WDVX presents Tennessee Shines Live at the Bijou TheatreWednesday, Aug 6, 2025

WDVX’s Tennessee Shines returns to the Bijou Theatre!

After a fantastic run from 2008-2011, we’re delighted for this series to return to the Bijou on August 6 for this quarterly show. This in-person experience offers the magic of live radio from one of Knoxville’s most historic and storied venues. The August event includes guests Kelsey Waldon, Handsome and the Humbles, and Redd & The Paper Flowers, and is a free event.

Tennessee Shines is possible thanks to support from Visit Knoxville and Tennessee Stone

We reserve the right to revoke tickets sold to a broker or unauthorized third party. If you are holding a revoked ticket, you will not be admitted and will not receive a refund.

About Kelsey Waldon:

In the six years since she signed to John Prine’s Oh Boy Records, Kelsey Waldon has earned wide praise for her “self-penned compositions [with] the patina of authenticity” (Rolling Stone). On her new album, Every Ghost, she confronts addiction, grief, generational trauma, and even herself — and comes through it stronger and at peace.

“There’s a lot of hard-earned healing on this record,” Waldon says of the nine-song project, recorded at Southern Grooves studio in Memphis with her band, The Muleskinners. As she sings in the record’s title track and first song, “Ghost of Myself,” she’s put in the work not only to better herself and leave behind bad habits, but also to learn to love her past selves.

Doing so wasn’t easy, Waldon admits. “It took time and experience,” she says, adding that she can now find compassion for her younger self.

“I think you’ve gotta respect her,” Waldon says, “because she was trying as hard as she could for where she was at, and she was doing a damn good job.”

Compassion is a throughline on Every Ghost, whether it’s for Waldon herself, for the person in the throes of addiction in “Falling Down,” or for a suffering world in “Nursery Rhyme.” The people in Waldon’s songs aren’t irredeemable — they’re struggling.

“You’ve got to have compassion; you gotta stay humble and have gratitude,” Waldon says. However, she’s learned that you also can’t let people take advantage of an empathetic heart. “Comanche” — which Waldon jokes is her very own truck song — finds Waldon grappling with the loss of a loved one, not to death but to boundaries she’s set for her own good. Waldon owns a 1988 Jeep Comanche, and driving it serves as a kind of therapy for her.

“I love the whole aspect of when design mattered,” she says, “and owning your car was an expression of yourself.”

“Comanche” is deeply personal, but Waldon’s most introspective reflections bookend My Ghost. Its penultimate song, “My Kin,” extends the idea of loving yourself in spite of yourself beyond the choices she’s made and the circumstances she’s put herself in, to reckon with both the good and the bad that come from her family tree. Those traits, Waldon concludes, make her who she is.

“As the song says, ‘I’m the best and worst of my kin,’ and I love that for myself,” says Waldon, who was born and raised in a hunting lodge at the end of a dead-end road in the rural, unincorporated community of Monkey’s Eyebrow, Ky. “And I’m also at a point where I’m willing to break these cycles, I’m willing to grow, I’m willing to evolve.”

Among those best parts of her lineage is Waldon’s grandmother, who died in June 2024. “She was a remarkable woman. The women in my family have been rocks, and they’ve all been colorful and full of character,” Waldon says.

“Her garden and her yard, that might have been one of the things she took the most pride in,” Waldon adds, recalling how her granny would often stop to dig up roadside flowers, then transplant them into her yard. A display of tiger lilies, some of which now grow in Waldon’s yard in Tennessee, was a particular point of pride.

“Transplanting is such a tradition — it can teach you a lot,” Waldon says. “Life goes on, beauty can grow from anywhere, and as long as a person is remembered, they’re never gone.”

Waldon honors her granny with the song “Tiger Lilies.” She didn’t want an over-the-top sentimental song, so she instead leaned into the idea of traditions as a way to remember loved ones. “I’m sure Granny would love it,” Waldon says.

Every Ghost concludes with a Hazel Dickens cover, “Ramblin’ Woman.” Waldon covered two Dickens songs on 2024’s There’s Always a Song and had added “Ramblin’ Woman” to their live sets as well. While Waldon didn’t originally intend to include their cover on this album, it served as “a sonic star” during the recording process and has a message Waldon feels is still relevant decades after Dickens wrote it. “Hazel was ahead of her time,” Waldon says. “Our existence is more than just what society expects of us. We’re more than just somebody’s girlfriend or wife or mother, and those are all beautiful things, but we can have our own independence, and we don’t have to do it for anybody else. We’re beautiful, magical, and powerful creatures.”

That’s certainly how Waldon sees herself after completing Every Ghost. “It feels like there’s a spirit of fearlessness throughout this album,” Waldon says, “and I’m really proud of that.”

Waldon’s fearlessness is among the reasons she landed at Oh Boy Records in 2019, as the independent label’s first new signee in 15 years. It’s attracted fans to her headline tours and her festival sets, and prompted artists including Tyler Childers, Charley Crockett, Robert Earl Keen, Margo Price, and Lucinda Williams to invite her on tour. It helped earn her both the title of “Kentucky Colonel” — an honor recognizing goodwill ambassadors of Kentucky’s culture and traditions — and a spot in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s annual American Currents exhibit in 2024.

