lake bottom. Hundreds of cans, mostly beer, lay half buried in the mud. Bottles bobbed along in the artificial current of the Little T. Bubbles gurgled up frequently, gas released from the muddy bottom.

I found a horseshoe, crusted over like a fossil. Bunde wondered if there might be a horse somewhere under the mud. I joined Crain near the creek mouth. He offered me his place where the silty water met the clear, deep water of the lake, a distinct border where Bunde had caught the bass.

I said no and positioned myself a few yards upstream. First cast with the Little Cleo spoon, I snagged the exotic

striped fish, so beautiful in the water, slightly less beautiful as it floundered in the mud. When I got the hook out and washed some of the mud off, I blurted, “It’s a saugeye!” It was the first fish that came to mind, a hybrid of a sauger and a walleye, which had a big fan-like dorsal fin like this one. For some reason, everyone seemed to agree.

I released it and he swam back to what remained of the depths.

We left a little while after the saugeye catch because nobody seemed to be pulling in the mythical hauls of fish that we’d expected. The lowered lake had lost its novelty for me, and the whole scene, like a shoddy reenactment of pre-dam history, made me mourn the lost river and ponder the eternal question: Why do people drop cans into a lake?

Crain sent me an email after I got home, including a link to a fish photo from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources website. It was a yellow perch that I’d caught. Saugeye, Crain wrote, have teeth and don’t have the orange fi ns.

He told me I’d probably released a state record yellow perch. (The current record is 2 pounds, 2 ounces.)

The only thing worse than throwing back a state record fish would be to clean him and eat him, so at least I had that consolation, and as a mere bait slinger, fishing a drawndown lake, I wouldn’t feel right about holding a state record. ◆ November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 39

FOOD

Home Palate

Holly’s Comeback Special

BY DENNIS PERKINS

I

t’s only been a matter of weeks since Holly Hambright merged her wacky, pig-tailed chef logo with the staid oval that marks the longtime Bearden breakfast favorite, Gourmet’s Market.

But the first alterations—only opening tucks before a larger facelift—already point to the presence of one of Knoxville’s favorite foodies, most lauded chefs, and unforgettable personalities.

The changes are yet small—there are some accent lights scattered around the cavernous dining room that soften the unforgiving glare of fluorescence in the former market space, once filled with shelves of Le Creuset’s classic enamel-lined cast iron cookware, aromatic Piedmontese truffle oil, and coarse fleur de sel. On the other side of the building, where Cosmo’s Caffe offered Knoxville some of its first tastes of sandwiches filled with Irish bacon, country pate, and Westphalian ham, Hambright has added some cozy moments that give the Caffe space a soft, pleasantly clubby feel via lower lighting and some cozy seating.

But the larger changes, as Hambright describes them, make perfect sense and seem perfectly suited to the market. The colorful red walls punctuated with playful, bright yellow images of baguettes, stars, and coffee accoutrements, will soon turn to a soothing shade of cinnamon stick.

Other walls will be filled with more art,

40

KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

including a prominent new spot for a drawing by Knoxville’s celebrated glass artist, Richard Jolley. Hambright’s vision for the space also includes a smaller version of the market’s retail past that she says will include goodies from Magpies Cakes as well as “grab-n-go casseroles, salads, soups, and dressings, my brother’s coffee cups, our T-shirts,” she says, as well as cheeses, coffee, spice blends, and finishing salts. “We’ll market things that make sense.”

If any other chef had taken the keys to this space, the changes might feel less organic, but for Hambright this isn’t a corporate takeover—it’s a homecoming.

From 2003 to 2008, Hambright was Gourmet’s Market’s executive chef, and many items on the menu today hearken back to that time. It was a job she loved. “I enjoyed it so much here, I hated to leave,” she says.

“I had so much fun on the weekends doing secret specials and developing the brunch menu.” She left in 2008 to pursue other opportunities that led directly to her return to this kitchen; along the way, she’s opened three successful restaurants and seen her catering efforts grow to a size she never imagined. But like the hero in Joseph Campbell’s description of the monomyth, her journey brings her home with the experience and wisdom to help rejuvenate this place and the community she loves.

