Jacksonville, FL

Jacksonville is the largest city by area in the contiguous United States — a municipality the size of a small country, wrapped around the St. Johns, one of the few major rivers in America that flows north. Its musical history runs deeper than outsiders suspect: in the LaVilla district, once called the "Harlem of the South", James Weldon Johnson and his brother John Rosamond wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing" in 1900 — the hymn now honoured as the Black national anthem — and the restored Ritz Theatre keeps the neighbourhood's memory. Early southern rock followed: Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman brothers first played in Jacksonville's clubs.

The archive's stage is the riverfront performing arts centre opened in 1962 as the Civic Auditorium, known through the touring decades as the Times-Union Center for the Performing Arts, and renamed the Jacksonville Center for the Performing Arts in 2022 (a note for the registry). Its three halls include the acoustically fine Jacoby Symphony Hall, home of the Jacksonville Symphony. Around it: the Cummer Museum's gardens on the river, the beaches half an hour east, and the vast salt marshes of the Timucuan preserve — a working port city that wrote one of America's great anthems and rarely mentions it.