Keeping it with the positive jams.
A sommelier can, from a single sip of wine, tell you where the grapes were grown. Not just a general idea, but often a specific vineyard, and, with some potentially dubious cases, the exact location within that vineyard. The wine is truly a product of its birthplace, and it carries within itself the qualities of that place, a marker of the place of time from which it sprung.
In the same way, I think, certain musicians carry markers of where they're from - not necessarily their place of birth, but where the grew up, and where they truly found their home.
