A cathedral for country music

Southern Living, Dec 2001 by Cook, Lynnmarie P

Nashville's Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum is claiming new converts to its art form.

I'll admit I was a skeptic. Granted, this new Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum is touted as a triumph for the industry and a coup for the city. But I'm not a huge country music fan.

So when I visited the facility in the heart of downtown Nashville, I was prepared to be respectful but not reverent, well-mannered but not moved.

That is, until I saw it on the back of a piece of junk mail: Roger Miller's scrawled and scratched lyrics to "King of the Road." I saw the words, and I was transfixed. I stared as though it were a map to buried treasure.

Perhaps it was. There, encased in plate glass, lay my childhood encapsulated. My father's favorite song from 1965, the song he loved to play before he went off to war. Those lyrics struck a deep and powerful chord.

I understood then the power of the museum, the synergy of its assortment of artifacts-of Minnie Pearl's hat, price tag intact. Of Maybelle Carter's 1927 Gibson guitar, Willie Nelson's bandanna, and Elvis's gold-encrusted Cadillac. To some, they're curiosities; to others, they resonate with meaning.

Last spring, the Hall of Fame, orig

inally located on Music Row since 1967, moved into a $37-million mecca of sorts in the heart of the city. The building ascends from a former parking lot on the west bank of the Cumberland River, just a few steps from the Ryman Auditorium and the Lower Broadway honky-tonks.

The 130,000-square-foot facility, with almost three times the exhibit space of the first location, is built of glass, brick, and limestone. From the air, the building looks like a bass clef.

Throughout the 40,000 square feet of museum space, exhibits chronicle country music's history from its rural origins to present-day popularity. The journey begins on the third floor, tracing the roots of country music from Anglo-Irish folk songs to blues and spirituals, early popular music, and the radio age. Each key era and influence is treated in turn: the cowboy singers, the boom of the 1940s, honky-tonk, rockabilly, and the West Coast sound.

The galleries arc around a glassed-in central core where vast archivessome 300,000 records and other treasures--are housed and where you can watch researchers, archivists, and sound curators at work.

Next, you progress down a suspended spiral staircase to the second floor to visit the modern music scene as it has unfolded since the 1970s. Across a massive wall hangs every gold and platinum record in the 20th century history of the music. Here's where you'll find the Dixie Chicks' safety pin-studded stage costumes, an exact re-creation of producer Owen Bradley's office, and talismanic manuscripts like Roger Miller's.

Your final stop on the journey is the 70-foot-high rotunda, the heart and soul of the Hall of Fame (and the dot of the bass clef when viewed from high above). The 86 plaques for members who have achieved Hall of Fame status-the highest honor in country music-are hung around the room at intervals to resemble notes on a lined sheet of music. Straight ahead in the room is American artist Thomas Hart Benton's last painting, The Sources of Country Music.

High above it all hang the words "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" symbolic of the room where artists are enshrined as equals. It's also the title of a Carter family tune that embodies the spirit of the country music genre.

Then there's the water-you hardly notice it at first. Water springs from a fountain within the Hall of Fame, and then flows alongside the 200foot-long staircase and pools in a wishing well in the lobby below. The water's origin symbolizes the wellspring of country music's roots.

The effect is powerful. In fact, it's a spiritual experience. I'm a convert.

LYNNMARIE P. COOK

Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum: 222 Fifth Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37203; (615) 4162001, 1-800-852-6437, or www. countrymusichalloffame.com. Admission: $14.95 adults, $7.95 ages 6-15. Hours: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. daily, except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day.