Metro Pulse/Cover Story

The Moan

A forgotten fire, remembered in a song

by Jack Neely

Early in the first year of the Depression, it seemed as if everything in Knoxville was going wrong. The newspapers were full of murders, robberies, prominent suicides. One prominent businessman shot himself in his upscale Fort Sanders apartment. Another whose downtown grocery was going into receivership left as if for lunch, drove out to Bearden, and calmly walked into an oncoming train.

Late one cool night that March, an explosion rocked Union Avenue, and an apartment building burst into flames. Some people leapt out of second-floor windows onto the sidewalk. A family of three died in their apartment. The fire itself, one of the worst of its era, was also one of the strangest.

As firefighters battled the blaze, an enigmatic German razor grinder climbed to a second-floor landing down the alley, collapsed, and stopped breathing.

A block away, two weeks later, a young black woman walked into a white people's hotel and sang a song into a recording machine as several technicians from up North listened on headphones. When she sang her song about that weird night, it may have been the newest song in the world. She called it the "Arcade Building Moan."

The Arcade Building and the peculiar fire that destroyed it are nearly forgotten. Even local historians have been known to doubt that it even existed. It's possible that no one alive remembers any of the people who died in the blaze. But 75 years later, a song about them still makes the rounds around the world.

It all happened 75 years ago, this confluence of events which would have been unlikely anywhere but in an American city. Anywhere but in this particular American city.

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The St. James Hotel was on Wall Avenue, in the short block between Gay Street and Market Square. About 30 years old and constructed entirely of concrete, it was advertised as Knoxville's first "fireproof" building. It was an important distinction to claim in those days, a stone's throw from the 400 block of Gay, which had recently suffered the worst fire in Knoxville history.

Most of the time the St. James was just a hotel, but for several months in 1929 and early 1930, it doubled as a recording studio for a national record label. The Brunswick-Balke-Collender Co. had been known for decades for manufacturing pool tables, but in the 1920s became known as the only record company big enough to challenge Victor. Their subsidiary, Vocalion, was known for popular records on 78 rpm shellac, especially blues records.

Popular-music recording was still new in the 1920s, tastes were shifting rapidly, and much of the new music in America-country, blues, gospel, and jazz-was coming from certain regions in the South, especially New Orleans, the Mississippi Delta, and the Southern Appalachians.

Recording companies like Brunswick were keen to catch the best talents before the competition did. Like National Geographic explorers, rival record companies set up recording sites in various locations and took in everyone they could.

In 1927, Victor went to Bristol, where they discovered the Carter Family and Jimmy Rodgers, who would both be popular and influential in the development of country and popular music. In 1928, Columbia went to Johnson City.

In 1929, Brunswick gave Knoxville a try. Knoxville was appealing to them perhaps because the city was respected as a center for the burgeoning country-music market. Even before the landmark Bristol sessions, several Knoxville musicians like Charlie Oaks, George Reneau, and Ted and Mac, had found some success with records made in New York as early as 1924. In Knoxville, Brunswick found a good deal more than country.

In the summer of 1929, several technicians from Brunswick's offices in Muskegon, Mich., unloaded 1,600 pounds of recording equipment at the St. James Hotel to make use of the soundproof studio run by WNOX, the popular station that had been broadcasting from downtown Knoxville for nine years, its signal strong enough in those less-cluttered days to reach across several state lines.

The technicians who helped arrange each recording in Knoxville are remembered, barely, as R. Chaff, H.C. Bradshaw, and W.J. Brown. The guy in the booth was the musical director, Richard Voynow, who some sources suggest was the one who prompted the Knoxville sessions. Voynow was something of a celebrity in jazz circles. He'd been pianist with the original Wolverines, alongside legendary cornettist Bix Beiderbecke. He'd collaborated with songwriter/pianist Hoagy Carmichael, partly credited for the popular song "Riverboat Shuffle."

Word got around. Musicians came from all over to the hotel on Wall Avenue. During that brief period, before Nashville had any reputation for music recording, musicians from across the region, including several from Middle Tennessee, traveled to Knoxville to make records at the St. James. Among them was Nashville's biggest star, Uncle Dave Macon.

