![]() ![]() ![]() “Nashville needs this museum, because it’s a musical mecca,” said Moore, who is a national chair for the museum. Keb’ Mo’, a Nashville local who has been involved with the museum since its conception. “Crossroads” also strives to tie the genre to the present by collaborating with living musicians like the blues guitarist Kevin Moore a.k.a. (The museum is open on Saturdays and Sundays in February, and time-slotted tickets are required for a limited number of masked visitors.) With the support of the city and many community members, 56,000 square feet of the Fifth & Broadway complex in downtown Nashville were carved out for the institution. The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce conducted a feasibility study for a museum encompassing African-American culture in 2002 and in 2011, its focus was narrowed to music. In the beginning, they gathered with local leaders for monthly meetings in their living rooms to raise enthusiasm and seed money. Boyd III, then the president and chief executive of the R.H. The idea for the museum, which has been 22 years and $60 million in the making, originated with Francis Guess, a civil rights advocate and Nashville business leader, who shared it with T.B. Last Saturday, the National Museum of African American Music opened in Nashville, with six interactive sections covering 50 genres of music with a focus on gospel, blues, jazz, R&B and hip-hop. Historians, anthologies and exhibitions have traced this path before, but an entire museum hasn’t been devoted to demonstrating and celebrating how Black artists fundamentally shaped American music until now. After Emancipation, the sounds of Africa and field hollers and work hymns from the American South dispersed across the country and transformed into new forms: the blues in Mississippi, jazz in New Orleans and later house music in Chicago and hip-hop in the Bronx. If you want to trace the roots of American popular music, you have to start when Europeans brought enslaved Africans across the Middle Passage. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |