Otis Redding's childhood — Macon, Georgia

Otis Ray Redding Jr. was born on September 9, 1941, in Dawson, a small town in southwest Georgia, but grew up in Macon — specifically in the Tindall Heights housing project, a public housing development in the city's Black community. His father was a sharecropper who moved the family to Macon when Otis was a child in search of better prospects. Macon in the 1950s had a vibrant African-American cultural and musical life centred around the same circuits — churches, juke joints, talent shows — that produced James Brown, who is also from the area, and through which a young Otis Redding came to the attention of local musicians and promoters.

He began performing in talent shows at the Douglas Theatre on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Macon, winning the contest so many consecutive times that he was eventually barred from entering. He formed his first band, the Pinetoppers, as a teenager and played local shows around central Georgia before his connection to Phil Walden — a white University of Georgia student who became his manager — and to the Stax Records world in Memphis opened his national career. Macon remained his home base throughout his career; he bought a farm outside the city, the Big O Ranch, and was building his life there when he was killed in the plane crash near Madison, Wisconsin, in December 1967.

Macon honours Redding with several memorials, including a statue and the Otis Redding Foundation, which continues educational music programs in the city. The Douglass Theatre on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard — where he won those early talent shows — has been restored and still operates as a performing arts venue, one of the most direct physical connections to his early career.