Musical Tour of Johnson City, Tennessee
I grew up in Johnson City, TN, but I never really had much of an idea that anything particularly significant had ever happened there in terms of music, other than the one Bruce Springsteen concert at Freedom Hall in 1976 that my parents will never tire of telling me about. Even well into adulthood, after I’d earned degrees in musicology and spent a lot of time studying, and even teaching, about American vernacular music, I was still somehow clueless about my own home town. Then one day about five years ago I was listening to some music with my son, who was about four at the time, and we happened to hear "The Coo Coo Bird", by Clarence “Tom” Ashley. It wasn’t the first time that I’d heard it, but somehow this time it just clicked for me. It was one of those moments when you happen to catch a piece of music from a new angle, and then that allows you to hear other music differently too. It’s not that I’d had anything against early country music; I’d been into pre-war blues, Hank Williams, The Louvin Brothers, and lots of other stuff that was adjacent to it for a long time, but nothing in that “old-time” world had ever tugged my strings in the way the music that I really love does, the way “The Coo-Coo Bird” did. We started listening to Ashley a lot, and gradually we added songs by Dock Boggs, Buell Kazee, various Brothers, Ramblers, Skillet Lickers, etc., and before too long it felt like this kind of stuff had just always been an integral part of our musical world.
So, you can imagine my amazement when, years later, I discovered that “The Coo-Coo Bird”, the song that had started it all, was actually recorded in Johnson City, in a building that I had passed by hundreds of times and never thought anything of! Needless to say, this revelation led me to see my home town differently, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. A big change that’s happened in the 25 years or so since I left is that the old downtown area, the place where almost everything I’m going to talk about here happened, which had been largely abandoned and allowed to rot away when I was growing up, now seems to be where everything’s happening again. It’s also filled up with murals celebrating the town’s history, and more than half of them seem to feature banjos, guitars, fiddles, and/or mandolins, so hopefully kids who are growing up there now won’t have to wait as long as I did to learn about something that makes their town so special.
This past Christmas my son and I came back to Johnson City for the first time in a while, and so, in the spirit of all this, we decided to take a little tour of a few spots that have, in one way or another, played a significant role in the town’s musical history. Some of these locations have a lot of information about them available, in Bear Family Records’ incredible box set of Columbia Records’ “Johnson City Sessions” of 1928 and ’29, where “The Coo-Coo Bird” was recorded. as well as on local history websites like Bob Cox’s Yesteryear and Johnson’s Depot. For others, there was little I could do other than ask around and report back on what I heard. If you happen to find yourself in Johnson City for an afternoon, or if you just feel like absorbing a lot of information about music in a random town, then I hope you enjoy the tour! Here, I’ll just be including “brief” blurbs about the various spots and their significance, along with links to songs and a few tips on what else you can do while you’re there, but I have a lot more to say about some of these places, so I’ll be posting some longer pieces soon.
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I realize that, however large Johnson City may loom in my personal history, and despite oddly misleading references to the town in a couple of famous country songs, at this point some of the more cosmopolitan members of my readership might be wondering just what the hell I’m talking about. So, here’s a brief rundown for the uninitiated.
Johnson City is a town of just over 70,000 people near the eastern tip of Tennessee, about 30 minutes’ drive from the borders of both North Carolina and Virginia. It’s abutted on four sides by the considerably smaller towns of Elizabethton, Erwin, Jonesborough, and Gray, and together with its slightly more distant rival towns of Kingsport and Bristol, it forms a “Combined Statistical Area” (CSA) called The Tri-Cities, which is the fifth largest in the state. Geographically speaking, Johnson City is most notable for being located right at the point where the rolling hills that dominate to the north and west give way to the more aggressively mountainous areas to the south and east, hence it’s one-time nickname, “the gateway to the Appalachians”.
Although the site of Tennessee’s earliest permanent European settlement is located within its present-day city lines, Johnson City was a relative newcomer compared to most of its neighbors. The town owes it’s existence to the junction of three rail lines, The Carolina Clinchfield & Ohio Railway (CC&O, now the Clinchfield Railroad), The Southern (SOU, now Norfolk Southern) Railway, and the now defunct East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad (The ET&WNC or “Tweetsie”). The last of these, in particular, helped to open up the once isolated mountainous areas around the Tennessee/North Carolina border, helping the town to earn its reputation as a regional hub, and as a kind of cultural buffer between the mountains and the rest of the country.
This location came with considerable economic benefits, which were further boosted around the turn of the century when the town was chosen to be the location of both The East Tennessee State Normal School (Now East Tennessee State University) and the Mountain Home VA center, which was originally built to house aging Union veterans of the civil war. In the early decades of the 20th century, the town promoted itself heavily, calling itself “The coolest town in the south” and “The heart of the destined industrial south.” It seems to have worked, because the town entered a serious growth spurt, more than doubling in population during the 1920s, by the end of which it had become the fifth largest community in the state.
