Who Lived Here? A Short Home Tour of Knoxville’s Notable Former Residents

Every city likes to claim its famous children. Knoxville does it with street addresses. The Knoxville History Project keeps a Home Registry of more than 75 locals who mattered, culturally, economically or politically, and it reads less like a walk of fame than a stack of old city directories:
rental houses, carved-up apartments, a grandmother’s porch.

Today’s celebrity house tours tend to look alike, with a Cassina armchair in the corner, a B&B Italia glass coffee table facing the view and a kitchen that seems built for photographs more than dinner. The Knoxville addresses tell a
different kind of story. Most of these people weren’t famous yet when they lived here, and the houses were simply where they were figuring things out. Some are still standing. Some are long gone.

Before the Fame, a Lease in Sequoyah Hills

For a neighborhood of curving streets and deep lawns, Sequoyah Hills has hosted a surprising number of short stays. Cormac McCarthy‘s family reportedly moved through three rental houses there in the 1930s, one of them at 418 Noelton Drive near Kingston Pike, before heading to
South Knoxville. The future author of The Road was still a small boy.

Patricia Neal‘s last Knoxville address is in the same part of town: Apartment A at 1415 Kenesaw, in the Sequoyah Village Apartments. She lived there in 1943, right before she left for college and, eventually, an Oscar.

Thirteen years later, the Everly family turns up at 641 Scenic Drive. City directories list them only once, in 1956, when the substantial house had been divided into three and then four apartments. Don and Phil spent less than three years in Knoxville, but it’s
where they started singing as a duo and playing rock ‘n’ roll, apparently on WROL radio. Picture two teenagers working out harmonies in a big house cut into small units, and the acoustics start to make sense.

Then there’s Alex Haley, who arrived around 1986, already the author of Roots. His best-known Knoxville home was a large house at 840 Cherokee Boulevard, where he lived for two or three years in the late 1980s. He also had a better-known place in rural Norris and a condo on the
bluff across the river, but it was on Cherokee Boulevard that People magazine photographed him raking leaves. If you’ve ever driven that stretch in October, you understand the chore.

Fiddles and Film Reels North of Downtown

North of downtown, the stories get even more modest. Roy Acuff‘s family came to Knoxville when he was about 15 and settled in the Fountain City area. From roughly 1927 to 1937 he lived at what is now 1101 Raleigh Avenue, just south of Sharps Ridge. Those were the years he gave up
on professional sports, learned the fiddle and put together his first real band, the Crazy Tennesseans, playing on WNOX and WROL. In 1938 he left for Nashville and helped build that city’s reputation for country music. The house where it began is still there.

A generation earlier, Clarence Brown grew up in Old North Knoxville, where his father was an executive at Brookside Mills. The family moved through several houses in the neighborhood, and only one survives: 121 E. Scott Avenue, where Brown lived from about 1908 to 1911. He
graduated from UT at 20 with two engineering degrees. A decade or so later he was directing pictures for Universal, then MGM. It’s hard to look at a front porch on Scott Avenue and see Hollywood coming, which may be the point.

Linden Avenue, Mulvaney Street and What Progress Took

Linden Avenue appears in the registry twice, and the two entries could hardly feel more different. In 1930 the Neals lived at 2643 Linden, and Patricia later recalled acting on the front porch as if it were a stage. It’s a sweet image of a house doing what houses do best, giving a
kid room to try things out loud.

Down the same street, at 2533 Linden, lived Emma Louvenia T. Watson, grandmother of poet Nikki Giovanni (1943-2024). Giovanni was born in Knoxville and kept coming back for summers after her parents moved to Cincinnati. Her grandmother’s real home, though, had
been at 400 Mulvaney Street, in a close-knit Black neighborhood that urban renewal destroyed in the early 1960s. The house on Linden was a good one, and she lived there for several more years. She was never happy there. Giovanni wrote in a memoir that “something called progress killed my
grandmother.”

It’s a hard sentence to forget, and it says something no floor plan can. A home is the street outside, the neighbors, the routines. A better house doesn’t replace any of that.

The registry has a few loose ends, and they’re part of its charm. Quentin Tarantino‘s entry comes with a question mark: 301 Bedford Drive in East Knoxville was his mother’s address in the newspaper when he was born, and nobody seems sure the house still exists. The registry also
lists a later suburban home on Bluegrass Road. And back at 641 Scenic Drive, one of the apartments in 1957 appears to have been rented by Ernie Dickerman, the nationally known conservationist, perhaps right after the Everlys moved out. Some houses, it seems, just attract interesting tenants.