Adam Paris
New twang is being ushered into the heart and lungs of bluegrass music—right in downtown Owensboro, home of the new Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum. Established in 1991 as the International Bluegrass Music Museum, the rebranded and expanded “international treasure with American roots” is kicking off Oct. 18-20 under a new name and in a new $15.3-million facility celebrating the origins, history and future of bluegrass music.
The museum’s refreshed image—part of a recent, multimillion-dollar riverfront restoration—was “basically to align ourselves with other music museums … and creating that destination experience such as the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” said Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum Marketing Director Carly Smith. “Our mission is basically to preserve, exhibit, disseminate all the artifacts in history and the performance art of the global history of bluegrass music—because it is a global genre—and we’re the only museum that’s dedicated to preserving the international scope of bluegrass music.”
With two floors of exhibit space, the museum is sure to live up to that mission. On the second floor, alongside the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame exhibition, are two temporary galleries “so there will always be something different,” Smith said. “We want people to come back and see what else we have going on, so those exhibits will stay fresh and keep changing.”
Not unlike sentimental and nostalgic bluegrass music as a whole, the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum is dedicated to looking both back and ahead: on the roots and the future of bluegrass, and on both preservation and education. “We like to be that repository for all artifacts that are related to bluegrass music,” Smith said. This attitude is exemplified in the museum’s Picker’s Corner, a wall of donated instruments that serves as a finely tuned interactive exhibit.
Adam Paris
Through grants, the museum is able to provide heavily discounted lessons in guitar, mandolin, banjo and fiddle—instruments included—to nearly 350 students per year. With its Bluegrass in the Schools program, or BITS, multi-state fiddling champion and museum education director Randy Lanham works alongside Daviess County elementary school music teachers to put instruments into kids’ hands, reaching more than 9,000 students per year. “This may be the first time they’ve held a stringed instrument, you know?” Smith said. “So that’s always amazing … The education side is growing the music, we feel.”
A museum and hall of fame is not all there is to the updated attraction; it’s also a performance space. The new facility boasts an outdoor stage facing the Ohio River; first-rate dressing rooms; event spaces for rental; and the 447-seat, state-of-the-art Woodward Theater, named after Terry Woodward, a local businessman and a founding member and chairman of the first IBMA’s board of the directors, who kickstarted this bluegrass dream six years ago.
The potential for the museum’s growth was shown by increased turnouts to Owensboro’s ROMP bluegrass music festival, which just celebrated its 15th anniversary in June. “We’re seeing that people, once they came and experienced it one time, they came back,” Smith said. “I think ROMP kind of was the gateway to the museum, especially for … the local population, just because they understand how ROMP works. They enjoy that festival; they enjoy it as an event, so it hopefully will translate with our live shows that we will have at the museum.” It also showed that fans will travel far for anything related to bluegrass music, she said.
“The goal,” she added, “is to become a destination for any bluegrass fan.”
For the museum, the new possibility of offering outdoor concerts and festivals is particularly exciting, “because that’s how people consume bluegrass music today—by going to a music festival and seeing it live,” Smith said. “And that’s just the perfect setting, being that we’re on the newly renovated Owensboro Ohio riverfront.”
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The timing is perfect. Bluegrass is undergoing a resurgence in popularity. “Bands like the Punch Brothers, the Infamous Stringdusters and Leftover Salmon, they’re taking bluegrass music and taking it to new places,” Smith continued. “Newgrass, jamgrass—there’s multiple names for it, but it’s reaching a wider audience—a younger audience.”
These innovators in the genre are “staying true to their instruments,” she added. “They’re just doing something different with it, which I think is really amazing—that, in bluegrass, you can continue to push the boundaries and try new things.”
It just feels right, too, as it’s a bit like bringing bluegrass back to where it began, at the original home of the IBMA before it moved to Nashville. Only a 40-minute drive from Rosine, the birthplace of “Father of Bluegrass” Bill Monroe, it’s only fitting for the revitalized Owensboro to emblazon itself as the beacon for Kentucky’s trademark genre.