Carpetbag Theatre celebrates life and work of Howard Armstrong

Cast of Between A Ballad & A Blues

Howard “Louie Bluie� Armstrong once described his music as “somewhere between a ballad and a blues.� That conversation with Carpetbag Theatre’s Linda Parris-Bailey would set the stage for a musical drama about the renowned musician’s unique life and creativity. And provide a title as well.

Between a Ballad and A Blues, still being crafted by Parris-Bailey, director and playwright for the Carpetbag Theatre, is based on the life stories and string band music made famous by Armstrong. Besides being a master string jazz fiddler/mandolinist, the artist’s life serves as a prism through which we can glimpse the unheralded “African American Appalachian� experience. A half-hour excerpt of the play will be presented during the Louie Bluie Festival Saturday, June 9, at Cove Lake State Park near Armstrong’s childhood home, LaFollette, in Campbell County.

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Campbell Co. native inspires June music and arts event

Barely 10 months after its creation, an organization called the Campbell Culture Coalition is staging an ambitious celebration of Campbell County’s people and arts. The “Louie Bluie Festival� will be the inaugural Music and Arts Festival for what organizers want to be an annual event.

The Louie Bluie Festival will take place 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday, June 9, at Cove Lake State Park right off Interstate 75. Admission will be free. The nearest town is Caryville, but nearby is LaFollette, the hometown of legendary music phenomenon Howard “Louie Bluie� Armstrong. “Just as Mr. Armstrong was a multi-talented artist—musician, singer, visual artist, writer, storyteller—the Festival will feature a broad array of the arts – music, instrument making, arts and craft show, and storytelling,� said event co-chair Peggy Mathews.

“We are also considering having a fiddle contest in the spirit of the LaFollette Fiddlers Convention that was held in the 1920s and ‘30s, and was known as a prestigious event among musicians. We will have a large stage set up on the grounds near the Pavilion that will feature the bands, and we will have arts and crafts and food tents set up on the periphery,� added Mathews, who is also CCC vice-president.

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Knoxville Public Library hosts the third annual “Forever Young—Bob Dylan’s Birthday Celebration� Thursday, May 24 at the East Tennessee History Center, 601 Gay St.

The celebration, which local singer Steve Horton dreamed up as a way to honor the signal singer-songwriter of this era, will raise money to support cultural programming at Lawson-McGhee library. Nelda Hill, director of the library’s Sights and Sounds department, explained this includes any number of programs the library uses to take music, poetry and other arts to the larger community. In the past few years, the library has emerged as a major player in the downtown arts scene through musical and literary outreach programs like the Rothrock Café series and the jazz and poetry festivals. “Shows like the Dylan festival go a long way toward helping raise money so we can continue hosting these kinds of events,� Hill said.

This year’s lineup is headlined by the legendary Carawan family—Guy and Candie plus son Evan. The Carawans are a living repository of American folk music. “Considering the Carawans long association with politically conscious music and the use of music to educate people about the need for social change, particularly in the South and Appalachia, it is especially poignant that they are involved in a celebration of Bob Dylan’s music by some of the best musicians in East Tennessee,� she continued.

Plus, as Horton joked, it’s a good opportunity to celebrate his own birthday—the same day—“without having a bunch of hippies over to the house.�

Horton and Maggie Longmire are co-leaders of longtime favorite country rockers The Lonesome Coyotes. “The idea for the Dylan's birthday celebration grew out of discussions between Maggie and me about the need for an event to draw together the various elements of the local music scene. Bands typically don't get to hear each other perform. And when they do, bands tend to go hear other bands in the same genre. Back in the old days, there were benefits that put country, rock, jazz, and bluegrass acts on the same bill, for the same cause. That doesn't seem to happen as much now.�

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(This story actually starts here, Dylan-lovers!)

Collectors edition poster available at concert

Robert Zimmerman was born May 24, 1941, and raised in the area around Duluth, Minnesota. From that cradle in America’s Rust Belt came the singer-songwriter who would change the face of popular culture and cast a new template for the relationship between artist and public.

