The Country Music Hall of Fame (CMHOF) is honoring the connection between nation and R&B music in a web-based exhibit.
Night Train to Nashville: Music City Rhythm & Blues, 1945-1970 examines the influence of R&B music on Nashville and the way it helps outline it as Music City. The exhibit begins within the late Forties and ’50s, chronicling the legendary R&B artists who carried out within the metropolis, together with Jimi Hendrix, Etta James, Little Richard, and Ray Charles, who was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2022.
Videos, pictures, and audio recordings seize this illustrious time and are rooted in a sequence of themes exploring the roots of R&B music, well-known stay music golf equipment that have been on historic Jefferson Street, a hub of Black tradition and music, together with New Era Club, Club Del Morocco, and Club Baron. Clips from James’ stay album, Etta James Rocks the House, recorded at New Era Club, and Arthur Gunter’s rendition of his self-penned track, “Baby Let’s Play House,” that he recorded for former Nashville indie blues label, Excello Records, and was later lower and made successful by Elvis Presley.
“The multimedia exhibit explores the significant story of Nashville’s vibrant and pioneering R&B scene and its important role in helping the city to become a world-renowned music center,” reads the press launch. This is a digitized model of the exhibit of the identical identify that was on show on the Hall of Fame in 2004 and 2005. It’s accessible free of charge on the museum’s official web site.
As the introduction to the web show provides: “During the years when Nashville grew into its title of Music City USA, Black artists such as Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix spent hours of bandstand apprenticeship in Nashvile’s Black nightclubs. At the same time, Nashville station WLAC blasted rhythm and blues across half the United States when most radio considered the music taboo, and Black and white musicians made hit records together in Nashville studios, in tacit disregard of segregation. As this online exhibit reveals, their music continues to reverberate through American Culture and Music City to this day.”
The exhibit is split into eight on-line chapters, beginning with City Sounds, which examines the origins of Nashville R&B. There are devoted chapters on R&B’s stay, radio and TV scenes, in addition to artists, labels, and producers; the connections with nation music; R&B’s “legacy and lament,” and a closing Public Program Archive of movies, interviews, and extra. These embody panels equivalent to “Sunny” Days: Nashville’s Bobby Hebb and the Hebb Family, Jimi Hendrix in Nashville, and Let’s Trade a Little: The Country-R&B Connection.
The Country Music Hall Of Fame is including an in-person element with a dialog between the Hall of Fame and the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville together with performances by R&B artists, the Fairfield Four’s Levert Allison, Jimmy Church, Peggy Gaines Walker, Frank Howard, Charles Walker, and others on January 25 on the Hall of Fame’s Ford Theater in Nashville.
Listen to the perfect of Jimi Hendrix on Apple Music and Spotify.