National Museum of African American Music — Attraction in Nashville-Davidson

Move the National Museum of African American Music to the top of your priority list if you are visiting Nashville, live in Nashville, or plan to come in the future. As a local, I was completely blown away. Imagine everything you can do with technology today and turn it into a museum experience and you have the NMAAM. First, it sits in Nashville's new 5th + Broadway complex which gives you tons of options for food, shopping, and convenient parking.

Once inside the museum, you're greeted one on one with someone to get you signed up for your RF technology band that will build your experience throughout the museum. Everyone starts in the Roots Theater with a 5-7 minute orientation video. Once out, you're released into a universe of Black heritage music. In the grand hall, huge interactive tables with high definition audio headphones give you a great overview of the music within the galleries. In the Gospel area, Wade Into The Water, you can join the Gospel choir on green screen and sing live with them. The outcome is high quality and hilarious.

In the Urban Renewal section, you can compose your own music in several sound booths. Whether its percussion, bass, or DJing your own free style wrap, you can record it all and save it to your RF reader with the swipe of your wristband. In all room you'll find smart, interactive tables that allow you choose an artist and network with their influencers and their music. To see how Sonny Terry connects to Aretha Franklin to Janet Jackson to Nicki Minaj is a pretty amazing musical journey for not only the adults, but also the kids. My kids spent sold blocks connecting the musicians in the "Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon" type digital experience.

Another highlight is in the dancing through the decades interactive wall art that starts you with great disco and carries you through the decades with Michael Jackson and Beyoncé. Again, in the RF experience, it allows you to swipe your band and save your memories of your horrible dancing.

You'll find seven different galleries with scores of experiences and memorabilia. One of the great finds is a 1957 Billie Holiday contract where she worked everyday for hours in a music venue for a few dollars. It's impossible to see it all in an hour, so budget two or three hours to truly soak it all in.

Once you exit the galleries, the gift shop is as equally amazing. Uniquely curated items you'll find nowhere else in gorgeous displays of antique cars and more are all over the place. Go ahead a buy a membership. It's completely worth it. I beg you. If you live in Nashville, please go as soon as possible. If you're coming soon to visit, make this in your top...

I visited the museum on 4/13/2024. I like the staggered wait times to prevent overcrowding. Although the museum is not extremely large, there a lot of interactive exhibits that you can easily spend hours or multiple visits exploring. The cost was $26.95 per person plus 5% sales tax. You can purchase a wristband for $5.00 to download playlist from the interactive exhibits.

There are exhibits throughout the museum that you put on headphones and you can look for an particular artist then you can see artist that influenced the artist, who the artist influenced, and who where his/her peers at the time they came out. You can also download snippets of the artist most popular songs onto the purchased wristband.

There is an exhibit that you can put on a choir robe and sing with Dr. Bobby Jones and his choir. I think we sung Ole Happy Days. It was cool.

There is an exhibit where you enter a room and dance like the Just Dance or the old Dance Central games. There is a virtual choreographer on the wall that show you can moves and you start from you 1950s and dance in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s. The exhibit is about 10 minutes and from what I understand is a good workout. I just stood back and video my wife dancing. LOL

There is another exhibit that you are given an acapella version of a song and you have to produce the song by adding instrumentals, percussions, etc. I think you can download the finished version to your wristband, if you purchased it.

My favorite exhibit is the rap booth. You can either rap to Lauryn Hill, Nicki Minaj, Kendrick Lamar, I think these are the artist. Or you can Freestyle over a beat or my favorite is the rap battle. You answer some questions and a rap is created for you. This was a lot of fun.

There are numerous exhibits of clothing worn by artist and various events or performances.

Overall this was a fun experience and I would visit again. The couple my wife and I traveled with with mentioned some of the exhibits were different than when they visited in 2023 so I'm not sure if they change exhibits periodically or just add more over time. Plus I think the museum has a live DJ on Saturdays and you get 10% off from the giftshop if you mentioned...

My family was visiting Nashville and put this museum on our list of MUST-DO attractions based on the reviews. I thought the museum as a whole was really well done and engaging. The presentation of music through time was a really interesting processional, and I really enjoyed the tables where you could listen to the musical connections from the past to present. My children are 5 and 11 and also made several meaningful connections. They spent a long time at the table where you could "build your own jazz song" which also tied in well to what my sixth grade daughter is learning about in social studies right now. My five year old loved the dancing room the best, but also enjoyed walking around with me and learning the names of different instruments.

One thing I wanted to note: I get that this museum is maybe geared toward an older age group, but I've never shied away from exposing my children to diverse and accurate historic information. My one minor complaint is that there was no way to opt-out of explicit music when listening to the playlist building tables. I would definitely go again, but would probably have prefaced it with a conversation about the use of certain words that pop up a lot in the modern music. I recognize that it would be inauthentic to sensor music in this setting, but feel like there are ways to make this an engaging opportunity for younger audiences, without surprising them with music full of words that will get them in trouble at school. I wish this information would've been clearer before attending, and I think resources on talking to kids about the use of explicit language in music and art would've been a nice touch.

We spent almost two hours there and had to skip the last section about modern music because the museum was closing.

At the time of our visit the museum offered parking validation for the lot at 5th and Broadway, for up to two hours. This cannot be stacked so if you go to the museum and dinner, you'll be paying full price for the full time and not just the time...