Plan for Austin music museum muted
Failed legislation re-energizes idea to build site here
AUSTIN — Like Willie Nelson sang in “The Party’s Over,” a controversial plan by state leaders to build a Texas State Music Museum in Austin had its lights turned out.
Two separate bills that would have established the new museum in the state Capitol complex, in part of a new government office building across from the Bullock State History Museum, died in the Legislature before it adjourned last Monday — burying a plan endorsed by Gov. Greg Abbott and other top officials.
It also ended, at least for now, a push by Austin officials to get bragging rights for the state music museum over Houston. In fact, the death of the legislation is re-energizing supporters of a long-planned music museum in the Bayou City to push ahead with
their plans.
It’s also seen as a boost by others who operate or support music museums statewide. A group of nearly 40 private music museums across Texas that protested the Austin project say the dispute has spurred them to establish a statewide network to showcase the state’s colorful and rich music in ways that a single museum cannot.
“This has not been a doomsday. It has been an epiphany for everyone on the value of the music business in Texas,” said Stephen Williams, a founding member of the Museum of American Music History, a coalition of more than 50 organizations, private collectors and families who he said has been working for years to get the museum located in Houston.
“We’re now energized. We’re moving ahead with our own project that will make this a statewide effort, not just something in Austin,” he said
‘Not going to happen’
Williams and others who operate or support the dozens of private music museums in Texas said a meeting is planned in July at the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame in Carthage to organize those plans. Many of them felt the push for the new Austin attraction was government overreach.
For their part, officials at the State Preservation Board — the state agency that was to oversee the development of the new museum — say they are still reviewing the results of the legislative session.
Aides to Abbott, who chairs the agency’s board, said there are no plans to move ahead with the project.
“The bills didn’t pass. It’s not going to happen right now,” said state Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, a sponsor of the Senate bill that would have established the museum in Austin.
Several bills in previous legislative sessions that were to spur development of a state museum also died. Lively mix of genres
Texas has a rich music history, ranging from the influences of German and Czech immigrants that brought dance halls, oompah bands and polka to the state in the 1800s, to a mix of Mexican folk songs, bluegrass and country songs brought in immigrants from Eastern states. Then there are rhythm and blues, jazz, conjunto, Texas swing and other music styles.
That history was developed in small towns and cities in every corner of Texas, where small museums celebrate and highlight that past. There’s Turkey, where the Bob Wills Museum is located. And San Benito’s Freddy Fender Museum and the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, along with Arlington’s Texas Blues Museum and the Light Crust Doughboys Hall of Fame and Museum in Hillsboro.
There’s even a privately funded Texas Music Museum already in Austin, located less than a mile from where the new museum was to be built.
Most are privately run, and their supporters saw the state proposal for a museum in Austin as a threat to their future.
“Instead of approaching us to be a part of something, they would have undercut us,” said Thomas Kreason, executive director and curator of Irving’s Texas Musicians Museum. It bills itself as “the premiere conservatory of Texas music history” and was established in 2004.
Kreason, who opposed the state plan during a March legislative hearing in Austin, said the current museums want to create an alliance not only to increase public awareness about Texas’ history but to thwart any future moves by state officials to rekindle the museum project.
By rallying support to their cause, through a social media campaign and lobbying of local officials to support them, the private museums said they were able to defeat this latest attempt to centralize Texas music history.
When the Austin project was announced, state and local officials pitched it as something that would complement the capital city’s self-proclaimed status as the “Live Music Capital of the World.”
It was to have been part of a new museum district near the Capitol — with the Bullock and the Blanton Museum of Art — in a project that was to have cost taxpayers nothing. It would have been managed by a new nonprofit foundation that was to have raised its own funding through gate admissions, donations, events rentals and gift shop sales. Abbott was to have named the board of the private foundation.
Austin ‘a bad idea’
In Houston, Williams sees the death of the legislation as a signal for his group to move ahead with plans for their museum, which was to receive a $10 million federal grant from the state several years ago. That money was never released because of politics in Austin, he said, but the designation of Houston as the site for a museum showcasing Texas’ music history still stands.
“We’re going to start fundraising again, because our plans are shovel-ready, and plan to get our project going,” he said. “Our plan is to be an entry point for this trail of music museums all around Texas. A lot of our music history happened within 100 miles of Houston, so it’s the natural place for the Texas Music Hall of Fame.”
And the spring controversy in Austin over the two bills that didn’t pass?
“It’s shown everyone how important this project is,” Williams said, “and why one state museum in Austin was a bad idea.”
“Our plan is to be an entry point for this trail of music museums all around Texas. A lot of our music history happened within 100 miles of Houston, so it’s the natural place for the Texas Music Hall of Fame.” Stephen Williams, Museum of American Music History