John Coltrane Birthplace — Hamlet, North Carolina

John William Coltrane was born on September 23, 1926, in Hamlet, North Carolina — a railroad junction town in Richmond County — and grew up in High Point and Hamlet, moving between relatives after his father died when he was twelve. He began playing clarinet and alto saxophone in school bands before the family relocated to Philadelphia during the Second World War, where the city's rich jazz scene — and an encounter with bebop — transformed his musical direction. He played in Navy bands, absorbed the innovations of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and by the early 1950s was working his way into the Philadelphia and then New York jazz worlds.

Coltrane's career encompassed several distinct phases, each of which redefined what jazz could contain: his hard bop period with Miles Davis (captured on "Kind of Blue," 1959); the "sheets of sound" style developed in his quartet recordings of the early 1960s ("My Favorite Things," "A Love Supreme," 1964); and the increasingly free, spiritually motivated music of his final years ("Ascension," "Interstellar Space"). "A Love Supreme" — a four-part suite conceived as a direct offering to God — is one of the most emotionally and spiritually ambitious recordings in any musical tradition. He died from liver cancer on July 17, 1967, at the age of 40.

Hamlet and High Point, North Carolina, both acknowledge Coltrane's origins. The John Coltrane International Jazz and Blues Festival has been held in High Point, where he grew up, and a historical marker stands near his childhood home there. The Hamlet train depot, where his father worked, is now a preserved railway museum. A church in San Francisco — the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church — has worshipped through his music since 1971.