Observing Knoxville
From different decades, different countries, and different life experiences, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Cormac McCarthy, and Roland Kopp of Buddy and the Huddle were drawn to the shadowy side of Knoxville and compelled to document their impressions.
Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Annemarie Schwarzenbach, an enigmatic writer and photojournalist, was born in 1908 in Zurich, Switzerland. Trips to the United States yielded an array of articles and photographs that depict the era of the Great Depression. She analyzes class, and, to a much lesser degree, race, within the context of the United States, she looks at the development of unions and organizations promoting political change aiding the underprivileged. In her texts she is a vivid advocate for groups like the Monteagle School for workers (later Highlander Center) and shows an interest in alternative lifestyle models, like the Gruetli Farm community in Tennessee.
Her depiction of Knoxville in her 1937 essay “On the Shadowy Side of Knoxville” vividly captures the harsh contrast between privileged lives and the destitution of those who dwell in extreme poverty in neighborhoods like what used to be West Front Street. This essay thus far has not been translated from German to English, and the English translations provided in this exhibit presents for the first time selected passages to an English-speaking audience.
Cormac McCarthy
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Cormac McCarthy moved to Knoxville in 1937 when he was just four years old. He attended Knoxville Catholic High School and the University of Tennessee. His early “Tennessee” novels are set in Knoxville and the region surrounding it. His fourth novel, Suttree, takes place almost entirely in downtown Knoxville in the early 1950s. Famous for his amazing attention to detail in his description of setting and landscape, McCarthy brings to life in Suttree the darker sides of Knoxville’s midcentury urban scene.
From Suttree, published in 1979:
“Suttree watched this industry accomplish itself in the hot afternoon...in the quiet midafternoon the call of a long sad trainhorn floated over the lonely countryside...Behind him the city lay smoking, the sad purlieus of the dead immured with the bones of friends and forebears. Off to the right side the wite concrete of the expressway gleamed in the sun where the ramp curved out into empty air and hung truncate with iron rods bristling among the vectors of nowhere.”
Buddy and the Huddle
Buddy & The Huddle is a band based in the Nuremberg in Southern Germany. The band’s frontman, Roland Kopp, read Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree in German translation and was immediately taken by the novel’s unforgettable characters and vivid description of Knoxville.
The band’s debut album “Music For a Still Undone Movie Maybe Called Suttree” (released on Jan. 1, 1998) was inspired by McCarthy’s novel and partly recorded when Roland Kopp and Michael Ströll visited Knoxville in 1996. On this album, the band works with McCarthy’s gritty city scenes and characters, brilliantly translating into music what McCarthy called an overlooked “world within the world” of Knoxville. Even the band’s name is inspired by the novel, as “Buddy” is a nickname for the book’s protagonist and “The Huddle” is the name of a colorful downtown Knoxville bar included in the novel.
During their Knoxville visit in 1996, Roland Kopp and Michel Ströll also searched for the places depicted in Suttree and took hundreds of black & white photographs of these locations.
“...the journey seems to me less an adventure and a foray into unusual realms than a concentrated likeness of our existence: residents of a city, citizens of country, beholden to a class or a social circle.”
— Annemarie Schwarzenbach —
THE SHADOWY SIDE TRAVELING EXHIBIT
This exhibit was first displayed in October of 2018 as "Mapping ‘Knoxville’ Across Time, Media, and Cultures: Tracing Unexplored Connections between the Work of Cormac McCarthy, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and Buddy and the Huddle" at Hodges Library on the campus of The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Twenty panels measure 31.5" wide by 80" high. The exhibit is accompanied by descriptive, detailed brochures. If you’d like to engage the exhibit for your space, please be in touch with Bill Hardwig.
“...now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.”
— Cormac McCarthy [From Suttree] —
A nexus of words, images, and music
Explore the multimedia connections between the photography and journalistic work of Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, the fiction of American author Cormac McCarthy, and the music and photography of the German band Buddy and the Huddle across seven decades, from the 1930s to the 1990s—all depicting their impressions of mid-century Knoxville.
“...I'm a man who's river bound / I live on a houseboat on the wrong side of town / muddy waters flow, the four winds blow / run my skiff into the shady cliff / lazy days and rambling nights...”
— Buddy and The Huddle [From Suttree] —