A birthday party for Bob Dylan will be held here in Knoxville Thursday night with a songfest featuring some of the best musicians in East Tennessee, all gathering to raise money for the Knox County Public Library’s cultural outreach programs.

Steve Horton, who conceived and produced the “Forever Young� series, now in its third year, believes Dylan’s influence is “across the board, across generational lines. Just this year, an all gospel album of Dylan covers was released. And we have a range of ages in the performers on this show from Guy Carawan, nearly 80, to my son, Will, who just turned 18.�

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Knoxville’s most culturally motivated seller of new books, Carpe Librum Booksellers in Bearden, received the Joseph E. Johnson Award of Appreciation for this year from University of Tennessee Press. The award was presented to the women who own and operate the unique bookstore Tuesday evening by the award’s namesake, Joe Johnson, the educator who was president of UT for most of the ‘90s.

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And to think, they could have called it “Snot Otter.�

Roughly a decade ago, three friends from the University of Tennessee with a common interest in journalism and ecology were inspired to create what has become the leading environmental publication of the region.

Hellbender Press, named for the rare, endangered and poignantly named giant salamander (known in some quarters as a “snot otter�) that inhabits only a handful of pristine, highland streams, is now poised to undergo a major growth spurt. There is hope of boosting advertising and paid subscriptions to ramp up Hellbender’s traditionally volunteer operation with some real part-time positions.

This is a big step for a publishing venture that never had more than a shoestring budget and a mission some might consider a forlorn hope: Educating a complacent public to reduce, reuse and recycle and conserve Earth’s finite resources.

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That little tabloid you see in the freebie rack around town—the one that is doing all it can to save the planet, one reader at a time—needs your help.

Supporters have organized “The Earth Day Benefit Concert for Hellbender Press� to be held Friday night at the Corner Lounge. Hellbender Press, Knoxville’s own grassroots, non-profit environmental advocacy publication, is trying to elevate itself financially to a level where it might become as sustainable as the best of all possible worlds it tries to promote. Money raised at the event will go toward day-to-day expenses and help nudge the paper toward self-sufficiency.

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A memoir of springtime in Exurbia

I think about this every spring when some stubbornly remaining daylilies come up in my neighbor’s yard.

My young neighbor, Owen, didn’t plant the daylilies. In fact, he is rooting them out clump by clump as if they were a nuisance.

Mister Brock planted them long before Owen bought Brock’s trailer. The flowers with their bright stellae of yellows, reds, purples, oranges and mutant combinations, are rowed like the stripes on a rainbow flag spread out on a postage stamp yard where Mister Brock had tried to nurture some transient beauty. Hundreds of individual specimens of hemerocallis, budding out overnight so productively that if you didn’t know any better, you’d think they were the same blossoms, instead of new ones every day. But in his spare time, Owen, a hardheaded, pragmatic head of a new family, digs them out and tosses the tuberous rootstock into the brambles.

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Possibly the most extravagant outpouring of local musical talent since 2003’s Metro Fest is taking shape in the form of a benefit show Thursday night for one of our own.

Funds collected at the concert at the “Detroit Dave Benefit� at the World Grotto on Market Square will defray costs incurred during uninsured heart surgery for “Detroit� Dave Meer, one of the hardest-workin’ guitarists in Knoxville. The show, organized by Meer bandmate Micheal Crawley, pulls together musicians associated with Meer since he moved to Knoxville a quarter a century ago from his namesake hometown.

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A traveling circus of an art show came to town Friday night and if you weren’t one of the 500-plus folks to witness this bedlam of artistry ranging from graphics to industrial, mechanical to musical, you should get another chance when the Big Art Show returns this fall.

Hosted at Ironwood Studios, Preston Farabow’s new, hangar-like digs off North Central Avenue in what used to be an auto body shop, the Big Art Show is a touring collective of artists and musicians who recruit local sculptors, painters, photographers and bands at each of their stops.