Knoxville was, at the time, a crowded, noisy, exciting, grotesque, lively, filthy place of electric trolleys and belching smokestacks, rednecks and sophisticados in an uncomfortable transition between the booming urban city with metropolitan pretensions it had been in its Edwardian peak, and a mill town, which at its worst seemed something like a giant refugee camp for the rural dispossessed and the tax-resistant. The progressive movement that promised to rebuild much of downtown in the 1920s seemed to be dying before it had fully bloomed, and this new Depression seemed to stomp it flat. The only obvious green shoots in Knoxville were musical ones.

Brunswick already had a presence in town. Sterchi Brothers Furniture, then touted to be the biggest furniture company in America, was headquartered on Gay Street. Seller of phonographs and phonograph records, Sterchi was a big supporter of the booming recording industry. Sterchi's own Gus Nennstiel, an electronics expert, was an agent for Brunswick's subsidiary, Vocalion.

In Knoxville they found a kaleidoscope of styles and genres-and, predictably, a good deal of lunacy.

Brad Reeves, who works at the Archive of Appalachia at ETSU in Johnson City, has made a study of the St. James sessions. He cites ranking country-music historian Charles Wolfe's research that the St. James sessions were "the end of an era," the last of the on-location field sessions done for a major recording label. Reeves has become so interested in the St. James sessions that he's compiling all of the existing recordings into a CD. He hopes he can find the financial backing to make it commercially available.

Reeves naturally compares the Knoxville recordings to other recording sessions in the region, the landmark ones at Bristol in 1927 and those the following year in Johnson City. Asked what makes the Knoxville sessions different, he says, "The diversity. I couldn't believe how old-time leads to gospel, then straight into jazz. And the sense of humor. Some of them are quite funny."

During a period of several months, a variety of bands, mostly white, walked into the St. James. One performer, Uncle Dave Macon, the vaudevillian banjoist who was one of country's first real stars, recorded there on March 31, 1930, with his son. He was already famous. A few, like the Sievers' family band, the Tennessee Ramblers, would go on to moderate fame in popular-music circles. Most of those Voynow and his men recorded wouldn't. More than half of them were country bands of one sort or another, many of them with vaudevillian humor, but there were others.

Many of the young men who made their recordings at the St. James were talented, and their work here is deservedly saved for posterity on CDs; but the sensibility is something along the lines of a barnwarmer attended by the Three Stooges.

You get the impression that for these months, the St. James was a jolly frat-house party of spirited musicians, mostly white, mostly male.

A couple of early jazz orchestras recorded there, including Knoxville's biggest big band, Maynard Baird and his Southern Serenaders, representing their party standard, "Postage Stomp." Like most of the others, their selections were a sampling of up-tempo songs they'd been playing for years. The St. James recording of "Postage Stomp" made it onto a Yazoo compilation aptly called Jazz the World Forgot.

In an article that emphasized the project's "Hill-Billy Music" recordings, the News-Sentinel added, "There was some Negro music, too." It was perhaps an understatement.

The Tennessee Chocolate Drops, an unusual black string-jazz band featuring fiddler-mandolinist Howard Armstrong, was one. They played their "Knox County Stomp," and another song called the "Vine Street Rag"-which, through a misprint, was printed as "Vine Street Drag." The Chocolate Drops would later be better known as Martin, Bogan, and Armstrong, and were popularizing their eccentric version of the blues around the world as late as the 1970s. Their St. James recordings play a role in the early Terry Zwigoff documentary about Armstrong, Louie Bluie.

And then there was Leola Manning.

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She was nothing like anybody else who walked into the lobby of the St. James. An East Knoxville cafeteria worker and aspiring evangelist of 25, she was at the time struggling with a troubled marriage. She recorded at the St. James twice, once near the beginning of the sessions, on Aug. 28, 1929, and once near the end, on April 4, 1930. Her work stood apart from everything else, almost as if she recorded her work in a different St. James Hotel from the others, in a different era. Her work was purer, more earnest, more urgent, more startling.

The first couple of sides she cut at the St. James were religious songs done in a gutsy blues style that may have startled the devout in 1930, those who were used to hymns. "He Cares For Me," a slow, mournful number, with syncopated piano and guitar accompaniment, seems to describe the death of a child: "When the Lord called my baby, I could not keep from crying / I could see that she was sick, but I could not believe she was dying."

