The Lorraine Motel balcony to the Battle Above the Clouds
Tennessee's two most weighted civic landscapes, about 235 nautical miles apart. KMEM Memphis is closest to the Lorraine Motel, preserved as the National Civil Rights Museum on the spot where Dr. King was assassinated April 4, 1968; to Beale Street, the blues' main street; and to Sun Studio on Union Avenue, where Sam Phillips recorded Howlin' Wolf, then Elvis, then Johnny Cash, and where Elvis, Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis crowded around one piano on a December day in 1956 while the tape ran. East to KCHA Lovell Field Chattanooga for Lookout Mountain, where Hooker's troops climbed through the fog on November 24, 1863, in the Battle Above the Clouds that helped break the siege of Chattanooga, the rail gateway to the Deep South. The mountain stacks its attractions: Point Park on the battlefield summit, Rock City's Lover's Leap on the brow, and Ruby Falls pouring inside a cave more than a thousand feet down.