Macon Music

Some of America's music greats once called this Georgia town home. Tom Vanderbilt retraces their steps, finding new stories along the way.

- Tom Vanderbilt

THE OLD IDEA of "ley lines" posits that sacred places are linked in the landscape by invisible threads; the points where those lines intersect pulse with a particular energy. It's just a theory, but it feels weirdly right in Macon, the Georgia city that has had an outsize influence on American musical heritage. "There is a ton of history here," said Justin Andrews, grandson of Otis Redding, whose furiously ascendant career was cut short in a plane crash at the age of 26. There's now a small namesake museum on Cotton Avenue dedicated to the legendary singer.

A short stroll in any direction in Macon “the Big M,” as James Brown called it—would put me and my wife and daughter at the spot of some seminal moment. On Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, we visited the now-renovated Douglass Theatre, where Redding played talent shows as a teenager. A few blocks away we found the former site of Ann's Tic Toc Lounge, where Macon native Richard Wayne Penniman—a.k.a. Little Richard—once worked as a busboy. “He would hop on the piano and they would try to kick him off,” Andrews told me. Little Richard, who sometimes performed as a drag queen named Princess LaVonne, typified the duality of life in this religious Southern town.

Nearby sits the studio, cofounded by Redding, of Capricorn Records, the legendary label that churned out more than 30 gold and platinum records and kick-started the Allman Brothers Band. Visitors can view the original recording studio as well as a small museum, where we learned a number of surprising things, including the little-known links between the Allmans and the presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter.

We wandered along Poplar Street, passing