Photo by Clay Duda

Knoxville’s favorite chef returns to revamp one her favorite haunts, Gourmet’s Market

Despite the success of her businesses and the tweaks she’s made to them over time, she’s never considered completely changing Gourmet’s Market into Holly’s Homberg, which now shares the space.

“Gourmet’s Market has a very devoted following. We’ve already had people say you can’t change the grits, you have to keep the Veg Head, etc. So we’ve decided if ain’t broke, we won’t fix it,” Hambright says. “If it’s good we’ll make it great, and if it’s worn out its welcome, we’ll send it on its way. We’ve already started specials, implemented our soup program, just subtle things like that. I don’t want to alienate lovers of Gourmet’s Market, but I also don’t want to alienate the clientele we’ve developed across the street.”

That means she’s gone back to the Cotswold cheese on the Frog in the Ditch, and inserted her own recipes for chicken salad, tuna salad, and the Cuban-style sandwich. But the “grand letterhead announcements” are waiting for First Friday, Nov. 6.

Dinner service will come after the first of the year on the weekends, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It will be the same style of dinner service featured at Holly’s Homberg, with a menu that changes weekly. Hambright plans to continue her regionally themed Taste Bud Tours. After recently visiting the cuisine of Montreal, she’s planning the final dinner in this year’s tour for Dec. 3

HOLLY’S GOURMET’S MARKET 5107 Kingston Pike, 865-584-8739 gourmetsmarketandcafe.com Monday–Friday: 7 a.m.–3 p.m.; Saturday–Sunday: 8 a.m.–3 p.m.

with a return to Knoxville. Next year, with the inclusion of a full liquor license, she promises to add wine pairings to the regional foods.

A less energetic person would get tired just thinking about the rapid-fire rise of Hambright’s little empire.

Holly’s 135 just opened on the 100 block of Gay Street last year, and Holly’s Corner landed on North Central the year before. Her occupation of this place, which started at the first of October, has been seamless and uninterrupted, remaining open throughout the revamp.

But this chef, winner of three Top Knox categories—including Top Chef, Top New Restaurant (for 135), and Top Caterer—looks as hale, hearty, and happy as ever. The familiar Hambright twinkle glitters brightly with each of her distinctive and frequent laughs, which come in a crescendo as she shrugs off any worry about her growing to-do list, including adding a new prep shift “just to get the bacon cooked.”

Holly Hambright’s fundamental principle is the same as it always has been: “I want to make it great food, every time.” ◆

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McLarney earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers and is currently a professor at Auburn University.

Her book, Its Day Being Gone, won the National Poetry Series award in 2013. For more information, call 865.981.8241.

Ms. McLarney will sell and sign copies of her book following the lecture.

November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 41

FOOD

D ir t to Fork

Photos by Rose Kennedy

Veggies on Wheels The Dinner Bell Fresh food truck veges out in the best possible way

BY ROSE KENNEDY

N

ot so many years ago, a restaurant aptly known as Veg-O-Rama came and went in Happy Holler.

Not so many months ago, a new produce and vegetarian baked goods market in South Knoxville had a grand opening and a quiet closing within months of each other.

Many local restaurants—Sunspot, the Holly Hambright enterprises, the Three Rivers Market food bar all spring to mind—do a brisk trade with the local vegetarian foodies, but as for establishments that are vegetarian all the way?

Is Knoxville really ready for that?

“We wonder that every single day,” quips Whitney Ross, the co-owner with Rebecca Clayman of the Dinner Bell Fresh food truck, open since August and utterly, completely, vegetarian—often vegan, to boot.

He’s only half serious, and any doubts are not keeping the pair from plowing right into action.

“We have a simple mission: Healthy, happy Tennessee,” he says. “We believe that healthy people are happy people and that Tennessee is a beautiful place to be enjoyed and explored. While

42

KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

some may feel our focus may make us an underdog, we embrace the opportunity to provide healthy options and comfort food minus the guilt.”