“True outlaw shit is sticking to your guns, and I feel like I’m doing that,” Waldon says. “I’m not saying I’m unbreakable, but I feel almost unbreakable. I’ve already hurt the worst that I could and lived to tell the story. We can be thankful for our ghosts."

About Handsome and the Humbles:

The best songs, the thinking goes, are the ones written from real-life experiences, but those experiences sometimes exact a heavy toll.

Josh Smith, the singer and songwriter for Handsome and the Humbles, knows that all too well. “Alt-Country,” the new album by the Knoxville-based Americana outfit, is built on a foundation of loss that knocked the gregarious and affable frontman to his knees … but in so doing, gifted him with a record that smolders like the orange coals of a once mighty conflagration.

“None of these songs are really about my dad, but the sadness I experienced from his death, as well as the loss of my marriage, is pretty much the foundation of this album,” Smith says.

It’s a profoundly intimate affair, evolving from the skeletal framework of scribbled lyrics in the dead of night and rudimentary chords on an acoustic guitar. Upon those bones, Smith and guitarist Josh Hutson began to bring the record to life in Hutson’s garage (affectionately nicknamed “The Ding Don Den”) using an iPhone interface to record everything but drum tracks on three songs.

“I’d lay down an acoustic track, he’d do electric, then I’d do bass and vocals, and we’d go back and do background vocals,” Smith says. “They started sounding better than we anticipated, so we just decided that since it’s so hard to get everyone together, we’d just release what we have.”

Along the way, they migrated to professional studios and recording spaces, adding band members (guitarist Marcus Balanky, former-and-sometimes-fill-in drummer Lauryl Brisson) and friends (drummer Kris “Tugboat” Killingsworth, organist Matt Coker) to sculpt the tracks into a fully realized new record.

The finished creation is both warm and familiar and a startling departure, made evident by the opening track “Be Around.” Ruminations on friendships during those dark times buoyed his spirits and inspired the shimmering ambiance that owes as much to the Flaming Lips as it does to any alt-country touchstones to which Handsome and the Humbles compare.

And yet those touchstones remain … polished in ways that are a direct result of the musical intimacy shared between friends who first shared a stage together as teenagers. On “Now I Know,” Hutson plays a guitar-slinging foil every bit as adept as Nels Cline to Smith’s Jeff Tweedy, stomping through a swirling maelstrom of regret over the end of the latter’s marriage: “When everything means so much, nothing means anything,” he sings, bone-tired weariness hanging on every syllable, regret tinging every chord.

That regret lingers on “Nice Things” – “you’d think by now I’d be better than this” are the words of a man still coming to terms with a profoundly life-changing experience, and once again Hutson’s fretwork serves as Smith’s North Star through the foggy remnants of remorse.

Here’s the thing about “Alt-Country,” though: Smith’s stories might burn like straight whiskey, but the music is the sweet fire of bliss that follows. Whether it’s Brisson on sticks giving “Fades Away” a “D’yer Mak’er”-style groove or Coker coaxing “Exile”-era Stones juju on a song like “You Walked Away,” there’s joy to be found in this collection, if for nothing else than the simple fact that pain fades and the sun always rises.

Light, Smith has learned over time, is always on the horizon, somewhere in the distance, guiding a path through the darkness. That’s a theme that Handsome and the Humbles have championed since the band came together around an EP titled “Hallelujah, Alright,” the capstone of which, “Knoxville Lights,” was a shambling rock ‘n’ roll homage to the cityscape as seen from a weary traveler crossing the mountains. Two full-length records followed — “Have Mercy” and “We’re All the Same,” along with another EP (“400 Cigarettes”) a couple of years ago. 

“Alt-Country” is a continuation of the band’s journey to places “both frightening and stunning,” as Smith croons on the new record’s final track, “Returning to You.” And as that song fades, he assures us: “When I’m alone, my heart keeps returning to you.”

It seems natural to assume he’s talking about the loved ones he’s lost along the way, but there are greater forces at work here, made evident in the beauty carved from the granite face of pain:

He’s returning to the light, and the fans and bandmates and opportunities that music has always provided, and we are all the better for it.

-Steve Wildsmith

About Redd & The Paper Flowers:

Redd & The Paper Flowers is an Appalachian Folk / Livingroom Folk band from Knoxville, Tennessee with members Katie Adams (upright bass), Colleen d’Alelio (cello), Gavin Gregg (mandolin), and Redd Daugherty (guitar).

The band met in 2022 through a local open mic and mutual friends, and they just released their debut album, Appalachian Bell Jar, a record that is a testament to East Tennessee and greater Appalachia’s beauty, struggles with government support, and their experiences in the area.

The band has grown extremely close over the past three years, particularly in touring: In 2025 alone, they're on the road for 22 weeks out of the year. The band also grew through the tragedy of Redd Daugherty losing her dear friend, Jason Cooper, who owned a local Knoxville music store named Rush’s Music, which has been a staple of the Knoxville music community since 1958. From Coop's tragic death, Redd found out he willed her the business, his estate, and his dog, Ando, who passed in April 2024. Redd owns, operates, and works at Rush’s alongside Katie and Gavin during their off time from touring, which services over 90 schools.

Their second album, Dead Little Thing, will highlight the struggles from this experience and is set to release January 2026.