This period of intense growth is the context for the most famous event in Johnson City’s music history, the Johnson City Sessions of 1928 and 1929, when Columbia Records producer Frank Walker came to town and set up temporary “recording laboratories” to make records of local talent. The kind of music that was being made in the region — largely a synthesis of ballad and dance music traditions from Great Britain and Ireland with African American styles from the late 19th century, with fiddle as its dominant instrument, supplemented by banjo, guitar, mandolin, etc. — was very much on the radar of the record business after a couple of test runs in the early 20s had resulted in sales figures that went far beyond labels’ wildest expectations. This flood of interest from the record industry as well as vaudeville and the new field of radio encouraged a new sense of regional pride in this music. Fiddling contests started to pop up all over the place, including in Johnson City, and musicians increasingly began to consciously modify their styles in order to appeal to wider audiences. In many cases, this included listening closely not only to each other but also to what was happening in the worlds of black music and pop. As a result, despite the common appellation of “old-time music”, the style entered a period of rapid evolution in many directions, some of which would ultimately lead to the sounds we associate with more modern country music.
Johnson City was a logical place to come looking for this music in the late 1920s, arguably even more so than nearby Bristol, the site of somewhat more famous recording sessions in 1927 and 1928. The town’s growing activities in the lumber, textile, and steel industries, among others, as well as its wholesale markets where farmers could sell their crops, made it a magnet for people from the surrounding countryside, particularly the more mountainous areas where farming conditions were notoriously harsh. This small-scale urban migration, a localized version of what was an increasing trend across the United States, also had the effect of accelerating the music’s evolution, as relocating to, or simply spending more time in bigger towns gave musicians more exposure to music from outside of their communities, as well as more money to buy things like records, radios, and tickets to vaudeville shows.
As you might expect, Walker found exactly what he was looking for, and his Johnson City Sessions, predominantly featuring musicians from areas that were connected to the town by rail, most notably the mountainous areas along the ET&WNC and Clinchfield lines to the south and east, ended up being wilder, more fun, more eclectic, and arguably more representative of what was happening in country music than what Victor Records rival Ralph Peer produced in Bristol. I’ll be getting into the sessions and some of the artists and songs that were recorded in them in several of the tour stops, so stay tuned.
Johnson City never had another moment quite like the sessions, but it continued to be a hotbed of musical activity. Beginning in the mid-1940s, it was the home of Rich-R-Tone records, the first label to be dedicated to the Bluegrass genre, and possibly the first to release a bluegrass record. Rich-R-Tone may have been the town’s first record label, but it had a shocking number of followers, including Spot, EDMAC, Southsong, Home Town, New Hope, Champ, Folk Star, and Fonda. Having this many record labels in a town Johnson City’s size seems to indicate that there was a whole lot going on, and sure enough, a 1965 article in the Kingsport Times-News stated that there were 25-30 bands active on the R&B and Rock ’n’ Roll scenes at the time, playing venues like Posse’s, an R&B club positioned on top of a small mountain, and Teen Town, a youth-focused music club that hosted one of the first local TV dance party shows in the 50s and featured racially integrated R&B bands in the early 60s, as well as at the university’s fraternity houses.
OK, having read all that, you now know a whole lot more about the history of music in Johnson City than I ever did before I started researching for this article. From what I can gather, Johnson City has always conceived of itself as a forward-looking exemplar of The New South, as a place where the pragmatic realities of business take precedent over concerns of culture or heritage. I may not be much of a capitalist, but even I can see that a philosophy like that can have as many advantages as disadvantages, especially when the culture and heritage we’re talking about are those of the south-eastern US. Nonetheless, at the time when I was growing up, it meant embracing the newer, slicker, more corporate north side of town and pretty much leaving the old downtown area, and most of the history that had happened there, to gradually erode away. Maybe I’m wrong about this, and other kids knew more than I did, but I was pretty engaged with history. I knew a decent amount about what had happened in the area before Johnson City was a thing, but almost nothing about any of stuff I’m writing about here.
I know now, though. My home town turns out to be a whole lot cooler than I ever realized, and I’m very happy to have the opportunity to share it with you. So, with all that out of the way, lets go for a little tour of Johnson City’s musical history!
Have a great time, drive safely, and let me know about anything I may have missed!
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Google Maps: Rotary Park
The first stop on our tour is an excuse for me to tell the story of a convention of Tennessee rotarians where a struggling singer named Jimmie Rodgers met The Tenneva Ramblers, a group of local string musicians who would briefly become his backing band, The Jimmie Rodgers Entertainers. It was by virtue of Rodgers’s relationship with the Ramblers that he happened to be in their home town of Bristol, thirty miles from Johnson City on the Tennessee Virginia border (Tenne-Va, get it?) when Victor Records A&R man Ralph Peer was there hosting auditions for the recording sessions that have come to be known, perhaps with a slight hint of extravagance, as “The big bang of country music.”
Perhaps even more significantly, if less frequently noted, it may have been Rodgers’s connection to these local players, along with his wider experiences in the region during the brief period between his arrival in Asheville in March of 1927 and the beginning of his extraordinary recording career that summer, that first forged the bond between this relatively cosmopolitan performer with a background in Tin-Pan Alley pop, Blues, and minstrelsy who would eventually be called “The Father of Country Music” and something that could legitimately be called “country music”.