"He Fans Me" is livelier, with a visceral ragtime heart. Some might have thought they sounded more like nightclub music than church music.

They were memorable performances. It's not surprising that when she came back to the St. James six months later with four more new songs, they put her on the schedule.

Some of her new songs were plaintive, distressed commentaries on current events in Knoxville, and she sang them like a town crier. One, "Satan Is Busy In Knoxville," seems to detail real-life murders.

In Nineteen and Thirty, in the beginning of the year, so many people was made sad

When Franklin was out, earning his bread, no fear or troubles he had;

He was driving in the sun along the road

And a robber jumped on his running board

Who murdered this man nobody knows

But the Good Book says they've got to reap just what they sow 'Cause Satan is so busy in Knoxville, Tennessee.

She pronounces Satan, ominously, as "Say-ton"-and continues with a grislier description.

Not many hours later, a colored woman her name was True

She was found with her throat cut

From ear to ear below the Mountain View School...

The Mountain View School was in East Knoxville, on Dandridge Avenue. Leola Manning knew it well; she worked there.

She wrote all the songs herself. She never called any of her songs "blues"; it was, to her, a bad word, an unchristian word. One of her songs, "The Blues Is All Wrong," is an up-tempo boogie-woogie piece that could almost pass for early rock 'n' roll or swing. The lyrics sound a little bit defensive, perhaps reflecting a typical reaction to her music:

This song's all right, if you think it's wrong...

It's got the blues tune, but the words are right...

They all sound like blues, but not one of Manning's six songs was a love song. "Laying in the Graveyard" seems to picture herself after death. "I wouldn't mind dying, but I have to lay dead so long.... Good morning, dead man; Mother, how do you do? / I've been so long in this world without you."

The newest song in the session was based on a tragic incident in the neighborhood. Topical songs describing the news of the day were not unusual in popular music. But one may be some kind of superlative for its era; one of the recordings Leola Manning made described a tragic incident that had happened only 15 days before she recorded her own song about it.

As always, she was careful not to call it a blues. She called it "The Arcade Building Moan."

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The Arcade Building was a zigzag block away from the St. James, on Union Avenue. The quickest way to get there would have been to walk the length of Market Square, along the farmwagons in the broad alleys on either side of the Market House.

Refer to the Arcade Building today, and chances are people will assume you're talking about the better-known building over on Gay Street, the Journal Arcade. Built in 1924, it was the handsome, modern, marble home of the morning paper; its interior held an architectural arcade, a broad interior hallway with doors on either side. To confuse historians further, there was an earlier building called the Arcade Hotel, which was located in the 500 block of Gay, about where the Riviera Theater would later be built.

The Arcade Building in the song was the least prominent of them all. Built around 1910, it was a modest two-story brick building on Union between Market and Walnut, broader than it was tall. Photographs of it when it was not on fire are hard to come by. Originally it housed small shops and offices in its lower floors-tailors, florists, novelty stores, piano parlors, perhaps in an arcade setting-and middle-class residents above. By 1930, the building was almost all residential and not doing very well: 19 units, nine of them vacant. Maybe it was the Depression, maybe it was the fact that affluent residents had been leaving downtown for more than 20 years, but in 1930 downtown was coming to seem more and more like a place for mainly working-class people, the ones who couldn't afford cars.

It was impressive how much you could squeeze into one block-offices, a couple of apartment buildings-the Sprankle was the larger of the two-and lots of retail. In that regard, this particular block had something of a theme. The 400 block of Union was home to a shoe store, a paint store, a cigar store, a cobbler, two restaurants, a Western Union office, a real-estate office, a plumbing and heating company, a bakery, the Union Milk and Grocery, and a poolhall. But it was also the go-to block for all things tonsorial: the same block hosted two barbershops, two beauty shops, and two barber-supply stores.

One of the barber-supply stores was run by a German immigrant named Carl Melcher. Born in Solingen, Germany, a city no bigger than Knoxville near Dusseldorf, he had served the German imperial government in Africa. He had apparently moved to the United States shortly after the World War, and had Cincinnati connections, but spent most of his time in Knoxville. At 59, Melcher and his wife Helen lived in the Virginia Apartments at the corner of Market Street and Cumberland. They may have had a lonely life. They had no relatives nearby, and neither spoke English well.

