Singer-songwriter-poet-playwright R.B. Morris orbits in the literary gravity of James Agee

R.B. Morris recently received a phone call from his longtime friend and sometime touring partner, the legendary folk singer Steve Earle. Both have published books of poetry as well as music, and both share a deep interest in the writer James Agee, whose centennial birthday is Nov. 27. Earle explained that he had been asked to write a forward for a new edition of A Death in the Family, Agee's Pulitzer-winning novel based on his own boyhood in the Ft. Sanders section of Knoxville, the place—not coincidentally—where Morris grew up.

"They should be getting you to do this," Earle said, "but they've asked me. So I want to ask you some questions."

The conversation that followed resulted in an introduction, published last month, in which Earle admits he didn't hear of Agee until 20 years after he came to Nashville to launch his recording career, when he finally read "the greatest writer the state has ever produced." The reason for the delay, as he explains in the introduction: "I was hanging out in the wrong part of Tennessee. James Agee came from Knoxville, some 200 miles to the east. In another time zone. Another world. Knoxville is where the Old South ends and the rustbelt begins."

Knoxville's "other world" is what holds and fascinates R.B. Morris, as it did Agee before him. This fascination may explain why Morris has devoted much of his adult life to celebrating and seeking wider recognition for Agee's work. Morris has written and performed a one-act play about Agee, The Man Who Lives Here Is Loony. His songs contain both implied and direct references to Agee's work, and he was one of the first local artists to pressure Knoxville—a city that Morris says has often been a bit "ahistorical" concerning its own cultural heritage—into recognizing its native son. Morris was instrumental in the founding of James Agee Park in 2005 and in launching an Agee centennial celebration this month.

Morris speaks as he sings, in a melodious baritone that carries just a hint of mountain twang. "The geography here is mountainous, and the Tennessee River runs right through town," he says of the Knoxville mystique, "so you've got a nice lovely geographic setting. You've got a lot of mountain music—old-timey music, gospel music—and in many ways this is one of the first places that it started to take root, one of the first towns." Like many Southern singers, Morris first encountered such music as a child in church: "So as I was growing up, I was getting, like most kids in America, doses of rock and roll, and doses of popular music."

But because Knoxville is also home to the University of Tennessee, Morris felt the influence, from an early age, of people from around the world. He believes it was this mix of two worlds—one cosmopolitan, educated and diverse; the other conservative, unsophisticated and provincial—that sparked not only his own poetic imagination, but Agee's before him. As Morris grew older, he became aware of the way the musical mix of the city inspired writers like Agee, Cormac McCarthy and Nikki Giovanni. Local tensions between conservative churchgoers and bohemian artists made him pay closer attention to both the musical and literary legacies of the city.

"It's a pretty strong tradition on the literary and musical fronts," Morris says. "Steve Earle said he thought that the Ft. Sanders neighborhood was the greatest in Tennessee, the most intense, the most cutting-edge, because of what it has always been up against."

Comprising some 50 city blocks near the campus of the University of Tennessee, the Ft. Sanders neighborhood is the most densely populated section of Knoxville. It was the site of a bloody Civil War battle during the siege of Knoxville in November 1863, and is a neighborhood that at times seems to both celebrate and ignore its rich history. For example, earlier this year, archaeologists discovered some original artillery positions from the battle at the construction site of a new sorority village. The discovery was noted and remarked on, but it did not affect the planned construction.

Morris first became aware of Agee long before he read anything the writer had produced. In 1962, when Morris was not much older than Agee's character at the opening of A Death in the Family, Hollywood came to Knoxville to shoot All the Way Home, an adaptation of the novel starring Jean Simmons and Robert Preston (not to be confused with a 1981 TV adaptation of the same name, which starred Sally Field and William Hurt). Scenes were filmed in the Ft. Sanders neighborhood and at the nearby rail station. Morris' father, who worked for the railroad, would come home and describe the scenes he had watched from his window on the second floor of the train station. Later, Morris' family attended the premiere of the movie in Knoxville, the memories of it leaving a nearly magical impression.

Morris says he understood, even as a child, that coming from Knoxville and the Ft. Sanders neighborhood had somehow contributed to Agee's imagination. "That was his early beginnings," he explains, "so it was important to him and helped to shape him in a lot of ways. Later he spent most of his time in New York and then in Hollywood in that whole milieu, and it was completely different, so I think it always gave him a little bit of a Southern mountain anchor, some other kind of sensibility—small town, I guess you could say—that might have countered all that."