TNTennessee Famous People

Three presidents, and North Carolina supplied every one

Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson all reached the White House as Tennesseans, and not one of them was born in the state. Jackson was born in the Waxhaws settlement on the Carolina border in 1767 and arrived in Nashville in 1788 as a young prosecutor; he served from 1829 to 1837 and lies buried at the Hermitage east of the city. Polk was born in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in 1795 and came over the mountains to Maury County at ten. He was Speaker of the House and then governor before a single term from 1845 to 1849 that added the Southwest to the map. Johnson was born in Raleigh in 1808, worked as a tailor in Greeneville, and was the only southern senator who refused to give up his seat when his state seceded. He finished Lincoln's term from 1865 to 1869 and survived an impeachment trial by a single vote. Sam Houston nearly made a fourth: raised near Maryville, elected governor of Tennessee in 1827, he quit the office in 1829 after his marriage fell apart and went west to win Texas at San Jacinto.

Nutbush, Sevier County and a cabin on Locust Ridge

Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush in 1939, a farming hamlet she later described in a hit single with the line about a quiet little community. Dolly Parton was born in Sevier County in 1946, the fourth of twelve children in a one-room cabin, opened Dollywood at Pigeon Forge in 1986, and has since given away more than 200 million books through her Imagination Library. Bessie Smith came out of Chattanooga around 1894 and was the highest paid Black performer in America by the mid-1920s. W. C. Handy was an Alabaman who set up on Beale Street in Memphis and published Memphis Blues in 1912 and St. Louis Blues in 1914, which is how the sheet music trade learned the word blues. Justin Timberlake was born in Memphis in 1981 and raised in Millington. Miley Cyrus was born in Franklin in 1992.

Ida B. Wells, Diane Nash and the Nashville sit-ins

Ida B. Wells edited the Memphis Free Speech when three grocers, one of them her friend Thomas Moss, were lynched outside the city in March 1892. Her editorials on the killings got the newspaper's press destroyed and made it unsafe for her to return; she spent the next four decades documenting lynching in print. Nashville produced the other great Tennessee chapter of the movement. James Lawson ran nonviolence workshops that trained the students who sat down at downtown lunch counters in February 1960. Diane Nash, a Chicagoan studying at Fisk, confronted Mayor Ben West on the courthouse steps that April and asked whether he believed it was right to sell a person a comb but not a sandwich. He said it was not, and Nashville desegregated its counters in May, the first city of its size in the South to do so. John Lewis was a seminary student in the same group and was arrested in Nashville for the first of some forty times.

Born in Tennessee, claimed elsewhere

Aretha Franklin was born in Memphis in 1942 and moved to Detroit as a small child, which is why almost nobody files her under Tennessee. Morgan Freeman was also born in Memphis, in 1937, and raised largely in Mississippi. Quentin Tarantino was born in Knoxville in 1963 before his mother took him to Los Angeles. Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island but grew up outside Knoxville, and set Suttree along the Tennessee River there. Alex Haley was raised by his grandmother in Henning, and Roots took a special Pulitzer citation in 1977. Samuel L. Jackson grew up in Chattanooga. Oprah Winfrey moved to Nashville as a teenager and was hired by a local television station at nineteen while enrolled at Tennessee State. The traffic ran the other way too: Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and did not reach Memphis until 1948, six years before he cut That's All Right at Sun.

A sprinter, a diplomat and a vice president

Wilma Rudolph was born near Clarksville in 1940, the twentieth of twenty-two children, wore a leg brace after childhood polio, and won three gold medals at the 1960 Rome Olympics while running for Ed Temple's Tigerbelles at Tennessee State. Cordell Hull was born in a log cabin in Overton County in 1871 and served as Secretary of State from 1933 to 1944, longer than anyone before or since, then took the 1945 Nobel Peace Prize for his work founding the United Nations. Davy Crockett was born in Greene County in 1786, served three terms in Congress, lost his seat in 1835 and died at the Alamo five months later. Al Gore divided his childhood between Washington and the family farm at Carthage, held his father's Senate seat, served as vice president from 1993 to 2001, and lost Tennessee's eleven electoral votes in 2000. Had he carried the state he grew up in, the Florida recount would not have mattered.

Notable people from bordering states

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