Anneliese Place is the founder of Rock ’n’ Roll Highway and creator of the History of Sound project, documenting the infrastructure of sound—the real places where music shaped culture.

Rock ’n’ Roll Highway documents the places where music shaped culture.

Because rock ’n’ roll isn’t just something you hear.
It’s something you can stand in.

From small-town venues to historic streets, legendary stages to overlooked landmarks, the project traces how sound moved through real locations and became part of everyday life.

This is music history told through place.

Rock ’n’ Roll Highway is built from years of travel, documentation, and first-hand experience visiting the places where music history actually happened. What began as a personal journey has grown into a structured effort to map and preserve music landmarks across regions, genres, and generations.

This is not secondhand research. It is lived experience.

Most music history focuses on songs and artists.

Rock ’n’ Roll Highway focuses on where it happened.

The stages. The streets. The clubs. The communities.

These are the physical spaces where sound moved before it was recorded, streamed, or archived. They are the foundation of music culture and identity.

Before music became an industry, it was a system.

It moved through highways, venues, radio stations, and communities, connecting people long before modern distribution existed. Rock ’n’ Roll Highway documents that system, showing how music spread, evolved, and became embedded in culture.

Before music was streamed, it moved through places.

Those places are disappearing.

Rock ’n’ Roll Highway exists to document them before they’re gone.

Rock ’n’ Roll Highway was created by Anneliese Place, a nightlife historian and former live music venue owner who spent years inside the scenes she now documents.

She began as a cocktail waitress and worked her way up to owning The Compound, a live music venue that hosted national touring acts and became part of a regional underground and festival circuit.

Her work has been featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal (December 18, 2020), and she has been quoted in outlets including Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, HuffPost, VinePair, Bar & Restaurant, Nightclub & Bar, and InsideHook. She was also named a Santa Barbara Hometown Hero by the Santa Barbara Independent.

In 2020, Place was recognized with a COVID-19 Hero Award from the ALO Yoga Foundation after organizing a nationwide mask-making effort during the early stages of the pandemic.

After learning that doctors at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center were forced to reuse N95 masks, she taught herself to sew and began producing protective coverings to extend their use. What started as a personal response quickly became a coordinated effort, as she organized volunteer sewers, sourced donated materials, and funded production out of her own savings.

With support from Seymour Duncan, which retooled its manufacturing equipment to cut fabric at scale, the effort expanded rapidly.

Together, the initiative produced and distributed more than 50,000 masks at no cost to recipients, reaching military personnel, healthcare workers, essential workers, homeless communities from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, animal hospitals, and individuals with disabilities, often anonymously and without recognition.

Rock ’n’ Roll Highway connects storytelling, travel, preservation, and technology to make music history visible and accessible in real places.

The platform includes:

Music landmark documentation and storytelling

Rock and roll travel guides and road trip routes

Visual archives of historic music locations

Public art and placemaking initiatives

A growing digital map and app experience

Rock ’n’ Roll Highway currently documents music landmarks across the United States and Europe, with a focus on both iconic locations and overlooked sites that shaped local and national sound.

This is an ongoing archive. A living map. A cultural record built in real time.

Music is not just something you hear.
It is something that happened somewhere.

And those places still matter.

 Rock ’n’ Roll Highway is a nonprofit organization documenting and preserving the history of sound through the places where music shaped culture.

Across North America, Europe, and beyond, it traces how music moved through stages, streets, and communities — functioning as infrastructure long before it became an industry — and became part of everyday life.

Based in Los Angeles, Rock ’n’ Roll Highway champions the diverse voices that built modern music, including women, African American pioneers, LGBTQIA+ artists, and influential creators across genres.

Through storytelling, sponsorship, and advocacy, it honors both iconic and overlooked figures who defined the sound of generations.

  Along the Rock ’n’ Roll Highway, we document the artists who shaped music where it actually happened — from juke joints deep in the Delta to stages around the world.

This includes both today’s icons and the overlooked trailblazers who built the sound of generations.

 Follow the road where music moved through real places. From iconic stages to overlooked streets, Rock ’n’ Roll Highway traces the locations that carried sound across America, Europe, and beyond. This is where rock and roll didn’t just happen — it spread. 

 This is not just a trip. It’s how you find where the music still lives.