They ended up splitting up and recording separately at the Bristol sessions. According to Peer, it was his decision to split the band because, as he told an interviewer in 1929, “The records would have been no good if Jimmie had sung with this group because he was singing [racial epithet deleted] blues and they were doing old-time fiddle music. Oil and water … they don’t mix.” It may have still been possible to make that claim in 1929, but ultimately it was exactly this “oil and water” combination of a laid-back bluesy singer and a country string band that would characterize the direction of country music going forward.
Whatever music Rodgers and the Ramblers made together is irrevocably lost, and the chances are that they didn’t really play together for long enough to really gel as a band, but this combination, born in Johnson City, must have been one of the first incarnations of a soundscape that would help define the 20th century.
Listen to this!
Tenneva Ramblers, “The Longest Train I Ever Saw” (Song more often called “In The Pines”)
Jimmie Rodgers, “T for Texas (Blue Yodel #1)” (The song that made Jimmie a star, way better than what he recorded in Bristol)
And while you’re there:
You can explore the strange “miniature mountain range” terrain that characterises the landscape of this unusually wild-feeling park where I experienced unnumbered skinned knees and potato salads as a child, as well as one small heartbreak as a teenager. Also, if you have kids, there’s a fantastic playground there now, especially highly recommended in the summer when they turn on all the waterworks.
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Google Maps: Tannery Knobs
This small mountain positioned on the edge of downtown Johnson City was once the sight of the town’s first major industrial operation. Several decades later, it was the home of Posse’s, a black night club that was a hot spot in the surprisingly vibrant R&B scene that existed in the area during the 1960s, which included up to 30 active bands according to a 1965 article in the Kingsport Times-News. Sadly, concrete information about the club is hard to come by, but according to my informants every weekend large crowds would ascend the wooded hillock to hear groups like Kingsport’s Little Caesar and the Euterpeans, a group with a child singer that sounded like James Brown’s band backing Frankie Lymon, and The Scat Cats, another Kingsport group who toured with Lightnin’ Hopkins and, at least according to legend, once turned down a request by Sam and Dave to join the band.
Listen to this!
Little Caesar and The Euterpeans, “It was Love”
And while you’re there:
Tannery Knob(s) is now home to a shiny new mountain biking park! I have to confess that I’m not much of a mountain biker myself (and even though I’m mostly recovered from breaking my leg while roller skating last September, now doesn’t seem like the best time to start) but from what I hear it’s supposed to be pretty good. They even have a trail called Posse’s Club, but it’s apparently one of the toughest they have, so steer clear unless you really know what you’re doing.
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Google Maps: Old Tobacco Warehouse
Back in 1978 an old banjo player named Walter Davis told an interesting story during an interview with a younger banjo player named Wayne Erbsen. According to Davis, at some point in the early 1920s, he was traveling with Clarence Greene, another player from the scene of old-time musicians in the area around Roan Mountain, on the Tennessee North Carolina border, who would go on to make some of the most compelling recordings at both the Bristol and Johnson City Sessions. While they were playing on the streets of Johnson City, Davis related that both of them were inspired to take their playing in a bluesier direction when they met “the most wonderful guitar player I had ever heard,” none other than “Blind” Lemon Jefferson, and ended up spending two or three days, “trying to pick up some of his chords and some of his tunes.”
Everybody seems to take this story at face value, but I have to admit that my initial reaction upon hearing about it was to be suspicious. Jefferson was, first of all, based in Dallas, Texas, a half a continent away from Johnson City. He was also by far the most well-known African-American blues guitarist of his era. So, I thought, perhaps with the merest hint of cynicism, if these two guys from the hills happened to remember running into a black guitarist, and particularly a blind black guitarist, then of course it must have been Jefferson; who else could he have been!? I haven’t been able to find any other specific source for the idea that Lemon Jefferson spent time in Johnson City (although I would love to if you happen to know of one), and it’s a bit odd that Davis describes Jefferson, who would have been in his late twenties, as an old man and mentions him having his grandson with him.
On the other hand, Jefferson was definitely known to travel far and wide, even compared to other traveling blues musicians, and playing on the street for coins as Davis describes was certainly his M.O., even after he became a recording star. Maybe the most compelling evidence in Davis’s favor is his partner Clarence Greene’s song, “Johnson City Blues,” a reworking of Ida Cox’s “Chattanooga Blues” which he recorded at the first Johnson City Session in 1928. There’s no question that Greene is aiming, with some success, for a decidedly bluesy style in his guitar playing on this track, but the style he plays in doesn’t really sound anything like the ragtimey “Piedmont” style of many blues musicians from the region relatively close to Johnson City, nor does it bear much resemblance to the more rhythmically driving style found further west in the Mississippi Delta region. What it sounds like is Lemon Jefferson.