Melcher was known as an expert mechanic and was, by some accounts, the best razor-grinder in town. He also sold his own tonsorial supplies, mixing hair tonic himself from mineral water and perfume. He also had a reputation as a fire enthusiast, often chasing the sound of sirens around town, even in the middle of the night.

Some, including cobbler Joe Badich, who ran his own shop next door to the barber-supply store, didn't like Melcher much. Despite their proximity, Badich and Melcher hadn't spoken to each other for two years. Melcher may have had a reputation for skill, but Badich suspected the razor-grinder wasn't getting much business. Melcher was often seen standing out on the Union Avenue sidewalk, waiting for customers. That March, he had only 20 bucks in the bank.

Though some regarded him as "affable," Melcher struck some as an unhappy man; he had told some that he expected to move back to Germany soon. In the shaky democracy of Weimar Germany, the Nazis were rising to power.

On the evening of Thursday, March 20, Herr Melcher did a few very peculiar things. First, he cashed out his bank account, all 20 bucks of it. Then, he ordered a 55-gallon drum of gasoline from Gulf Oil. It was late arriving, and he telephoned in angry, opaque accents. When the truck finally did come down his alley, Melcher asked the driver to help install a spigot into the barrel.

At 8 p.m., he walked into the Union Lunch. Despite its name, it was a three-meal restaurant, open well into the evening. He asked proprietor Jim Evras how late his place was open. Evras responded he usually stayed open until about midnight.

Melcher returned to the restaurant two hours later with a cardboard box. He told Evras to keep it until someone-not necessarily Melcher himself-asked for it.

It had been cold on previous evenings, but this night it was warmer, well into the 50s, a hint of spring. The movie houses of Gay Street were showing some of the first talkies. The Girl Said No! with William Haynes and Marie Dressler, was playing at the Tennessee. The Sky Hawk ("Laughing at Death/Thrilling the World") was at the Riviera. Some theaters were still showing silents, but the big houses advertised "All Talking."

By 2 a.m., the Wilkerson family was probably sound asleep. Sylvester Wilkerson, 32, was a former army recruiter who had recently retired from duty at Fort Oglethorpe. He married a slightly older woman who already had a son, Arthur Sharp, who was 16. The three lived together at the Arcade.

The Union Lunch had closed down for the evening. The 400 block of Union never completely went dark, though, because there was always at least one operator at the Western Union. This night, it was C.H. Nesbitt. When it happened, he thought the boiler had exploded.

He ran outside. The whole block glowed in lurid red. Broken glass was everywhere. Badich's shoe store, Martinello's Beauty Parlor, Frazier's Barber Shop, Melcher's place, and the whole Arcade Building, were all on fire.

The fire department was right there, nine engines, two ladder trucks, dozens of firemen all over the block.

One after another, people leapt from the second floor out of the Arcade Building. A woman jumped and got entangled in telephone wires. A man jumped and landed on a passerby, a middle-aged man with an accent.

One man lowered a rope and nonchalantly climbed down. A travelling salesman who was just staying at the Arcade was obliged to explain his preparedness. "I've been carrying a rope in my suitcase for 25 years, waiting for something like this to happen."

In spite of the water hoses, the fire leapt around the block, sending cinders into the air, skipping over some buildings to hit others. Much of the 500 block of Market caught fire. "A survey of the burned area teaches the value of fireproof buildings," observed the Journal. "The Arnstein Building stood almost unscathed while the fire surged around it."

By the time the sun rose on the smoking rubble of Union Avenue and Market Street, they were calling it the worst fire in 20 years.

Everyone got safely out of the Arcade except for the Wilkerson-Sharp family. Their bodies were found in the ashes, charred and in pieces, identifiable only by dental work and supposition.

The fourth victim's fate was much more peculiar. On a second-floor landing of the Schriver Building, nearly a full block away and barely touched by the fire, lay a portly middle-aged man. His hands were scorched as if he'd held a live wire. His face was charred "to a crisp." He turned out to be Carl Melcher, the German.

He was the mystery of the week, and details of the gasoline delivery and the mysterious package were soon all around town.

