National Museum of African American Music Is Getting Closer to Opening In Nashville: Details

Hicks says the museum has met about 75 percent of its fundraising goal and construction on the museum will be completed at the “very end” of 2019 with the museum slated to open either later this year or in early 2020. On Feb. 19, the museum announced it was $1 million closer to its goal thanks to a joint gift from the Regions Foundation and the Mike Curb Foundation.

Next week, the museum expects to release rates and information for members of the community who would like to become “founding members.”

As the museum finalizes its plans, Hicks spoke to Billboard about what to expect.

Billboard: Why Nashville?

H. Beecher Hicks, III: Why not Nashville? Nashville really is America’s music city. We like to say that if you look at it from a little bit of a historical presence, Nashville and Tennessee are like the crossroads of American music. Really, it was born in the South and then at the end of slavery and the beginning of The Great Migration, when our grandparents began to migrate North, whether they were going to Detroit or New York or Los Angeles, they very possibly went through Tennessee. So they left breadcrumbs in Memphis and left breadcrumbs in Nashville and breadcrumbs in Johnson City. Tennessee really, in so many ways, is kind of the crucible center of American music, even though in more modern times it’s been more prominent in other cities. We’re just bringing it back home.

What will the first temporary exhibit be about?

It will be on the Fisk Jubilee Singers and their impact on funding for [Historically Black Colleges and Universities]. In particular, the chorus and glee clubs that are such an important part of the HBCU experience.

You’ve partnered with a few artists, such as Darius Rucker and India.Arie, to get this done. How important were those partnerships for the museum?

We certainly make lots of friends along the way. Like anything else that you’re creating, it’s the one-on-one relationships [that matter]. You kind of get together with folks to kind of see and tell the story. You help them understand what’s in it for them, what’s in it for the culture [and] what’s in it for the community.

Black music has touched every genre of American music. How do you decide what goes into this museum?

We’re very fortunate that we have a skilled staff and a really skilled group of consultants that are working with us. We started out going to ethnomusicologists and music scholars around the country several years ago and asking them to tell us their stories of the music that African Americans have the most impact on around the nation. That was sort of boiled down into a storyline. Then we brought on a senior scholar, a woman by the name of Dr. Portia Maultsby, who is [the lead ethnomusicologist at the museum]. We have since hired a staff of curators who are experts in their own right in blues, jazz and in public history.