Of course, by 1928, Greene could easily have picked up his emulation of Jefferson’s style from listening to records, but at least it shows that there was a true affinity and that Davis wasn’t just grasping at a famous name.
Who knows, maybe Davis’s story is true, and if it is, then Jefferson would certainly have come to the tobacco warehouse. Auction days, when farmers tended to be flush with cash and good spirits after selling their crop, were the bread and butter of street performers like Jefferson, and if he did indeed come to Johnson City, he almost certainly would have timed his visit to correspond to that opportunity.
Listen to this!
“Blind” Lemon Jefferson, “Black Snake Moan”
And while you’re there:
Sadly, there’s not much left to see of the old warehouse other than this admittedly quite dramatic looking collapsing building, which may well already be torn down before you can make it there. As a kid I remember a sign painted on the wall of the already disused warehouse advertising it as the home of a “world famous auctioneer” whose name I have sadly forgotten. You’d think that would be the kind of thing that someone would have taken a photo of and posted on the internet, but alas, no. Fortunately though, the former site of the warehouse is right across the street from the TVA Credit Union Ballpark (Formerly Howard Johnson Field), home of the Johnson City Doughboys, a collegiate summer team who’ve been playing there since the St. Louis Cardinals pulled their farm team back in 2020. An article on ballparkreviews.com states that the park was opened in 1956, but it can already be seen, as Keystone Field, on a map of Johnson City that was published in 1925, so who knows how long it’s actually been there.
Also, just a short walk down Legion Street will bring you to the head of the Tweetsie Trail, a rails-to-trails project that traverses the right-of-way of part of the former East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad, a narrow gage line that once connected Johnson City to Boone, NC, which looms large in the childhood of anyone who grows up in these parts. In addition to its historical interest, the trail is, by all accounts, quite lovely, and you’ll find opportunities to rent bikes and other amenities in the immediate vicinity of the trailhead.
Part 2 - Main Street
When I was growing up, Johnson City’s Main Street, which, along with parts of Market Street and a small cluster of side streets basically makes up the town’s “downtown” area, was a ghost town. That was a big part of what I liked about it. It felt like a place where you could do anything and no-one would ever know or care. Looking back, I can see that that was already starting to change a bit by the time I was in high school, but it still blows my mind a bit to go back and see how the empty streets of my misspent youth are bustling today. Witnessing this revival makes me extremely curious about what downtown Johnson City must have been like back in the 1920s, when the town was booming, growing at a ridiculous rate, and, according to one 1926 newspaper editorial, in the “Tenacious gip [of] the criminal and undesirable element,” including “criminals; would be criminals; thieves, thugs, gunmen, dope-peddlers, and other undesirables working hand-in-hand with the liquor ring.” In those days, when there was no other business district to compete with it, Main Street really lived up to its name, so it’s no surprise that that’s where we find several of the remaining stops on our tour.
A warning: For narrative purposes, I’ll be taking you on a rather mixed-up, back and forth path through the downtown area. If you happen to be doing the tour on foot, you might want to rearrange the stops a bit.
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Google Maps: JC Bus Terminal
On the current sight of Johnson City Greyhound bus terminal once stood the Deluxe Theater, one of the town’s earliest entertainment venues, which started life as a lavish vaudeville house and managed to survive, through several name changes, into my lifetime, when, having evolved into a theater of ill-repute, it was finally torn down as part of a “moral makeover” in the early 1980s. There’s no doubt that a whole lot of interesting stuff, musical and otherwise, went down here over the years, but I’ve placed it on this tour because of a fiddling contest that happened here in the Spring of 1924, which may shed some light on exactly why Columbia Records A&R man Frank Walker ended up coming to town for the (kinda sorta) famous Johnson City Sessions four years later.
The event featured “Fiddlin’” John Carson, an unsavory character from Atlanta who had arguably become country music’s first recording star the previous year when a couple of songs he recorded with Okeh Records A&R man Ralph Peer ended up selling much better than anyone had expected, as well as “Fiddlin’” Cowan Powers of south-western Virginia, whose family band would make the first commercial recordings of old-time string band music with Victor Records a few months later. The records of Carson and Powers were early murmurings of a trend for country string-band music that would have a deep impact on the recording industry, leading directly to the record label excursions to Asheville, Bristol, Johnson City, and Knoxville, among other places. Another symptom of this trend was the rise of fiddle contests, which started to pop up in the teens and really hit high gear in the 20s. These were curious events at which the contestants sat on stage in a row of straight-back chairs waiting for their turn like kids at a spelling bee to have their playing judged according to specific technical criteria, often to the dismay of the audience. Whatever it was that the judges at these events were looking for, there can be no doubt that the third notable participant at the 1924 Deluxe contest, one “Fiddlin’” Charlie Bowman, definitely had it. Bowman, who came from the area now known as Gray, just north of Johnson City, was still an amateur musician in 1924, but he was already rapidly becoming a local hero for the tear he’d been on through fiddle contests, both in the area and as far afield as Atlanta and Washington D.C.. All told, of the thirty-two contests he entered, he won 28, and he came in second in the other four.
