At first glance, Macon looks and feels like Greenville did around the turn of this century. Just as they do in Greenville, cranes lean into Macon’s low-cut skyline. But then, as you cruise onto Cherry Street, you see a near replica of Greenville’s Main Street in the late 1990s, early 2000s — before GreenVegas’ award-winning downtown became a metro-sclerotic zone of Southern-fusion flair.
As Greenville’s old-timers’ll tell you, you used to could stand in the middle of Main at night without seeing a car. Back then, it’d take you an hour to stroll along the empty sidewalks because you’d run into all your friends and catch up on the latest dish about everyone in town.
In Central Georgia, you can stand in the middle of Macon’s traffic-thin main drag on weeknights and . . . just . . . listen.
Musical streets of Macon
Grateful Dead and Little Feat and “Sweet Melissa,” from Macon’s cherished Southern rock pioneers, the Allman Brothers Band, play over the sidewalk in front of Fresh Produce Records.
Across the street, at Parish on Cherry, Big Mike plays “Please Come to Boston” and “Margaritaville.” Pausing between covers on that cool Tuesday evening, he says his band has the night off—so you check out Big Mike & the Booty Papas on Spotify, where their slap-your-mama-tasty blues have 500,000-some streams.
“How you gonna be in Macon, Georgia, without playing a little Macon music?” the big, tattooed baritone says to the patio cocktailers. Then he slides into Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” released in December 1967, barely a month after the King of Soul died in a plane crash at age 26—the first posthumous chart-topper in US history.
In the ’60s and ’70s, Redding, the Allmans, and Little Richard put Macon on the map. Now the city is banking on all those notes to pull in banknotes that will play that history forward.
Let’s take a 33½-rpm spin through Macon’s repertoire of sights and sounds.
First stop, Hotel Forty Five, where the Do Not Disturb cards read: “I’m working on my next big hit.”
The boutique hotel, named for 45-rpm records, sits directly across the street from the construction site for the Otis Redding Center for the Arts. When completed, the 9.000-square-foot campus will house recording and performance spaces, music camps, education programs, and on and on.
Live Music Scene
Grant’s Lounge bills itself as “The Original Home of Southern Rock.” Opened in 1971, the venue-bar still rocks Poplar Street, a mere two blocks from Cherry. Every Wednesday night, Charles Davis, who’s also a morning radio personality at the hyper-local 100.9 FM-The Creek, leads the Macon Music Revue. The five-piece band starts at 7 and scorches through two hours of Macon’s sprawling catalog.
One of 22 bars, clubs, taprooms, theaters, pubs, and restaurants that offer live music all within a five-block radius, Grant’s on Wednesday nights charges a $7 cover. The city gets grant funding to pay the band.
“The history never died, and Macon said, ‘We’re going to reinvest in that,’” Davis said the night before over a craft beer at the Rookery, where the menu includes the Little Richard Pennimelt (sort of a black Angus Reuben) and a mean double-chocolate shake … and live music.
Davis started investing his time in the local music scene when he was 21 and working in a restaurant. A friend, Pop, heard him singing from the kitchen, he says. Next thing he knew, he was recording music. Next thing we know, he’s wiping his forehead with a white bar towel as the band rips the joint with R&B, blues, rock, and soul-funk.
Kirk West sits among Grant’s crowd of 60 or 70 people sipping beers and munching pork chop sandwiches. The retired rock ‘n’ roll photographer spent 50 years shooting the likes of Bob Marley, Frank Zappa, and Bruce Springsteen, among others. He later moved South and spent 20 years as the Allmans’ road manager, their “tour mystic,” as his Gallery West website says. In the early ’70s, Kirk and Kirsten West owned the Big House, where the musicians lived with their families, friends, and roadies from 1970 to 1973.
Before that, they decamped in one of the then-dilapidated antebellum mansions along College Street. Next door, where mildew mottled a Victorian home and vines clung to life on its Corinthian columns, the guys posed for the cover of their 1969 self-titled debut album. (West didn’t take that picture, a New York photographer did.)
Big House in Macon
Today, the Allmans’ erstwhile crash pad is gone. But the renovated manse at 315 College St. now houses the Robert McDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University, an elegant two-story school for classical music.
Patty Crowe, the center’s operations manager, says Macon embraces artists of any genre and any age, from budding hometown shredders to latter-day country stars like Jason Aldean.
“If you’ve got a song that you want to sing or you want to come on stage,” she says, “we’ll listen to you. We’ll give you a chance.”
As a kid washing dishes at the Macon Greyhound station, Richard Penniman came up with “Awap bop a lup bop a wop bam bam, take ’em out,” according to a sign at the Little Richard House Resource Center. He was born in that 800-square-foot home—much like the ones in Greenville’s old mill villages—and with his 11 brothers and sisters and his parents.
Three years before Little Richard died in 2020, Macon invested in its history again, moving the house a mile from its original location to 416 Craft St.
Along his way, Richard would meet Eskew Reeder, a gay Greenvillian with a pompadour, pencil-thin mustache, makeup, sunglasses, and light-your-ass-on-fire piano work. Performing as “Esquerita,” he offered Richard advice and inspiration, according to Robert Banks, the house’s administrator. Unlike his avatar, Banks says Penniman rose to fame because he left town when he was young, got radio play nationwide, appeared in movies and TV, and toured up until 2013.
Macon Musicology
As Banks says, Richard never stopped talking about his hometown.
A mile away from the grim Pleasant Hill neighborhood, Inez Hill and Louise Hudson knew an investment when they could feed one.
Jessica Walden, president and CEO of the Greater Macon Chamber of Commerce, tells the story over an eggs-and-biscuit breakfast.
When they founded the H&H Restaurant in 1959, the ladies not only kept their soul-food establishment desegregated, they would also pick up tabs for some skinny, White, shaggy-haired regulars.
“Yup, these two women were generous enough to feed them, and they told the ladies they could pay them back when they got back from being on tour. And those guys were the Allman Brothers.”
Walden knows. Her uncle, Phil Walden, cofounded Capricorn Records, which is now a Mercer University-owned museum and studio, a half-mile walk from the H&H. (Greenville’s own Marcus King laid down some tracks there recently.) Walden’s father, Alan Walden, published a few songs you’ve heard: “Freebird,” “Gimme Three Steps,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Simple Man.” He was also Lynyrd Skynyrd’s tour manager.
Jessica also operates Rock Candy Tours, which gives her even more opportunities to share the city’s musicology and its musically driven economic development.
“It is a good business plan; it worked for Macon then and it’s going to continue to work for us now because it’s allowed us to do the impossible over and over again. There’s a spirit that comes with it,” she says, mentioning, as others do, about downtown’s past struggles.
Davis echoes her sentiments: “We understand what people say about us, our history. We’re always respectful of that. But we also know what we have coming down the pipeline. And we know those things are good.”
Summing up the Macon experience at the end of the Grant’s show, he tells the crowd, “If you have a life worth living, you have a night like this.”
