Macon, GA

Macon may have put more soul into American music per inhabitant than any other city. Little Richard was born here and secularised gospel into rock and roll; Otis Redding grew up here singing in its churches and lies buried at his ranch nearby, the city's most beloved son; James Brown cut his first record in a Macon radio station; and in 1969 Capricorn Records made the city the capital of Southern rock, with the Allman Brothers Band living communally in the "Big House", now the shrine-museum of the genre. Few blocks in America have heard so much future history rehearsed.

The city that produced all this is itself a beauty: white-columned antebellum mansions like the Hay House survived the Civil War intact, and each March some 350,000 Yoshino cherry trees — more than Washington — turn Macon pink for its Cherry Blossom Festival. The deepest history lies at the city's edge: Ocmulgee Mounds, the great earthworks of a thousand-year-old Mississippian ceremonial centre, preserve seventeen millennia of continuous human presence on the river. Concert life proceeds in the city's historic theatres and halls, from the Grand Opera House — one of the South's venerable stages — outward. Mounds, magnolias and the birth-cries of soul: Macon is the American South, fully scored.