This particular contest ended up being one of the ones where he came in second, losing to Powers, but the event was very likely still a confidence booster for him because of its relatively lavish venue, all-star cast, and high prize (Bowman received $30 for coming in second, plus another $5 just for participating).
The next May, Bowman and his brothers, who were also accomplished musicians, attended the inaugural Mountain City Fiddler’s convention. This event, which occurred six months before the premier of the Grand Old Opry on Nashville’s WSM and three years before the inauguration of Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s Mountain Dance and Folk Music Festival in Asheville, was the first of its kind to be broadcast on radio, and it was probably the most notable and comprehensive gathering of old-time string-band musicians that occurred during this era.
It’s significant to note, however, that the convention was sponsored by the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan. This serves as a potent reminder that, despite the fact that a predominance of central figures in early country music, from Dock Boggs to A.P. Carter to Hank Williams described having been directly influenced, assisted, and even instructed by black performers, the group photos of this and every other 1920s fiddle contest that I’ve seen are exclusively a sea of white faces. As many early country artists have attested to, there were lots of African American musicians performing in this idiom, and although I haven’t found a source that addresses the issue directly, it’s clear that they were barred from events like this.
In the case of recording, it’s possible to make an argument that black artists were more likely to be recorded performing in more modern genres like blues and jazz, because that was what the black record buying public was primarily interested in, but I don’t know of any explanation for this exclusion other than sheer racism. Just like Ty Cobb’s batting average or, for that matter, the distribution of wealth in the present-day United States, Charlie Bowman’s victories should be viewed with this racist context in mind. Who knows whether he would have faired equally well on a level playing field.
At any rate, while he was in Mountain City, Bowman was approached by Al Hopkins, the leader of a professional group of eclectic musical comedians called The Hill Billies, who asked him for the second time to join his group. Where previously he had refused any offer that would have him away from home for too long, this time, he accepted.
The Hill Billies, who may or may not have been the reason why country music was routinely called “Hillbilly” music from the 20s through the 50s, had already done a fair amount of recording and touring, but they really hit their stride after Bowman’s arrival. Over the next three years, Bowman and the Hill Billies would make over 50 recordings with Brunswick/Vocalion Records, tour extensively across the northeast with the Keith-Albee Vaudeville circuit, broadcast live across the mid-atlantic region from Washington D.C.’s powerful WRC radio station, and even perform for the president of the United States. All this served to increase the visibility of country music immensely, and during the period from 1926 to the first half of 1928, especially outside of the south, the Hill Billies were almost certainly by far the most widely known and admired exponents of old-time string-band music.
In 1928, when Frank Walker of Columbia Records was looking for a place to emulate the success that Victor’s Ralph Peer had had in Bristol the previous year, there were multiple factors that may have attracted him to Johnson City. As I’ve mentioned previously, the town was experiencing a major boom, and its industrial prowess had made it a magnet for people from all over the region. It was also positioned on the junction of three railroads, meaning that it was pretty easy to get there from almost any direction. In particular, the narrow gauge ET&WNC, AKA “Tweetsie,” Railroad made Johnson City easily accessible from the area of Roan Mountain, on the Tennessee/North Carolina border, a hot-bed of musical activity that produced a preponderance of musicians who recorded at the sessions.
Nonetheless, it is also very likely that Walker was influenced by the fact that the Johnson City area was the home, and frequent song topic, of this musician who had been making such waves with his combination old-school bona fides, modern eclecticism, and down-home humor, who, in other words, represented exactly what Walker was hoping to find on his trip.
As it happened, Bowman triumphantly returned to his home in Gray just in time for Walker’s arrival in town. Along with his brothers Walter, Argil, and Elbert and his daughters Pauline and Jennie, who we’ll talk about at another stop on the tour, he would be the closest thing to a native Johnson Citian to record at the Johnson City sessions. Bowman never made any more recordings after the sessions, but he continued to spread the word about his music on vaudeville, sometimes along with his daughters and brothers, in groups like The Blue Ridge Ramblers, Charlie Bowman and his Buckle Busters, The Southern Mountaineers, and The Rhyme Family, and he maintained his status as the area’s first music hero until his death in 1962.
Listen to this!
Charlie Bowman, “The Hickman Rag”
And while you’re there:
Unless you’re looking to catch a bus or attend a Presbyterian service, I’m afraid there’s not so much going on in this immediate vicinity. There was a brewery with a cool looking rooftop bar across the street, but it was in the process of closing when we were there. Hopefully, someone else will have moved into the location by the time you visit.
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Google Maps: Fountain Square
When I was growing up, Johnson City’s fountain square was nothing more than a nondescript concrete triangle with a nondescript concrete tub in the middle of it. Now, with the triumphant return of its statue, “The Lady of the Water” and its waters flowing — albeit sadly now without the cool pans at the bottom for animals to drink out of — it once again feels like a place that should, or at least conceivably could, have a name. It’s nothing compared to what it was in the early 20th century, though. It’s not even in the same place. The original fountain square was much larger, positioned across the street, where a public parking lot is now, and for decades it served as the town’s main gathering place. In the 1920s, it was the sight of a weekly jam session where anyone who knew a few licks on the guitar, banjo or fiddle had the chance to play alongside recorded professionals like Charlie Bowman, Clarence “Tom” Ashley, Clarence Greene, and maybe even “Blind” Lemon Jefferson.
