Last Night in Macon (by Anne Margaret Daniel)

2026-04-22, Macon City Auditorium, Macon, GA

Photo by Duncan Hume

Last night, Bob Dylan played his third show ever in Macon, Georgia. Macon is, as you know he knows, the home of Little Richard. And that’s only the start of the city’s musical story. Below, scholar and writer Anne Margaret Daniel reports on the Dylan concert—but first she takes us on a virtual walking tour through Macon’s musical history. Here’s Anne Margaret Daniel:

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A Rambling Man Passes Through Town: Bob Dylan and Macon Music

On Wednesday, April 22—Earth Day—it was close to ninety degrees in Macon, Georgia—summer heat already, on top of a longtime drought that has the huge old magnolia trees already in full bloom, and the red clay ground baked bricklike in all the city’s green open spaces, from parks to cemeteries. After a terrible winter in the Northeast, the hot sun and fragrant air were twin benedictions to me. I roved around town in a sundress, espadrilles, and a straw picture hat, happy and grateful that Bob Dylan had brought me here.

Macon is a completely unique place for a musician to perform, and for a music lover to come and hear that performance. For its size—a population of around 70,000 in the 1960s—Macon is the birthplace of a great number of musicians, including Mildred Bryant Jones, Lucille Hegamin, Veronica “Randy” Crawford, Richard “Little Richard” Penniman, and Jason Aldean. Other musicians gravitated to the town young, and remained there, now claimed lovingly by the town as native sons: Bill Berry, Otis Redding, and the Allman Brothers Band.

Back in 1958, Bob Zimmerman styled his hair in a wild curly pompadour, and the following year the Hibbing High Hematite yearbook predicted Bob’s future: “to join Little Richard.”

Richard (whose name was meant to be Ricardo, but his birth certificate erred) Wayne Penniman was the third of twelve children born to Leva Mae and Bud Penniman. As a little boy in Macon in the 1940s, Richard was known for singing loudly in local churches, and on the porch steps of his family’s two-rooms-and-a-hallway shotgun home. When his idol Sister Rosetta Tharpe played the City Auditorium in 1947, she invited the fourteen-year-old to open for her after hearing him singing her songs outside the venue.

The Penniman home place, moved to the historic and aptly named Pleasant Hill neighborhood when threatened by highway expansion, is now a local treasure: Little Richard House and Resource Center. The skinny hallway with its pine plank floorboards is where Richard slept in bunk beds with his host of brothers and sisters. The piano he played when Mercer University awarded him an honorary Doctorate in Humanities is on the back patio, and you can play it, too, if you dare. When you go, ask for Rose Hunt-Person to give you the tour—this elegant lady knows all about Little Richard and his career, and the neighborhood and cultural events all across town.

Little Richard’s birthplace. This and subsequent photos courtesy Anne Margaret Daniel

Otis Redding was born in nearby Dawson—in 1941, just like Dylan—but grew up and began his musical career in Macon. As a teenager he played with Little Richard’s band The Upsetters. Redding was just 21 when he had his first hit single, “These Arms of Mine,” in 1962. His commitment to helping other young performers was already significant by 1967—he ran camps for kids at his brand-new ranch in Round Oak, Georgia, and sponsored college scholarships for local high schoolers. In December of that year, Redding was in his Beechcraft Model 18 when it crashed into a lake near Madison, Wisconsin, killing the singer and four members of his backing band the Bar-Kays; only trumpeter Ben Cauley survived. Redding’s funeral service was at the City Auditorium in Macon, and crowds filled Cherry Street and Cotton Avenue outside as the 3,000-seat space overflowed. The next month, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” went to number one on the Billboard charts.