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 The Southern Music Hall of Fame will be a destination experience that chronicles and expresses the awesome legacy of Southern Music and its relevance to world culture. This epic musical tale will be told by showcasing the lives of the people who formed the critical threads of the diverse and stimulating tapestry we call southern music.
The SMHF will use Augmented and Mixed Virtual Reality to trace a variety of journeys that wind through the nine main tributaries of music that began in the South: folk, jazz, blues, gospel, rock, country, bluegrass, R&B and beach. The experience will meander through numerous intermingling hybrid genres, weaving into a tapestry the lives and influences of the pioneers, legends, movers & shakers, as well as emerging talents and visionaries. The SMHF Experience will chronicle the history of nine unique musical forms that have gifted the world with over one hundred distinctive varieties of music!
And that journey will be stunning!
With the stunning use of cutting-edge technology and stimulating use of emerging forms of engaging interactive entertainment, the Southern Music Hall of Fame will revolutionize what can be done with cultural heritage, informal education and music appreciation.
Our journey begins with the Native American tribes that inhabited the region known as the South, who gave us the five-note scale, chants, drums, rattles, striking sticks, flutes and whistles. This was followed by the arrival and influence of the English, French, Spanish and Afro-Americans. Be with the African slaves congre-gating on a hot afternoon to dance and sing on what has become Congo Square in New Orleans, the birthplace of New Orleans jazz.
Enter a negro church in Mississippi where gospel music had its origins with “ring shout” and “call-and-response” forms, which later carried over into soul and rhythm and blues. African slaves were required to perform on Sunday afternoons for their white slave masters and their blues scales and call-and-response forms became integrated with European folk music. This combined with southern colonial music gives us the beginnings of what has become country music, which is a modern manifestation of American folk music interspersed with the gospel and blues of African music.
Be there at the birth of “rock n roll” which was an outgrowth of the musical interactions of blacks and whites in the South and the Southwest. As Robert Palmer says in Rolling Stones’ Illustrated History of Rock & Roll: “Bedrock black church music influenced blues, rural blues influenced white folk song and the black popular music of the Northern ghettos, blues and black pop influenced jazz.”
... and much more!
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