Deborah Coddington: If home is not a thriller, just beat it with music

Gary, Indiana, is the saddest place I've visited. Forget slum tourism in Mumbai or New Delhi, where groups stop to peer at children addicted to correction fluid. In Gary, Indiana, there is nothing to see. Unless you count a convention centre - unused. Streets - deserted. Shops - boarded up.

Getting lost in Gary, Indiana, was not on our itinerary. It's rated on the Morgan Quinto crime scale as one of the five most dangerous cities in America (fans of cult TV series The Wire won't be surprised to know Baltimore is another of the five).

You don't stop to ask for directions in Gary. The population of around 100,000 is more than 85 per cent African-American and desperately poor.

Many houses are abandoned and those which are inhabited have grass growing up to the broken-glass windows, peeled-paint doors, half-torn screens, dirty graffiti.

Who cares? Nobody. But don't take my word for it, Google "Gary Indiana photos" and sample a taste of the desolation we experienced, street after street, when our embarrassed Michigan hosts took the wrong highway exit.

But in truth, I was pleased. I'm not a traveller who prefers countries' prettiest profiles. I loathe schlepping around designer boutiques, maxing out credit cards on ridiculously overpriced fripperies popped into carry-bags larger than seafarer's trunks.

I'm not one to nod sagely for hours in front of incomprehensible art installations, headphones clamped to my skull. For all I know, it's the plasterer's tools of trade and he's on a tea break.

Gary, Indiana, was once a thriving steel industry city of 200,000, founded in 1906 by the United States Steel Corporation.

One of those steel workers, a man who laboured as a crane operator, was Joe Jackson, father of the famous five.

Michael Jackson was born in Gary, and spent 11 years there growing up in a little white house. Little Michael was already "discovered" before he left, but once he got out, he rarely went back, much to the locals' chagrin. But they still talk about erecting a memorial, or better still a Gary equivalent of Gracelands. Fat chance.

Gary has no money. When the steel industry declined in the 1960s so did Gary. Half the population fled, leaving a city plagued - to this day - by drug crimes and unemployment.

When Michael Jackson suddenly died I tired of the media coverage. I couldn't see why such a dysfunctional family deserved so much adoration - fighting over the children, the money, the publicity.

But now I see the Jackson family was doomed to be somewhat stuffed up. How could any family born into such a hell-hole of poverty and desolation like Gary, fighting for their existence, remain normal, let alone a family rocketed to stardom and riches like the Jacksons? The only difference was if they had remained in Gary, they'd have been unknown.

So at least Michael Jackson had some happiness in his life. For that small mercy he has music to thank. Music lifted him and his siblings away from this terribly sad, rundown place, south to the warmer climes of California.

And just 40km away in Chicago, once again I saw how music has the magic to transform the lives of the poor.

If you've never heard gospel music live, you've never lived, and in "the Windy City" our ears rang to contemporary gospel from the Soul Children of Chicago, led by musical director Walter Whitman.

Founded 23 years ago by Whitman, more than 1000 kids, mostly African-American, have passed through this choir, rescued from a destiny of "drugs, teen pregnancy and violence off the mean streets of America", Whitman says.

Strong faith and beautiful voices have taken them all over the world, to the White House and a World Cup opening, recording five albums, and backing artists such as Harry Belafonte, Stevie Wonder and Mariah Carey.

The ramped-up version of The Star Spangled Banner they treated us to nearly made bald men grow hair, and when they slipped into Oh Happy Day I recalled our impromptu tour through Gary, Indiana. If a music man like Whitman could gather similar Soul Children in Michael Jackson's home town, then maybe that city, too, might wash its sins away.