Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong

The filmmaker Terry Zwigoff was so taken with State Street Rag, which Armstrong and the guitarist Ted Bogan cut in 1934, that he went looking for him, and his hour-long portrait Louie Bluie came out in 1985 and found Armstrong a new audience. Martin, Bogan and Armstrong had already made records for Rounder and Flying Fish in the 1970s. In 1990 he received a National Heritage Fellowship, the federal government's highest honor in the folk arts. He also designed album covers and the juke joint set for The Color Purple.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Norris Dam and Norris Dam State Park — 11 mi
  TVA's first dam, finished in 1936 on the Clinch River, and the state park beside it with the 1798 Rice Grist Mill, built for a valley whose families were moved out.
• Museum of Appalachia — 14 mi
  John Rice Irwin's 65-acre collection of moved log cabins and mountain objects north of Knoxville, opened in 1969, with a cabin believed to be Mark Twain's father's.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 19 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• Frozen Head State Park — 26 mi
  A 24,000-acre Cumberland Mountains park around a 3,324-foot peak, made from Brushy Mountain prison lands and the CCC, and home to the Barkley Marathons.

More markers nearby

• Big Creek Gap — 0.5 mi
• The Coal Creek War — 14 mi
• Kentucky-TN, Campbell — 15 mi
• The Market Place of Pearls — 19 mi