Right across the street, where today stands yet another, newer and shinier, parking lot, was once the home of Rich-R-Tone Records, a label founded by jukebox operator James H. Stanley in 1946. Rich-R-Tone may or may not have been where the first commercial recordings of Bluegrass music were made. Records are a bit too foggy to be able to say for sure whether or not the first Rich-R-Tone recordings were made before Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys’ first records with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. In either case they were certainly influenced by the music Monroe and Co. had been performing on WSM’s Grand Ole Opry since Flatt and Scruggs joined the band in 1945. Rich-R-Tone was the first record label to specialize in this brand new genre, and much of its early history, including the first recordings of The Stanley Brothers, is chronicled in the label’s releases. Today the building where Rich-R-Tone was located is long gone, but you can find a historical marker at the end of the covered parking lot across the street from the other parking lot.
Listen to this!
The Stanley Brothers, “Molly and Tenbrook”
And while you’re there:
Have lunch! Or maybe drinks! Who am I to judge!? Whatever you’re in the mood for, you’ve found yourself in the most revived section of Johnson City’s downtown revival, so they’ve got you covered. A lot of people talk about Freiberg’s, a German restaurant that now occupies the beautiful building that was once the Unaka National Bank, directly on Fountain Square, but as I live in actual Germany, this is not what I’m typically looking for when I come to town. Personally, I’m partial to the nachos at Newman’s, a pool hall that’s been on Main Street since before all this renewal stuff even got started. Ask for black olives. They might charge you a bit extra, but it’s worth it!
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Google Maps: Main and Roan
This is the spot that was once regarded as the center of Johnson City, where East meets West and North Meets South, at least as far as the names of streets are concerned. If you look south down Roan Street, you can see the old Southern Maid Dairy building, which was once the home of Teen Town, a youth-oriented music club where local bands performed every weekend from the early fifties until at least the early seventies. Teen Town was also the location of one of the first Teenage Dance Party TV shows, WJHL’s Teen Town with Eddie McKinney, which was broadcast from 1953 into the early sixties. I haven’t been able to find a whole lot of information about Teen Town, but according to my source, local guitarist and newspaper publisher Bill Derby, it may have been the site of some of the area’s first racially integrated musical performances, by a band called the Starfires in around 1963. Bill also adds that the same band attempted to play a high school dance in nearby Erwin, TN but were run out of town.
Listen to this!
“Teen Town Hop” by Eddie McKinney (The theme song to the Teen Town TV dance party)
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If you look in the opposite direction you can’t miss the former John Sevier Hotel. Built in 1924, the 10-story John Sevier was, and if you don’t count ETSU’s infamous Mini-Dome, may still be, the tallest building in town. For decades it was the town’s premier hotel, with a guest list that included Eleanor Roosevelt, President Herbert Hoover, swashbuckling movie star Tyrone Power, and, according to Stella Lent, a former employee who was interviewed in 2010, Al Capone. More significantly for our story, on October 3, 1928 an ad was posted in the Johnson City Chronicle inviting anyone who could “sing or play old-time music” to write to Mr. F.B. Walker of Columbia Records at the hotel in order to secure an audition for a set of recording sessions that he would be conducting in town.
Frank Walker, the chief producer of Columbia’s Blues and Old-Time music division, had come to town hoping to recreate some of the success that his rival, Victor’s Ralph Peer had enjoyed during his visit to the neighboring town of Bristol the year before. Peer’s Bristol sessions have become the stuff of legend, largely because they produced the first recordings of both Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family, The Johnson City Sessions have been consistently overshadowed and were, at least until 2013, when Bear Family Records compiled the 100 recordings that survive from the sessions in a lavish and spectacularly curated box set, largely forgotten. This is a shame, because the Johnson City Sessions are actually a lot more fun. Unlike Peer, who was largely interested in finding artists, like the Carters, who had a lot of new (or pseudo-new) songs that he could publish, the more freewheeling Walker actually seems to have been interested in painting an honest picture of the area’s musical culture, and he seems to have been willing to give just about anything a try.
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If you turn to your right (assuming you’re still looking at the John Sevier Hotel), you can see the spot where the first round of sessions took place, on the right side of East Main Street, just past the old Kings Department Store building. Sadly, The Marshal Bros. Lumber co. building, where the sessions took place, was demolished in the mid-1970s, so other than a historical marker, there’s not much to see here, but you can put on your headphones and listen to “Johnson City Blues,” in which Clarence Greene actually mentions East Main Street, although for some reason he places it in Memphis (a town where the Main Street is divided into South and North ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) and imagine what it must have been like to be there 98 years ago.
Listen to this!
