Another side of Nashville: Music City’s ambitious new museum
“Some will no doubt wonder: Why Nashville?” said Barry Mazor in The
Wall Street Journal. But the new National Museum of African American Music, which opened last month across the street from Nashville’s famous Ryman Auditorium, has “succeeded stunningly” in answering the far more crucial challenge of presenting an engaging and thorough 400-year history that “powerfully affirms the centrality of African-American music to this country’s music story as a whole.” A central corridor styled like a river serves as “the jumpingoff point for an incredible journey,” said
Ron Wynn in the Nashville Scene. A short film provides an overview of the larger story while rooting so much of American music since 1619 in the call-and-response song patterns and intricate drumming that originated in Africa. Six galleries branching out like tributaries from the main hall offer excursions into dozens of musical genres and subgenres. “No matter your personal taste, there’s something that will appeal to it.”
James Brown bursts to life in that main hall on a 13-foot video screen, said Tracey Teo in The Atlanta JournalConstitution. Because as brilliant as the museum is at laying out complex history, “it’s also big on fun.” The footage of the Godfather of Soul gives way to Prince belting out “Purple Rain” at his 2007 Super Bowl halftime show, making the kind of cross-generational connections the exhibits excel at. Elsewhere, visitors can don church robes to sing with the backing of a gospel choir, attempt to copy dance moves from various decades, or construct a beat or rap to take home. Sacred relics such as a Louis Armstrong trumpet and a Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes stage costume share space with tributes to lesser-known contributors to a cultural history that spills beyond music itself. Striking 1940s cigar-factory workers get their due for turning a hymn into a protest song that later evolved into the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”
Nashville is not an entirely odd location for the museum, said Travis Levius in Condé Nast Traveler. A century and a half ago, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, from Nashville’s Fisk University, were the first performers to sing black spirituals to audiences overseas, and through the 1960s, the city’s clubs and radio stations were incubators of black musical innovation. But the museum, which realizes a long-gestating dream of local leaders, speaks for itself, said Margaret Renkl in The New York Times.
It sits in dialogue with Music City’s many country music landmarks. Like the best of them, “it honors the musical traditions of the past in a way that helps us understand that the past is never truly past, that it is always tugging up both its treasures and its tragedies and carrying them insistently into the future.”