Drive down Oak Ridge Highway past the Karns Community Club Center and you'll see what most people see: a low brick building that used to hold the neighborhood library, a gravel lot, maybe a sign about the next Fair Board meeting. What you won't see from the road is the grove of cedar trees behind it, and until this past August, there wasn't much reason to look. The grove sat there, unused, the way a spare room sits unused until someone finally clears it out.
That changed this year. Club members built a performance stage back there, in a single work session, and launched something called Music in the Grove. Two concerts have already happened. Two more are coming before the year is out. And the story here isn't really about a concert series. It's about what it means when a volunteer club that's been quietly running the same handful of buildings since 1954 decides to add something new instead of just maintaining what's already there.
How a grove that sat empty became a stage in one Saturday
The idea belonged to club president Brent Howell, who looked at ground the club already owned and asked why it wasn't doing anything. Urban Engineering Inc. put up the money to sponsor construction of the stage itself, and rather than hire it out, club members showed up on a Saturday and built it themselves.
The club's own description of what they were going for is short and sits well with what the space actually looks like once you're standing in it:
"The Music in the Grove concert series is a free, family-friendly event to give back to our community."
That's the whole pitch. No ticket tiers, no VIP section, no sponsor banners crowding the tree line. Just a stage where there wasn't one, in a spot most Karns residents drive past without registering as anything.
The two shows already gone, and the two still on the calendar
The series opened on Saturday, August 15, with Knoxville bluegrass group Timberwinds, reported at the time as starting "probably 7 p.m." That kind of soft, still-figuring-it-out timing is what you'd expect from a first show in a brand new venue.
By the second show, the club had it locked down. Saturday, September 12, 7:30 p.m., Karns native Tony Paul performed a musical tribute to Dolly Parton, and this time there was nothing tentative about the details. Parking was tight enough that organizers arranged an overflow lot in the back of Karns Elementary School, with lighted steps and a walkway leading over to the Grove.
That's two shows down. The series was planned as a four-show run for fall 2026, covering August, September, October, and November, with a fuller schedule not arriving until spring 2027. As of this writing, the October and November acts hadn't been named publicly.
Here's a small piece of arithmetic worth doing anyway. Count the days between the first two shows: August 15 to September 12 is exactly 28 days, four weeks to the day. If that spacing holds, the next two shows would land around October 10 and November 7, 2026. That's not a confirmed schedule. It's a pattern extracted from two data points, and two data points can break. But it gives you a Saturday to pencil in rather than a vague "check back later," and checking the club's Facebook page or its monthly newsletter, The Beaver's Tale, closer to those dates will tell you for sure.
| Show | Date | Act | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aug 15, 2026 | Timberwinds (bluegrass) | Happened |
| 2 | Sept 12, 2026 | Tony Paul, Dolly Parton tribute | Happened |
| 3 | ~Oct 10, 2026 (estimated) | Not yet announced | Upcoming |
| 4 | ~Nov 7, 2026 (estimated) | Not yet announced | Upcoming |
What to actually bring, and where to actually park
The logistics are about as low-friction as a free outdoor concert gets, but they're specific enough to matter if you're going for the first time.
- The show happens behind the Community Club Center at 7708 Oak Ridge Highway, in the cedar grove, not in the parking lot out front.
- On-site parking is limited. If the lot fills, the arranged overflow is the back lot of Karns Elementary School, connected by a lighted walkway and steps.
- Bring your own seating. A blanket or a lawn chair is the expectation, not a folding chair rental table or anything of the kind.
- The concerts are free and pitched as family-friendly, with no cover charge or ticket requirement mentioned anywhere in the club's own materials.
None of this requires advance planning beyond showing up a little early if you want a spot close to the stage.
Why a 1954 club still adds new things
It would be easy to read Music in the Grove as one nice thing a community group did this year and move on. But the more interesting fact sits underneath it. The Karns Community Club has been running essentially the same footprint since 1954, the old library building, a youth center on Beaver Ridge Road, a nature trail, an indoor event space at Karns Community Park, under the motto "To inform and unite for progress." Every Karns resident is technically a member, whether they've ever attended a meeting or not, and those meetings happen the first Tuesday of every month at 7:30 p.m., at the same building where the concerts now happen a few dozen yards out back.
That's the part worth sitting with. Groups like this tend to settle into maintenance mode: keep the lights on, run the Fair every July, mow the lawn, rent out the hall for baby showers and celebrations of life. Building a stage from nothing, in a grove that had sat idle long enough that even longtime club renters reportedly never walked back there, is a different kind of decision. It's the club deciding its own footprint wasn't finished growing.
If you want the fuller texture of that footprint, the club also manages an indoor event center at Karns Community Park on Beaver Ridge Road, where the Karns Lions Club runs a public pool and playground each summer and West Knox Little League fields its games. None of that is new this year. Music in the Grove is, and that's exactly why it's worth knowing about if you live close enough to walk over with a lawn chair some Saturday evening this fall.
A few questions worth answering before you go
Is there a cost to attend? No. The concerts are described as free by the club itself, with no ticket or registration mentioned.
What if the on-site lot is full when I arrive? Head to the back lot of Karns Elementary School. Organizers built a lighted walkway from there to the Grove specifically because they expected the main lot to fill.
Do I need to bring my own chair? Yes. The standard setup is bring your own blanket or lawn chair, not folding chairs provided on-site.
When is the next show? Not officially announced as of this writing. Based on the four-week gap between the first two shows, early-to-mid October is a reasonable guess, but the club's Facebook page and The Beaver's Tale newsletter are the places to confirm before you make a plan around it.
Where exactly is the Grove? Behind the Karns Community Club Center at 7708 Oak Ridge Highway, the building that used to house the neighborhood library.
If you've lived in Karns for a while, you've probably driven past that building more times than you can count without knowing there was a grove back there worth walking into. That's true of a lot of neighborhood corners. Sometimes the interesting thing isn't a new business or a road project. It's a volunteer club deciding the ground it already owns can still hold something new.
If a Saturday evening in the Grove gets you thinking about what else has changed in Karns lately, or what your own corner of the neighborhood is actually worth in today's market, The REAL ESTATE Office is a locally owned, non-franchise brokerage with roots in both Anderson and Knox counties. Reach out for a free home valuation whenever you're curious, no pressure, no obligation.