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And while we’re on the subject of buildings that aren’t there anymore, if you turn around and stroll down Main Street in the other direction, you’ll come to a big empty space with some parkish landscaping and a very large mural of a steam engine by artist Bill Bledsoe, the first of many that have popped up around in recent decades. You might guess that this was the former sight of Jobe’s Opera House, Johnson City’s first entertainment venue, which closed in 1907, and which is prominently featured in the mural, and you would be wrong, but close. Actually, this was the location of the Majestic (née Grand) Theater, which opened in 1902 and finally closed, presumably to make room for me, in 1981. On December 31, 1932, it was host to a program of “New Year’s Follies” featuring The Variety Five, a group that included Charlie Bowman and his two daughters Jennie and Pauline, by this point local heroes and heroines who had just returned to the area to rest up after a grueling two years of touring the vaudeville circuit with their regular band, the Blue Ridge Ramblers.
In particular I want to focus on Jennie and Pauline, who had recorded together as The Bowman Sisters at the Johnson City sessions, and who may be the most interesting musicians that this area has produced in its history. They were, first of all, country music’s first sister act to be recorded singing secular songs. More significantly, they may have been the first group to actively pursue a synthesis of old-time country and jazz, a combination that was to become so important that it practically defined the direction of country music over the following two decades.
Unfortunately, they didn’t have the opportunity to record very much. At the first Johnson City Session in 1928, when Pauline was 17 and Jennie 15, they sounded nervous and shaky and played it safe with two Stephen Foster standards. Over the next year, it’s possible that they discovered the music of the Boswell Sisters, a slightly older trio from New Orleans who began releasing recordings of their surprisingly hard-edged vocal jazz arrangements in 1925. At any rate, when they returned to Johnson City for the 1929 sessions, they sounded like a completely different animal, confidently singing sophisticated swing-inspired harmonies on two intensely bluesy songs that were as modern in 1929 as “Swanee River” had been old-fashioned the previous year.
Sadly, that’s all we get. The sisters did enter the studio once more in New York City in 1931, but the songs they recorded were never released. By that point they had already spent a considerable amount of time touring the vaudeville circuit with their dad and The Blue Ridge Ramblers, and who knows in what directions that experience may have steered their continuing evolution. One thing that’s very clear from the description of this New Year’s show in The Johnson City Chronicle is that the two sisters had a versatility far beyond what their meager recorded output reveals. The report has both sisters performing on numerous instruments, in different combinations with other band members, and in a diverse array of different numbers.
Country music historian Charles K. Wolfe has said of the Bowman Sisters that they “were trying to take country music to places it just wasn’t ready to go.” This isn’t really surprising. Country, maybe above all other popular music genres, has always been burdened by its knee-jerk conservatism and willingness to toss aside anyone unwilling to toe the line. I’d just like to know how far in that direction they ended up getting.
Listen to this!
The Bowman Sisters, “Old Lonesome Blues"
And while you’re there:
Hop across the street to The Generalist, a shop where you can find just about anything that’s quintessentially Johnson City, most notably including an incredible line of products from Mellow Tiger Studio, the moniker of Erin Fenley, the brilliant designer responsible for, among many other things, this website.
Or, depending on the time of day, you might want to catch a show at The Hideaway, the tiny venue that’s been largely responsible for keeping Johnson City’s punk and underground music scene afloat for the past twenty years.
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Google Maps: Montrose Court
I don’t want to get too much into the whole “Little Chicago” thing here, but just in case you’re out of the loop, there is a prevalent idea that Johnson City, as a railroad hub in the midst of bootlegger country and a convenient mid-point between Chicago and Miami, played a significant role in the operations of notorious gangster Al Capone and that he may have spent a more or less significant amount of time there. At the center of many of these stories is Montrose Court, which was built in 1922 to be the region’s most beautiful and luxurious apartment complex and then burned down under mysterious circumstances in 1928. (Don’t believe the dates on the slightly downsized rebuilt version that stands there now.)
Depending on who you ask, Al Capone went there to play cards once, or maybe it was the base of operations for his Appalachian bootlegging operation, or maybe he even had an apartment of his own where he would come to escape the frenzied pace of the Chicago and Miami thug life and breath the mountain air. This is all pretty cool, but the problem is that, other than a few newspaper editorials that make it clear that there was a general sense of lawlessness, which is pretty much what you would expect of any town during the prohibition era, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything but rumors and a bunch of people’s friends’ uncles who knew Capone or worked for him, and in Johnson City you can find people with friends’ uncles who’ve done literally anything. The closest thing to a verification that I’ve seen is the testimony of Stella Lent, mentioned above, that Capone stayed at the John Sevier Hotel, although even she was basing her account on the word of an older employee whom she described as “reliable”.
In other words, there doesn’t seem to be all that much to it, but still I can’t resist touching on it, mostly because I went to elementary school right across the street and spent untold hours of my life absent-mindedly gazing at it out the window. (The current South Side School is a bit too far to the left to afford the kids a good view, but this was not the case for the old one, which was directly across the street. Mrs. Jones’ fourth grade classroom was particularly well-positioned.)