Ross and Clayman bring rich and diverse life experience to this truck.

Clayman’s been a juice bartender and baker in other states, and honed her skills with renowned plant-based chef Chad Sarno and the Rouxbe team.

Ross is a certified plant-based nutritionist who says he started working at age 12 as a shoe shiner, and has held many administrative and educational posts in between.

The two met eight years ago working at the Apple Store, and both began a “vegan adventure” in January 2014. They share a frustration with Tennessee’s consistently poor national health rankings, and have vowed to help us do better. They’ve already met with some success at events like Barre3 in the Park at Sequoyah Hills Park and a Trunk or Treat event with the North Side YMCA. “Both of these were community focused and sponsored by organizations that encourage healthy

living,” Ross says.

The food truck also does a regular gig at lunch on Main Street, parked across from the main post office, and it’s here that I start thinking that these people might just be able to pull this off. The menu is lovely, all simmery or crispy, homey or spicy, depending on your preference.

I dive into zucchini “pasta” with a lively marinara and “meatballs” made of quinoa, beans, and spices. As I realize the “noodles” are crispy and lightly flavored, not carb-y or chewy like your typical white flour pasta, I place my finger on it: These two are forging new ground. With dishes as varied as vegan nachos and eggplant curry, a quinoa bowl, and butternut squash soup, they are making stuff you’ll like to eat. They are not trying to make sprouted grains taste like your mammaw’s meatloaf, or even a vegan soup taste like a vegetarian one—their cashew-lime “cream” is smooth and tangy but not trying to take the place of sour cream.

They are just cooking good food, unapologetically vegetarian food, and you can taste Clayman’s background at play in the simmered sauces, particularly her favorite, loaded with ginger.

“The food I was exposed to as a kid was rich with flavors and spices,” she says. “My grandmother was constantly having us try new things. Empanadas, tamales, beans, rice were the comfort foods on my table when I was young.”

She greets walk-up customers by name, and one of them, a guy named

Sam Rosolina who I met at a Knoxville Green Drinks Happy Hour, unwittingly gives me further hope that Dinner Bell Fresh is on the right track. He and a friend walk from the UT campus and their grad studies for lunch here regularly. What do they like? “You really can’t go wrong,” he says.

But here’s the cool thing. Rosolina seems to only remember that it is vegetarian food as an afterthought; he’s not a vegetarian. “It’s just really good,” he says.

Another fellow with a twice-pierced face and a happy grin confirms the opinion. “It just makes me feel good to eat this stuff,” he says. He was so thrilled with the choices on an earlier trip he was anxious to come back. “Remember?” he asks Clayman. “I couldn’t decide so I ended up getting four.”

A smattering of people in business suits and blue jeans completes the steady flow of customers, and Clayman and Ross, who divide all the duties, calmly banter and serve and stir and take money and feed.

Are we ready for them? I hope so.

Because there is one more way I know that these two are all-in on this enterprise, all set to be the ones who make food truck/vegetarian/Knoxville history.

It was Ross’ answer to my very first question for them: Do you have other jobs than this, other ways to support yourself?

The one-word answer: “No.” ◆ For more information: dinnerbellfresh.com

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November 5, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 43

’BYE

Sacred & P rofane

This Too Shall Pass Lots of bad days, but one good morning

BY DONNA JOHNSON

L

ife was hard then. I was eating cold pinto beans out of a can that I had to open with a hammer because I didn’t own a can opener. Having lost my wallet with my state ID, bus pass, and a few dollars, I had to walk everywhere. My phone had been disconnected for weeks and the electricity was on its way to being cut off, so I finally called my mother and the check was in the mail. The only problem was that since I didn’t have a bank account or ID, I would not be able to get the check cashed. I was pretty much screwed.

But all was not lost. I had friends.

Good friends. They would bail me out.

Again.

