Hitsville U.S.A. (Motown Museum)

The Motown Museum at 2648 West Grand Boulevard in Detroit — known as Hitsville U.S.A., the name Berry Gordy painted on the front of the building when he purchased it in 1959 — is where the Motown record label was born and where its extraordinary run of hit recordings was made. Gordy founded Motown Records with an $800 loan from his family and converted the two-storey house into a recording studio, business offices, and rehearsal space. Studio A in the basement — a small room with a distinctive drop in the floor that gave it its unusual acoustic properties — is where Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and the Jackson 5 recorded the music that defined American popular culture in the 1960s.

Motown's achievement between 1961 and 1971 was without parallel in American music business history: a Black-owned label in a segregated country producing music that crossed racial boundaries to dominate mainstream radio, charting dozens of top ten singles and creating one of the most recognisable sounds in popular music — the Motown Sound, built on James Jamerson's bass playing, the Funk Brothers session band, and the production sensibility of Gordy and his collaborators. Songs including 'My Girl', 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine', 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours', 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough', and hundreds more were conceived and recorded in this building.

The Motown Museum opened in 1985 and has since received more than a million visitors. It preserves Studio A in its original condition, with the original mixing board, the drop in the floor, and the echo chamber that gave the recordings their distinctive sound. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday; admission is charged and tours are guided. West Grand Boulevard in Detroit's New Center neighbourhood is a short drive from downtown. The museum is one of the most emotionally powerful music heritage experiences in the United States.