Investigators found that the package Carl Melcher left at the Union Lunch held incoherent clues: some razors and scissors, apparently left by customers to be sharpened. A checkbook and an account book for his barber-supply business. A couple of insurance policies, life and business. It seemed odd that the policies had expired months earlier.

Adding to the mystery was the fact that about the time of the explosion, someone with a German accent had called a taxi from Kern's Bakery, cursing impatiently. Melcher had lived only three blocks away.

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On Friday, April 4, 1930, Leola Manning was in the draped studio at the St. James Hotel, singing into a microphone with her accompanist as four technicians listened on headphones.

It was on one Thursday morning, March the 20th day

I think it was about two a.m., I believe I can firmly say

The women and the children was screaming and crying

Not only that, they was slowly dying

Oh, listen, listen, how the bell did ring

When the Arcade Building burnt down.

It was a song she had written and presumably rehearsed with a pianist, in the last two weeks.

The bell may well be a reference to the Market House bell, which hung in its belfry a stone's throw from the St. James. It rang an alarm during major disasters of the late 19th and early 20th century. By the mid-1930s, it had been retired, due to concerns about the safety of the rickety structure that held it, but it may have rung one last time that day in 1930. It's now on display at the square's south end.

I want you to listen, listen how the bell was ringing

And the people fell to the ground

They jumped through the windows, ran down the stairways and out the door

They was looking for safety, or they could not live no more

Oh, it was sad, sad, oh how sad

When the Arcade Building burnt down.

The song is in a style which most music critics would call, with no ill intent, blues.

The brave firemen, they could not go home to eat

The Salvation women with coffees and cakes kept them up on their feet

But the lord saved Clyde Davis, death was so nigh

Carl Melcher and his wife were separated by the fire

Oh, listen, listen, how the bells did ring....

All the details are journalistic in their accuracy, straight from the dailies. Then she breaks out of the music in an ad lib, a little too shy to be scat, as the pianist plays. "Play it! Oh, it was sad that morning! Several people lost their lives when the Arcade Building burnt down. What a moan in Knoxville!" Then, returning to singing, she repeats the second stanza.

In her lyrics, the singer was kind to Carl Melcher, giving him the benefit of the doubt. But for a week, Carl Melcher was regarded as the arsonist who had started the fire, an insurance scammer or a terrorist of some sort. The speculation was entirely about his methods and motives. Word was that he had set the fire with gasoline and set it off by some kind of electric wire, which had gotten out of hand somehow, and that he had hobbled down the alley in the direction of his apartment and, for reasons of his own, had climbed the outside stairs of a building to which he had no obvious connection. The call to a cab was interpreted as a flubbed getaway.

The autopsy showed that he had died of shock, not electrocution. There were more odd details. The barrel of gasoline he bought was found in the rubble, unscathed.

Clyde Davis, who had leapt from the window onto a pedestrian, was certain the man was Carl Melcher, at that time apparently unburned. Later, another witness claimed that Melcher was actually on the scene helping the firefighters move hoses.

An inquest rather hastily exonerated Melcher. He was reportedly buried at Lynnhurst, in Fountain City. His wife Helen vanishes from the city directories after that.

So does Leola Manning, by that name, anyway. She appears in the city directories, living on East Vine with her husband William Manning, a school janitor. She works in the cafeteria at the Mountain View School in East Knoxville.

She's listed as living separately from her husband in 1931. Leola Manning last appears in 1933, living on Doll Avenue, near old Five Points in East Knoxville. Some researchers assumed that maybe she left town, as many Southern black musicians did in the '30s, to try their fortunes up North, in Chicago or New York.

Most of the St. James recordings were forgotten. In 1982, perhaps to coincide with the World's Fair, a vinyl record, Historical Ballads of the Tennessee Valley, came out. It included Leola Manning's "Arcade Building Moan."

Then, early in the CD era, recordings of rarely heard American blues songs began appearing on European compilations. One, called Rare Country Blues, was printed by Document Records in Vienna, Austria, in 1993, and claimed to compile the "complete recorded works" of six under-recorded black musicians. On the CD are all six of Leola Manning's St. James recordings. "Manning, who sounded something like Memphis Minnie," reads the liner notes of the Austrian disk, "was another off-centre artist who recorded religious songs in a blues setting." (The notes also speculate that the pianist heard on the recording is Chicago pianist Charles Avery, a regular on some Brunswick records. Other sources, including Joslyn Layne, of the All Music Guide, claim that Manning accompanied herself, though her ad-libbed shout of "Play it!" in the "Arcade Building Moan"-and "Play it, boys!" in "Satan Is Busy In Knoxville"-would seem to make less sense if that were true.)