“I’m low on food myself,” Lance said as he gave me $5 for food and bus fare home. I figured this was probably true, as Lance spends a large portion of his money on pills and alcohol, and most of the time he gazes out the window jotting down a sentence or two in between snorts of hydrocodone and various alcoholic drinks. He does this in exactly the same order every day: He begins with two glasses of cheap red wine, then continues with three or four glasses of Scotch and soda, and finishes off with a large can of beer. All the while writing unrelated sentences and getting up every hour or so to do a couple of snorts.

“You should start writing again,” I tell him from time to time, for he is a gifted writer and could possibly have been a successful one—his writing has greatness. Instead, he has made a career out of getting high. To give him credit, he does manage to keep his excesses somewhat under control, and at age 70, he seems as happy as anyone I know.

Not entirely dismayed, I moved on to my other best friends.

Dorothy, whose cabinets are stockpiled to the ceiling with canned goods, gave me the remainder of her

44

KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

morning oatmeal and said: “Well, you’re not going to learn anything about budgeting until you go hungry a few times.”

Clearly, Dorothy has never been hungry.

My last attempt was Charlie. I knew for sure that he would help me because he is Buddhist—and isn’t Buddhism all about compassion?

“There’s a food bank on 23rd Street day after tomorrow,” he said. “I can’t help you right now. I’m in a new relationship and you know how careful one has to be in the beginning of a romance.”

“Of course,” I replied, mentally crossing him off my ever-decreasing list of best friends.

So that was that. I was hungry and alone, in an abyss where no light entered, on a pathway that only spiraled downward. It rained relentlessly in November as my birthday passed unnoticed even by me. I went to bed on the beautiful sheets with the pink roses that my mother had given me in one of her futile efforts to cheer me up. Day followed weary day as I lay in bed staring out the window as the autumn fog lay heavy on black, skeletal trees.

I sent a friend out for a bottle of cheap whiskey and drank it straight out of the bottle, which caused hours of weeping. I seemed to be the observer, more than the participant, of my abysmal depression, as though I had fallen into the trap door of someone else’s basement where no light could enter and no voice could be heard save my own: “Please God let this be over please God let this be over please God let this be over…”

Finally, the electricity was cut off and there was not only an absence of light but it was also cold, and I prayed that the sun would come out and warm the bed I lay in. I slept odd hours, hardly knowing whether it was day or night. For me it was always dark.

Then the check from my mother arrived.

Finally, I roused myself enough to take the bus to my friend’s art gallery in Homberg Place and she cashed my check and gave me food. There was a woman there whom I had given a painting to, and she talked of the $85 earrings her daughter had just given her, and I hated her for it. I hated myself for the irresponsibility that had caused me to be broke.

But there is something about a full bag of groceries on the kitchen table that brings hope, so I lit candles and had a picnic with my dog, Mallory.

I ate a grilled cheese sandwich, a large bag of potato chips, two Mars bars. I polished them off with a jug of milk and some more cheap whiskey, which I drank now out of a wine glass.

I sat rocking Mallory back and forth, back and forth, the creaking of the chair bringing comfort, as did the flickering of the candles against the

BY IAN BLACKBURN AND JACK NEELY

living room wall. Wrapped in my mother’s quilt, my dog and I fell asleep huddled together like geese tucked in toward one another on a midnight wharf. In the morning I awoke with the sun streaming through the window and the squeak squeak of Mallory’s rubber unicorn being dropped dead on my face.

I bundled myself up and went to pay the electric bill. Everything that had ceased to function in my life, in my brain, had begun to rev itself up again and seek motion, like the motor of a plane as it prepares for take-off.

My despair lifted as suddenly as it had come, and its disappearance was so complete that I could hardly believe it was ever there—like when you have an abscessed tooth pulled, and afterward you soon forget how it made you once believe that nothing existed in life save pain. ◆

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY 45

’BYE

Spir it of the Staircase

BY MATTHEW FOLTZ-GRAY

46

KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 5, 2015

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY 47

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