‘Knoxville Girl’ Gets Her Revenge in Wayne White’s New KMA Exhibition

If you need a refresher on the macabre plot of famed Appalachian murder ballad “Knoxville Girl,” it goes like this: Willy takes his girlfriend for a walk, beats her to death with a stick for no discernible reason, dumps her in the river, and ends up in jail—where he closes things out by professing his undying love for the woman he just murdered. 

Sure sure.

One can go down quite a rabbit hole tracing “Knoxville Girl’s” origin story, which has its roots in 18th-century British and Irish murder ballads. And believe you me, I have. 

What kept jumping out to me, though, whether it was academic analysis or cultural writing, is how often the song is read through the male gaze. The questions tend to orbit Willy: his motives, or lack thereof; whether there was a sexual relationship; whether she was cheating; how to interpret his perspective, since the entire song is told from it. 

Mostly, the writers are men. And so are the many bands—from The Louvin Brothers to The Lemonheads to Nick Cave—that have carried the song forward.

I kept wondering, where is Knoxville Girl in all of this? Who was she? What would she have to say, if her deranged boyfriend hadn’t killed her and then appointed himself the narrator of their worst-date-ever lore? 

One artist has been hard at work rewriting the story. This time, with her at the center. 

Last year in the lead-up to Big Ears Festival I had the opportunity to interview Wayne White, the Chattanooga-born artist, puppeteer and provocateur best known for his irreverent word paintings and his work on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. 

He was performing with his band Username Password and exhibiting his word paintings in the Emporium. He’d just released a 50-song self-titled debut album, which included “Revenge of the Knoxville Girl.”

The lyrics have a lot going on, all set against the backdrop of Wayne’s lilting banjo. And at first I didn’t get it. I asked Wayne to explain, and this is what he told me:

It’s a reference to the Knoxville Girl and also an homage to Cormac McCarthy’s book Suttree. There’s a scene in Suttree where they’re having a bar fight, and somebody brings in a floor sander and throws it across the room. So that’s that part. 

And then when he goes down to the river to a tall and shaky shell mound – in the book Suttree retreats from Knoxville and goes up the river and he encounters some people that are living like early Native Americans, like shell mound cultures, where they lived by the river and ate mussels and put the mussel shells in the big shell mounds. So he kind of reverts back to a Neolithic lifestyle for a while. 

And then, of course, the Vols reference. You can’t talk about Knoxville without putting in the Vols. So a Chris-Craft boat full of Vol dolls, which are women Tennessee Volunteer fans – they’re coming into town on their fancy boat for the big game, and there’s this poor bastard gumming mussels with his bloody mouth by the riverside.

It’s like a mishmash of the Knoxville Girl, Suttree and Tennessee Vols culture.

FINALLY, I thought—someone (and a man, no less) has given Knoxville Girl the agency to hit back. 

And that, I thought, was the end of it. But Wayne wasn’t finished yet.

I literally gasped when I walked into his new exhibition at Knoxville Museum of Art, which opened alongside Big Ears on March 26. There she was, Knoxville Girl herself, planted right square in the middle of the room. 10 feet tall and looking a hot mess, like she’d just hauled herself straight out of the river. And in her hand, dangling by the hair, was Willy’s head: purple-faced, eyeballs bulging, mouth agape with the dawning realization that the ending to his story had changed.

Oh, and they’re marionettes, which means you can pull a rope to make his head kind of loll and bob a bit. The grim pendulum of consequence, you might say.

Congrats on the character arc, Willy.

The rest of the exhibition is no less satisfying. From the intimacy of his sketchbooks to the largesse of his word paintings, quirky small sculptures to massive papier-mâché heads, it’s all of my favorite things: color, texture, absurdity, subversion (one painting depicts “Picasso’s Ass Falling Off”) and one very, very long hot dog. 

The exhibition opening was perhaps the most dynamic I’ve ever attended, watching Wayne move from a performance with his band downstairs into an intimate, 50-minute gallery talk recounting his wild and inspiring creative career in the company of all his creations.

The crowd was spellbound as he paced a circle around Knoxville Girl, both inside the work and slightly in awe of it himself, connecting the dots between decades of making.

I have been so impressed with KMA’s recent exhibitions and how they seem to watercolor-coalesce into what Executive Director Steven Matijcio described to me in this interview as the “Appalachian Imaginary,” a curatorial framework for rethinking how Appalachia is represented. Wayne White’s work, its folksiness infused with a kind of winking takedown of cultural authority, plays right into that vision.

In tandem with the exhibition, KMA is engaging with Cattywampus Puppet Council for a Giant Puppet Making 101 workshop. Open to teachers, community leaders and anyone interested in making parade art for the Cattywampus Parade & Block Party on May 17 at Suttree Landing Park, the workshop takes place this Saturday, April 11 from 1–3:30 p.m. at KMA and is free with preregistration (ages 13+).

Reminder: KMA is FREE to visit and open six days a week. If you haven’t been in lately, go go go! 

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