Thelonious Monk Birthplace — Rocky Mount, North Carolina

Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and moved with his family to New York City's San Juan Hill neighbourhood in Manhattan at the age of four. He is inseparable from the New York jazz world, but Rocky Mount has claimed his origins with a historical marker and periodic celebrations of his legacy. He taught himself piano, played in church, and by the early 1940s was a central figure in the bebop revolution that was reshaping jazz at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem — the informal jam session venue where Monk served as house pianist and where Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Kenny Clarke, and others gathered to develop the new music.

Monk's piano style was instantly recognisable and entirely unlike anyone else's: angular, full of silences and unexpected accents, with a percussive attack that treated the piano as a rhythmic as much as a melodic instrument. His compositions — "Round Midnight," "Straight, No Chaser," "Blue Monk," "Well You Needn't," "Epistrophy" — are among the most performed in jazz and have the quality of being simultaneously strange and inevitable. He was also a notoriously eccentric personality: his hats, his dancing on stage, his long silences, and his refusal to explain his music were expressions of a genuine inner world rather than performance.

Rocky Mount has invested in celebrating Monk's legacy through the Thelonious Monk Institute partnerships and local initiatives. New York City, where his actual story unfolded, is the appropriate centre of his geographical legacy: the 63rd Street apartment in Manhattan where he lived for decades with his wife Nellie, and Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, are the addresses most associated with his life. He died on February 17, 1982, in Englewood, New Jersey.