Country Singer Who Had an Art Museum in New Mexico

Featured in the museum's showtime temporary exhibition, the Fisk Jubilee Singers introduced spirituals to audiences around the globe. dangoat via Flickr under CC By two.0

Much of the story of the United States can be told through black music, from the instruments brought to the country past enslaved Africans to the development of jazz and the blues in the Jim Crow era and the stone and hip-hop artists who continue to shape culture today. Now, a new cultural establishment is dedicated to telling that 400-year story: the National Museum of African American Music, which opened in Nashville, Tennessee, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

"Most music museums deal with a characterization, a genre or an artist," H. Beecher Hicks III, the museum's president and CEO, tells the Associated Press' Kristin M. Hall. "And so it's one thing to say that I'm a hip hop fan or I'm a blues fan, but why? What was going on in our country and our lived feel and our political surroundings that fabricated that music so moving, then inspirational, such the soundtrack for that part of our lives?"

Exhibitions will describe on a collection of ane,600 artifacts, including ane of Ella Fitzgerald's Grammy Awards and a guitar owned by B.B. Male monarch. Visitors can also accept part in interactive activities similar learning dance moves from a virtual instructor, singing "Oh Happy 24-hour interval" with a gospel choir and making hip-hop beats. Guests receive wristbands that let them to tape and take habitation their creations.

As Kristen Rogers reports for CNN, the museum experience begins with a motion-picture show that roots the black American musical tradition in West and Key African music.

Artist's rendering of Harlem Renaissance display at the museum National Museum of African American Music

"Every bit enslaved people, they brought their music traditions," says the museum'due south curatorial managing director, ethnomusicologist Dina Bennett, in the video. "Many times their instruments were taken abroad from them, considering their instruments were used to communicate with each other. Just they yet had their voice."

Visitors can walk through the museum forth "Rivers of Rhythm" pathways tracing thirteen historical eras. The pathways characteristic interactive panels that brandish data about the social and political situations connected to particular musical developments. 1 gallery looks at how field hollers, a type of music sung by enslaved people, evolved into the blues, which in turn influenced both country music and rock. Other interactive exhibits look at specific artists' influences, including how many famous white musicians drew on black music. The Rolling Stones, for example, drew inspiration—and their proper name—from blues vocalizer Dingy Waters, while Elvis Presley'due south hit "Hound Dog" was first recorded past Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton.

"For not-African Americans," Hicks tells CNN, "I hope that they would realize that African Americans are at the eye of American civilization in a style that they peradventure never considered."

The museum has been in the works since 1998, when Nashville business leaders and civil rights advocates Francis Guess and T.B. Boyd conceived the thought of an establishment defended to black arts and culture, according to a statement. Per Kelundra Smith of the New York Times , the Nashville Area Sleeping room of Commerce conducted a feasibility study on the museum, and in 2011, organizers narrowed its focus to music. The museum now occupies 56,000 foursquare feet of space in downtown Nashville.

Artist's rendering of interactive displays at the museum National Museum of African American Music

Writing for Nashville Scene , Ron Wynn notes that when plans for the museum were but getting started, many observers questioned why the city made sense as its location. Some claimed that, in contrast with cities similar Memphis, Nashville is "non a blackness music town."

Despite the city'due south reputation for a country music scene that hasn't e'er been hospitable to black musicians, Nashville has a storied blackness music history, Wynn explains. The city's Jefferson Street was a hub of R&B in the 1960s. And, years before "Soul Train," Nashville telly stations created syndicated shows that brought blackness musicians' work to a wide audition.

The museum's get-go temporary exhibition is dedicated to a particular piece of Nashville musical history: the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Students at Fisk University formed the a cappella grouping in 1871 to enhance money for what was and then a fledgling schoolhouse for newly freed blackness Americans. The singers traveled around the U.S. and Europe, performing spirituals written by enslaved musicians for audiences that included Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain and Queen Victoria. Their performances not only secured Fisk'southward continued beingness and growth, just introduced spirituals as a musical form to a wide audience.

Singer Shemekia Copeland tells the Times she sees the museum filling a crucial office.

"The music is the people," she says. "Information technology's how we've always expressed ourselves. If the world ended and somebody institute records and they listened, it would tell the story of what happened to us culturally."

The National Museum of African American Music is open up on Saturdays and Sundays in February, with fourth dimension-slotted tickets to allow for social distancing. Masks are required.

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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/national-museum-african-american-music-opens-nashville-180976960/

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