Richmond, IN

Richmond, Indiana — the venue in the event records, the Civic Hall Performing Arts Center, fixes this entry to the Hoosier city rather than Virginia's capital (a note for the registry) — holds one of the most consequential addresses in musical history. In the Whitewater River gorge here, the Starr Piano Company's side business, Gennett Records, recorded in the 1920s the founding documents of American music: King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band with the young Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Jelly Roll Morton and Hoagy Carmichael all cut early sides in the little studio beside the railroad tracks, where sessions paused for passing trains. The "cradle of recorded jazz" is remembered with a Walk of Fame of medallions along the gorge.

The Quaker-founded city — its Friends heritage made it an early stronghold of abolition and of Earlham College, the respected Quaker liberal-arts school — also styles itself a city of roses, its rose garden a legacy of the Hill floral empire that once shipped blooms nationwide. Civic Hall, the restored auditorium at the heart of the community's schools campus, carries the concert tradition as the city's touring stage. A modest Indiana county seat that happens to hold jazz's birth certificates: Richmond is the archive's kind of town.