Ok, fine, I can imagine you saying, but do you have a musical angle on all this? Well, to be honest, no, except to point out that, in Chicago, Capone apparently had jazz pianist Earl Hines on his payroll. Illegal booze and music tended to work together in a symbiotic way, as long as you were paying off enough people that you didn’t have to worry about keeping the noise down in your speakeasy. If it’s true that Capone did have operations in Johnson City, which seems plausible even if he never really spent time there, then that very likely left its traces on the town’s music culture, and who knows what impact those traces may have had on the other items on our list.
Listen to this:
Earl Hines and Louis Armstrong, “Weather Bird” (Pretty far from Johnson City, but why the heck not. This would have been around the same time that Hines started working for Capone)
And while you’re there:
Take a walk through the tree streets, Johnson City’s most historic residential area and the place where I first discovered the joys of getting into trouble.
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Google Maps: 248 W. Main
I’ve saved the best one for last. Well, maybe. The 1929 Johnson City Sessions, unlike their predecessor, were not preceded by an announcement in the newspaper, so we don’t have a source to provide us with the exact address, but it seems to be pretty widely agreed on that this building is where they happened. This was the session that produced most of the really good stuff, including jazzier, more mature recordings of the Bowman Sisters, The Bentley Boys’ “Down on Penny’s Farm”, the song that served as a model for not one but two Bob Dylan classics, “Hard Times in New York Town” and “Maggie’s Farm”, and my personal favorite song out of the whole world of early country music, Clarence “Tom” Ashley’s haunting “The Coo-Coo Bird”, which was also a part of Dylan’s early repertoire.
Dylan knew about those songs because they were both included on Harry Smith’s legendary 1952 compilation The Anthology of American Folk Music, but it’s honestly pretty amazing that even a fanatical collector like Smith knew about them. As it happened, the final day of these sessions was October 24, 1929, otherwise known as Black Thursday, the day which is generally regarded as the beginning of the stock market crash of 1929. This was incredibly bad timing. The crash was a crippling blow to the record industry, reducing the number of active record labels from lots to four and pretty much putting an end to the industry’s eclectic interest in finding quirky music in out of the way places which had resulted in so many fascinating records over the past decade, including everything from the Johnson City Sessions. An immediate result of this was that none of the songs from the second, more revelatory, Johnson City Session experienced significant sales, and were it not for Smith’s lucky finds and (mostly) impeccable ear, the whole dang operation could easily have been forgotten.
The final two songs recorded on that day were “Buttermilk Blues” and “Smokey Blues,” two rollicking virtuosic harmonica numbers by Ellis Williams, a railroad switchman based in the Knoxville area who was probably the same person who had recorded under the name El Watson at the Bristol Sessions. Out of the entire Johnson City sessions, these were the only two songs by a black performer. This is especially shocking when you consider that this location was, and is, in the middle of a black neighborhood. The church right next door, now known as the Loaves and Fishes Ministries, the oldest standing church building in town, had even served as the school for black children for a time in the late 19th century.
It’s clear from our earlier stop at the former Posse’s Club that there was a strikingly large and well developed black music scene in the Johnson City area by the early 1960s, and that kind of thing doesn’t usually come out of nowhere. Exactly what may have been going on at the time of the sessions, though, is a bit of a mystery. Record producers who were looking to record black music tended to go to places like Atlanta, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Delta, where African Americans represented a larger chunk of the population, because those were the markets they wanted to tap into. Places like East Tennessee, where black people were a small but significant minority, were largely ignored.
Listen to this!
The Bentley Boys, “Down on Penny’s Farm”,
Clarence “Tom” Ashley, “The Coo-Coo Bird”,
Ellis Williams, “Buttermilk Blues”
And while you’re there:
Head about a block further west and check out a show at The Down Home. This place is such an important venue that I seriously considered making it an actual stop on the tour, and I’m pretty sure it’s still the place where I’ve seen the most shows in my life. Opened in 1976 by songwriter and old-time musician Ed Snodderly, of The Brother Boys, among others, along with partner Joe “Tank” Leach. The Down Home got in early enough to host blues legends like John Lee Hooker, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and Willie Dixon as well country musicians like Townes Van Zandt, Lyle Lovett, and New Grass Revival before they became stars. More recently, within my memory, Doc Watson would come every year to play a Christmas show, a tradition which he continued into the final years of his life. Snodderly has called The Down Home, “A place to come to where people come to honor whatever’s on the stage.” With fewer than 200 seats, this is a very small club, but artists who routinely fill much larger venues somehow tend to keep coming back. Maybe someday I’ll be able to speak personally about what a pleasure it must be to play at The Down Home, but for now I can say that there’s no place in the world where I’d rather be in the audience.
Well, that’s it, for now, anyway. I’ll be adding some more extended essays on some of the stops soon, so keep your eyes peeled for those. Until then, I hope you’ve enjoyed the tour, and the music!
See you again soon!
Peter Lawson - 27 March 2025
