Knoxville

I’ve always known I’ve found some sort of intrinsic safe harbor when I find a street in any of these towns where someone has decided that it’s a good idea to make a sign out of a vehicle. Be it on a roof or hauled up and set upon a pole, when I see this, I know I have come home. We have many of these in Memphis, especially on Elvis Presley Boulevard and Summer Avenue - my two favorite streets. I think we all fasten onto a certain physicality as our features get fixed and we settle into our shoe size. For me, it was apparently the strip malls of the sixties.

When I let it be known that I was going to Knoxville, I was warned of it’s soulless veneer reflecting it’s empty essence, and I was suitably fearful. But I was wrong. As soon as I saw the first pickup sitting on the roof of a used car lot, a feeling of peace settled over me. This is not a town that deals in the illusion of “pre-owned vehicles;” they know a used car when they see one. This is a town at home with its hillbilly roots; they can see the beauty in a rusty car and often display them on their lawns.

I met the man who is in the possession of the overcoat Hank Williams left behind the Andrew Jackson Hotel. Maybe it was to warm and close that night as he climbed into a long dark Cadillac, and he wanted to feel the Tennessee wind blow through his Nudie suit. Maybe he was just too twisted on pills and whisky to notice and had his shirt on inside out, but he never made it to Nashville that night. His coat still lives around here, though it’s sitting in a glass case.

Knoxville doesn’t have a lot of direct claims to fame. The Everly Brothers went to high school there for a while, and I think Mark Twain had lunch there once, but this lack of notoriety doesn’t stop the residents from having a good time. You can mainly see this in the conspicuous use of the color orange - the unfortunate choice of color of for the university football team. There are orange buildings, orange buses, orange statues, orange clothing, orange appliances, and orange hair. While I admire their spirit, I think maybe the team might think about changing the school color to beige. On the positive side, they have a radio station that broadcasts from a trailer on a hillside.