That 1993 CD caught the attention of several high-profile musicians, among them iconoclastic country rocker Steve Earle. When he came to town for a show in the late '90s, Earle was interested in learning exactly where the Arcade Building was. (When he asked this reporter about the song, this reporter had never heard of it, or of the fire, or of the Arcade Building itself.) Jazz pianist Donald Brown is also a fan of Leola Manning's recordings.

Nancy Brennan Strange, a jazz and blues vocalist who has made some recordings herself, heard the songs via a tape that Laurel Theater's Brent Cantrell made for her in the '90s. She was entranced. "Her voice quality is just different from all the black singers, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Bessie Smith. It's like a trill thing. Her voice is cool, lighter than the others."

Strange went around town asking, "Did you ever hear of a blues singer named Leola Manning?"

At first, no one she spoke to had ever heard the name. But near the end of his life, musician Howard Armstrong-who had made recordings at the St. James-visited the city where he had once made a living as a street musician. He told her indeed he had known Leola. He knew her mother better, but he did know that she had married a guitarist named Gene Ballinger. But he wasn't sure what had become of her.

Strange revisited some of her sources, revising her question. "Did you ever hear of a blues singer named Leola Ballinger?" She had better luck with that question. But as it happened, the first one who had heard of her was offended by the question.

"One morning, I woke up and said, 'Leola Manning, where did you come from and where did you go?'" Having recruited thespian Linda Parris Bailey on the quest, she went back to the Beck Cultural Center. The director didn't know the answer, but a secretary did. "I knew Leola Ballinger," said the elderly Ether Rice. "But she wasn't a blues singer." She made it clear that she didn't approve of the blues, and that it wasn't even something to joke about.

Younger generations may think of "the blues" as a rootsy and fairly conservative style, the subject of reverent festivals and PBS documentaries. But to people of a certain age, those now over 75, the word blues can still imply something off-color, or unholy, or even pornographic.

Strange, an accomplished musician herself, meant no moral insinuations. She says some of Leola Manning's recordings are technically, if not morally, blues. A lyric is repeated, then followed with a rhyming line. "It's the same stuff, the same chord progressions," she says. "But different lyrics."

The moral paradox is one that Manning herself seems to deal with in the song, "The Blues Is All Wrong."

Strange learned that Leola Manning Ballinger didn't leave town after all. She died here in Knoxville, more than 60 years after she made those records.

Some remember her well. On a hillside at the corner of Castle and Wimpole in East Knoxville is a solid, white cinderblock building called the True House of God. A sign reads, "Bishop B.J. Moore, Pastor."

Bobbie Jean Moore-in her church, the True House of God, in East Knoxville, she's known as Bishop Moore-lives just over the hill. Her house is on one of those ridgetop vistas in East Knoxville where the sudden view of the sunset can awe strangers. She's about 70 now, and doesn't get around as well as she used to, but she remembers Leola well. She points to her in a photograph she keeps in her living room. Leola was her mother.

Moore tells her mother's story. "She was born in Chattanooga," she says. Her maiden name was Ramey, and she grew up in a musical family; her own mother sang, too.

"Her mother brought her to Kentucky first, Middlesborough. Then to Knoxville when she was a little girl." Moore thinks it was probably about 1910 when the Rameys settled in Knoxville. Leola Ramey was singing from a very early age. Her mother was known in Knoxville as Mama Ramey. "Around here, they got her mixed up with Ma Rainey," Moore laughs. Mama Ramey and the great Georgia-born blues singer Ma Rainey were contemporaries.

Leola Ramey grew up evangelizing, and never quit. "She started singing in a cornfield in Park City. The projects is sitting on that place. Set up a tent, had services, usually outdoors. She had a tent on Willow Street, too, in the Bottom, they all called it." The western part of the Bottom is now known as the Old City.