With hundreds of paintings, photographs, apparel, home furnishings, sculptures and novelties arrayed along aisles set up throughout Ironwood’s gritty interior, and with one band after another coming on, and too many conversations to keep up with, a person wandering through the carnival of creativity might have come across Mary Nietling’s homemade religious icons. Since one of the votive figures featured eccentric Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, the orientation of the Knoxville teacher’s work is decidedly ecumenical and light-hearted. “I'm a Catholic girl,� said Nietling, “I spent a good bit of time in Mexico, and I'm interested in the value of myths and believing in something; a hope against hope, wish for the best kind of thing.�

Around the corner, Glen Glover was selling clocks built into an assortment of unlikely objects: a colander, a photograph of President Bush and Vice-President Cheney (slugged: “Time’s Up!�) and even a Ray Charles album. Denise Sanabria was giving away some nutty Jack Chick-parody evangelical pamphlets inspired by some genuine zealots who infested the Old City a few years back.

And then there was Advance Metal Fabrication’s “gong,� a five-foot tall trapezoid of textured, stainless steel that resonates with a kind of musical scale as it heats up. The metal box, created by Knoxville native and veteran metal artist John Ryan, is hermetically welded all around its seams—there is no sound hole.

There seemed to be evidence of an Iron Age coming to Knoxville, fittingly since the Big Art Show was hosted at Knoxville’s premier artistic blacksmithy. In addition to Farabow and Ryan, Rodney Cash, perhaps best known as a drummer around town, also had welded art on display, as did Halls native Mike Ensor (International Ironworks) and Morgan and Pat Fitch (Weld and Crazy). Incidentally, Cash was on stage, drumming behind Chick Graning, as well as exhibiting his own custom forged, metal fabrications, making him possibly the only artist working the show in two entirely different media.

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The Black Cadillacs, new generation representatives of Knoxville’s musical legacy, will blast the Corner Lounge Wednesday night with classic blues-rock and original numbers.

The band includes Will Horton and Cooper Hardison—each the son of a Knoxville music icon—who wowed the crowd at last spring’s second annual Bob Dylan Birthday Bash. Respectively, the teenagers are sons of Steve Horton, co-founder of legendary country swing band the Lonesome Coyotes, and veteran jazz guitarist Phil Hardison who has backed Nancy Brennan, among others.

“Cooper and Will brought the median age of attendees below 57,� quipped Nelda Hill, director of the Knox County Public Library Sights and Sounds Department. The Dylan festival, a project to raise money for the library, is a creation of the elder Horton.

“If there was a show-stopping act that night, it was Will and Cooper,� Hill added. “It's great to look at the future and see it knows all the same songs I do.�

Will, lead singer and harmonica player for the Black Cadillacs, is joined not only by Cooper (guitar and vocals) but cousin Matthew Hyrka (lead guitar and vocals); Phillip Anderson (bass); and Jesse Barden (drums).

The dividends of growing up in a musical family don’t extend solely along the paternal line. “The old man� might have introduced Will to a variety of music genres growing up, but, he credits his mother, Liz, as having a significant influence on his musical tastes by playing the Rolling Stones for him. Plus, teaching him some dance steps. The tribute show—at which numerous local bands cover their favorite Dylan songs—was Will and Cooper’s first gig together but Will’s public debut actually was about three years ago when he and Matthew, only in their mid-teens, played an open mic in Memphis.

Matthew and some other friends, including Phillip, actually started the Black Cadillacs in Memphis. When the band was in town, at Sassy Ann’s, for instance, Will sat in with them. Matthew and Phillip moved to Knoxville to attend the University of Tennessee and that’s when Will and his old schoolchum Cooper became full-fledged members. A fortuitous stroll completed the band lineup. “Matthew and I were walking around campus one day discussing the need for a drummer when we heard some really great drum licks coming from a nearby window. We jumped over this hedge and found the window and told the guy to meet us in the commons. And that’s how we met Jesse.�

$3 cover charge
8 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 28th
Corner Lounge
842 N. Central Ave.
865.971.1711

The Black Caddys next local gig will be at the Knoxville Track Club/Covenant Health marathon April 1.

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