Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Receives $280,000 Grant

The Country Music Hall of Fame^® and Museum has received a $280,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant will fund the digitization of rare and fragile components of the museum’s collection.

The grant was awarded in the NEH’s Humanities Collections and Reference Resources category, which allows institutions to preserve and provide access to collections essential to scholarship, education and public programming in the humanities.

The funds will enable Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum curators to digitize rare and fragile artifacts in its recorded sound, moving image and photography collections, including acetate transcription discs of WSM-originated network radio shows such as the Grand Ole Opry and Magnolia Blossoms, the latter featuring the Fisk Jubilee Singers from Nashville’s Fisk University; tapes of the 1983-88 television series Bobby Bare and Friends, which showcases American musicians and songwriters in a guitar pull format and is among the museum’s most requested collections; and the Walden S. Fabry photography collection, which contains nearly 8,500 negatives and prints of 1940s – 1960s era artists including Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, Roy Orbison, Hank Williams and many others.