Singing in Knoxville, Leola Ramey got to know some more earthly sorts, like the legendary jazz fiddler/mandolinist Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong who cut a couple of sides at the St. James Hotel just before Leola did. "He used to drive some for my grandmother," Moore says. "She had a car, but couldn't drive." Armstrong was happy to oblige, taking Mama Ramey around on various evangelical errands.

On his last visit to Knoxville, the elderly Armstrong attended the True Church of God-and, of course, the irrepressible Armstrong brought his instrument. "He wouldn't leave Knoxville unless he'd seen me and come to church. He played his fiddle-or violin-a lot of old songs."

Did he ever play with the Rameys back in the day? "I imagine he did," Moore says. "They had a little band at one time. My dad played guitar. Mom sang, played piano. Mama Ramey sang. Mandolin, bass drum."

"Later on, she knew the Swan Silvertones, when they were young," says Moore. That black gospel band formed in Knoxville in the late '30s and went on to recording success. Moore isn't sure whether her mother ever knew East Knoxville's other, more famous, blues singer, Ida Cox, who shared the then-unusual habit of writing her own songs; she moved to Knoxville in the '40s and, in her last years, the jazz-age recording star sang in the Patton Street Church of God, a church founded by Mama Ramey. For 20 years they lived just a few blocks from each other, and both sang in East Knoxville churches.)

"She had been married to the Manning fellow," Moore says. William Manning was an evangelist, too, and together they had five children. "She stayed with him for a long while. But he was one of those gallivanting Christians who just had the name, but didn't carry the right stigma. He preached, but didn't go practice what he preached. She divorced him."

City directories suggest that it may have been during their separation that she made the St. James recordings. Moore knows about the noir description of killers on the loose in "Satan Is Busy In Knoxville," and the specific description of the body found near the Mountain View School, where Leola Manning worked.

"It did happen somewhere back behind there. There was a wooded area back behind Mountain View." Moore says her mother told her the killer was finally captured, and she once remembered the man's name. "She'd done told me about it, but it's gone out. Mother told me things I thought I would always remember. But that's not so. You don't always remember."

She does recall her mother telling her that she was troubled about the state of her city when she made the St. James recordings. "She believed God was angry with the people because so much was going on."

Moore says the unidentified boogie-woogie pianist, whose style has attracted some attention from the musicians who listen to the record-and who the Document CD's liner notes speculate was Chicago session man Charles Avery-was actually her mother's friend Gace Haynes, who lived in Lonsdale.

She called the Arcade Building song a moan. "She wasn't singing blues," Moore says. "She didn't want to be identified with that. Gospel was what she sang. Blues wasn't representing the Lord like she wanted to represent."

After her brief and urgent foray into the secular world, Moore says, her mother returned to evangelizing, and also found a man she could trust. His name was Eugene Ballinger.

"My dad was saved by her and her mother in Middlesborough, Ky.," she says. "He played guitar for her." He moved to Knoxville with the Ramey family. She's not sure when Leola married her father who, like Manning, eventually worked as a janitor for the city school system, but the city directories suggest it was around 1933. He raised the five Manning kids, and soon added three Ballinger kids to the brood, including Bobbie Jean, the oldest. Later he worked as a carpenter in Oak Ridge during World War II.

"After that, my dad and my mother evangelized on the streets. Went around everywhere. Knoxville, Alcoa." Leola and Eugene Ballinger actually founded a brick-and-mortar church in Alcoa, a House of God. "If I give you the whole name, it's this long," Moore says. "It's still there."

But she kept playing all around, often traveling: "Middlesborough, LaFollette, Harlan, Harriman, setting up the church of the House of God. They went everyplace. She did old-time street work. Go to a different town and hit the streets. She loved street work.

"She went to Vine and Central when it was blooming," Moore says. In her mother's day, that intersection was the cultural heart of black Knoxville. "She would pick these homeless folks up and bring them home. She was always doing something for somebody else. She was a beautiful person, a sweet person. A pure, a giving person."

Ballinger seems to have had a reputation as a miracle worker. "She prayed for a woman who had died and was covered up. The woman's walking around today. She had been sick, died right there in the house. She's still alive today."

"My sweet old boss, I called her. She loved people. Her mother taught her that. Opened her home to any kind."

Moore remembers some of the songs her mother sang at her tent meetings, many of which the singer wrote herself "Your Number's Gonna Fall After a While," was one. Another went:

I'm a stranger don't drive me away/ You may need me someday.

