Pep's Musical Bar site / Walk of Fame

You're standing on the jazz corner. Broad and South was the crossroads of Black musical Philadelphia in the 1950s — the place the whole neighborhood you've been walking pointed toward. Pep's Musical Bar was here, the Showboat you just passed was a block or two back, and between them and the rooms nearby, this corner heard Coltrane, Nina Simone, Thelonious Monk. If you wanted to hear the future of jazz, you came to South Broad.

Now look down at the sidewalk. In 2015, on the hundredth anniversary of her birth, the Philadelphia Music Alliance set a bronze plaque here in her honor, part of the Walk of Fame that runs along the Avenue of the Arts. It's a small, easy-to-miss thing underfoot — and it's one of the very few places in this city that says her name out loud. A woman Philadelphia arrested twice is now cast in bronze in Philadelphia's sidewalk. Both of those things are true, and this tour keeps them both.

A note of honesty, because this tour makes a promise about the truth. You'll sometimes read that Billie headlined at Pep's on this corner. We can't verify a single dated booking there, so we won't claim one. What we can stand on is the plaque under your feet and the Showboat around the corner — the documented ground of her Philadelphia, not the legend.

For the sound of this corner, the song on your screen is “Fine and Mellow” — the flip side of “Strange Fruit,” and the number she turned into television history on a 1957 broadcast, trading choruses with the tenor players who loved her. When you've found the plaque, we continue down the corridor. Head south on Broad about two blocks, to 736. A living jazz institution is waiting there.