"When it's gone, it's gone": Teresa Knox, the Church Studio, and our responsibility to history

I visited The Church Studio in September 2025 on my way to move my older daughter to Phoenix. That’s when I met Teresa Knox, the dogged historic preservationist and music lover who saved the studio Leon Russell founded in a church building in Tulsa.

Tulsa, Oklahoma is a genuine crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture—and nowhere is that more evident than at The Church Studio, the century-old sanctuary that Leon Russell transformed into one of the most storied recording spaces in American music.

Teresa Knox—founder, volunteer CEO, and graduate/founder of the School of Hard Knox—saved the building after decades of neglect and turned it into something that defies easy categorization: a working analog recording studio, a living archive, an audio engineering school, a community anchor, and one of the most compelling historic sites in the country.

Our Crossroads

Teresa and I each feels history and place in our bones, whether standing in front of a building, a grave, or a stage. We share a foundational belief that historic sites only matter if they’re relevant, and that relevance has to be earned every single day.

We’re both obsessives about provenance and authenticity—Teresa spent years restoring The Church Studio down to bedrock, following National Park Service standards to the letter, while I spent years researching Duane Allman .

And we both came to our particular obsessions through music that hit us young and never let go—for Teresa, an eight-year-old girl discovering Leon Russell on a Slurpee cup; for me, a Florida kid hearing Southern rock and thinking, “Those are my people.”

(She shared her Allman Brothers Slurpee cup with me.)

The Conversation

Teresa’s story begins with shame and pride in equal measure—growing up poor in Tulsa, learning everything she could about Oklahoma history and famous Oklahomans, and finding in Leon Russell a scraggly-haired kid from her exact hometown who made it onto a convenience store cup. That fierce pride in place became the engine for everything that followed, including buying (sight unseen) The Church, a dilapidated building in the Pearl District of Tulsa and spending six-and-a-half years restoring it.

We dig into the deliberately hybrid business model that keeps the Church Studio alive—recording revenue, memberships, gate admissions, a bar, an audio engineering school, live music three days a week, and a digital content operation generating 1.5 to 2 million YouTube views a month.

Teresa is clear-eyed about what historic sites can and can’t sustain, and her analysis of why the Church had to go back to being a working studio is some of the sharpest institutional thinking I’ve encountered.

The preservation ethics conversation goes deep—the decision to leave the permastone exterior rather than strip it back to brick, the three distinct aesthetic periods layered inside the building, and the painful saga of the historic tax credit that got pulled after Teresa had already spent the money to qualify. I have some thoughts about the Oklahoma Historic Preservation Office. Teresa is more gracious than I am.

The Founder’s Dilemma comes up—Teresa has read the book and recognized herself in it. Her strategic thinking about her own eventual exit, about making the institution bigger than Leon Russell and bigger than Teresa Knox, is the mark of a genuinely mature leader.

We close on Mad Dogs and Englishmen and Learning to Live Together—the women of that tour, Rita Coolidge, Chris O’Dell, Claudia Lennear—and the throughline from Leon Russell to Delaney and Bonnie to the Allman Brothers Band and to the Tedeschi Trucks Band.

She tells a great story of Derek Trucks arriving to the Church drenched in sweat after a six-mile scooter ride in 110-degree Tulsa heat and Susan Tedeschi teary over the Linda Wolf lenticular. That’s what this place does to people.

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About Teresa Knox

Teresa Knox is the founder and volunteer CEO of the Church Studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma—Leon Russell’s historic recording studio, now a working analog studio, living archive, audio engineering school, and community music hub. She is the author of a wonderful book, Sanctuary of Sound. Find everything at thechurchstudio.com and schoolofhardknox.com.

Resources

Books

* Teresa Knox, Sanctuary of Sound: The Church Studio Story (2025)

* Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East—https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505

* Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History by Bill Janovitz

Video/Film

* This is Teresa Knox - The Church Studio | Tulsa Oklahoma (podcast interview I reference)

* Mad Dogs and Englishmen (documentary)

* Learning to Live Together (documentary)

History institutions

* OK Pop, Tulsa—https://okpop.org

* Bob Dylan Center, Tulsa—https://bobdylancenter.com

* Woody Guthrie Center, Tulsa—https://woodyguthriecenter.org

Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East

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