She never founded a real brick-and-mortar church in her hometown, though. "A real church: she would have loved one," Moore says. "At the time, money was tight. She just kept starting them up. A lot of home services." She often preached at the chapel her mother founded, the Church of the Living God.

They settled down on Doll Street, one of several East Knoxville streets that fell victim to urban renewal. "They ran us all off," says Mrs. Moore. Leola Ballinger lived a little farther out, on Boyd's Bridge, when she died. They had the service at Moore's church. Unlike most of us, Mother Ballinger had an opportunity to write a cheerful farewell message to her loved ones. It ends, "Farewell to life's challenges, hello eternal life."

Moore has led a challenging life in the years since her mother's death. Today she walks with difficulty, and says she doesn't sing like she used to, though she does play organ at her church. In the scrapbook where she finds a picture of her mother, she points out a photograph of a football player. "That's my baby, Phil," she says fondly. "He played for Holston. He was killed down on MLK. Men were shooting from the roof. He was a good boy. I told him not to go down there."

"So much has gone by," Moore says. "Time don't wait on nobody."

"I was amazed they gave this recording to me," Moore says of Nancy Strange's gift of Rare Country Blues. She had heard her mother talk about the session but had never heard the record. When "The Arcade Building Moan" appeared on Historical Ballads of the Tennessee Valley in 1982, and all of her recorded work appeared on Rare Country Blues in Vienna in 1993, Leola Manning Ballinger was still alive. But she and her family never heard of the releases.

"I didn't even know it was still out there," says Moore. "I don't think Mother knew how it went. She never did get nothing off it, never."

For the record, neither did Howard Armstrong. Though he later went on to recording success, he sometimes expressed bitterness about the St. James experience. It's unclear whether anyone who made recordings there in 1929-30 was compensated. Reeves thinks none of the records were marketed much. The Uncle Dave Macon session wasn't even released. Warner Brothers acquired Brunswick in April 1930, the same month as Voynow's last recordings of local musicians at the St. James Hotel. The new company may have had different priorities, but it was probably the Depression, more than anything, that spoiled the chances of the St. James recordings. By the end of the decade, the Brunswick label was a thing of the past. Brunswick went back to making pool tables and, eventually, pleasure boats. That division is now headquartered on Gay Street.

Reeves says Brunswick probably never made more than 500 copies of the 99-odd tracks they recorded at the St. James Hotel in 1929-30. They're extremely rare, he says. Joe Bussard, the Maryland collector from whom he obtained most of his own recordings, has a few. Reeves says they may be too rare even to have a dependable price.

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The solid old St. James Hotel was torn down without much fanfare in the early 1970s to make room for TVA's sprawling headquarters campus; it was said to be quite a tough demolition job. Its site is somewhere in the vicinity of the TVA Credit Union.

Benjamin Sprankle had hardly let the embers of the Arcade Building cool before he began work on a new building to take its place, a larger one known today as the Grand Union building. Today it's old enough to look historic, and is occupied by offices of Home Federal Savings and Loan.

The complete works of Leola Manning, later to be known as Elder Ballinger, are available on the web. More songs from her St. James sessions have appeared on other compilations, especially on the Yazoo label: one called Down In Black Bottom: Barrelhouse Mamas features "Satan Is Busy In Knoxville." Another, Favorite Country Blues: Piano-Guitar Duets, 1929-1935, includes, somewhat ironically, Leola Manning's thesis statement, "The Blues Is All Wrong."

Though it might be an exaggeration to call them "classics," the recordings Leola Manning made have been listened to more around the world in the 10 years since she died than they were in the 65 years before that.

"I wish I could have met her," says Nancy Brennan Strange. "I always find out about people after they're dead." She laughs. But to her, Leola's different. "I feel this connection with her that I don't understand."

Strange speaks those words just before looking at a document this reporter had obtained showing Leola Manning Ballinger's birthday, Sept. 10. She restrains a gasp.

"That's my birthday," she says.

Leola's biggest fan in Knoxville, though, is surely Bishop B.J. Moore of the True Church of God. "If the Lord let me live so long, I would like to write a book," she says. "It would be an interesting book. There's a lot of history here in Knoxville. People just don't know it."