Knoxville: Summer of 1915

“[Knoxville: Summer 1915] is a palpable evocation of folklore in a quasi-pastoral style, with frequent word-painting, hints of the blues, rich orchestral color, and freely varied meter.”

Grove Music Online

• Written in 1947, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is a piece for soprano and orchestra that sets text from James Agee‘s autobiographical essay “Knoxville, 1915.”
• Agee’s text describes a moment from the author’s childhood, filled with nostalgia and a sense of innocence. Barber was drawn to Agee’s writing because he saw similarities to his own childhood experience, saying:
  •  “I had always admired Mr. Agee’s writing, and this prose-poem particularly struck me because the summer evening he describes in his native southern town reminded me so much of similar evenings, when I was a child at home.”
• The piece premiered in 1948 under Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony, with soprano Eleanor Stebor. Stebor and Koussevitzky had commissioned the work.¹
  • Fun fact – Stebor would later create the title role in Barber’s opera, Vanessa.

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KNOXVILLE: SUMMER OF 1915 (TEXT)

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in that time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.

…It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds’ hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt; a loud auto; a quiet auto; people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber.

A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter, fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone: forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew.

Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose. Low on the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes…. Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces. The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.

On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there….They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine,…with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am. – James Agee²

1. Brian McCurdy, “Song Stories: Samuel Barber’s ‘Knoxville: Summer of 1915,'” Library of Congress Blogs (2021), accessed May 28, 2026, https://blogs.loc.gov/nls-music-notes/2021/06/song-stories-samuel-barbers-knoxville-summer-of-1915/.
2. “Knoxville: Summer of 1915, for soprano and orchestra,” Boston Symphony Orchestra, accessed May 28, 2026, https://www.bso.org/works/knoxville-summer-of-1915-for-soprano-and-orchestra.