The Chicago Blues Experience will be a world-class cultural attraction for the City of Chicago. The Museum will feature state-of-the-art interactive technology that takes visitors on an eye-opening, immersive journey into the past, present, and future of the blues. Exhibitions, memorabilia, a live music venue, and restaurants will reinforce the history and culture from which the blues emerged.
Through community outreach efforts, the Chicago Blues Experience Foundation will help play a vital role in providing positive experiences for youth through music education and immersion, creating sustainable and enriching activities for young people. The foundation’s overall objective is to use the blues and all popular music
18 The highlighted and repeated words in this extract are reproduced verbatim from the Delta Blues
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genres as an educational gateway to inspire and cultivate creativity, critical thinking, and self-expression (chicagobluesexperience.com, n.d.).
The transitivity of the Delta Blues Museum’s statements emphasises the permanence of the museum relative to the transience of its visitors. Mention of trains and freight central to blues iconography combine with images of permanent and travelling exhibitions underscore the resilience of the institution in a context of impermanence. The suggestion that “…visitors find meaning, value and perspective” alludes to scholarly and philosophical pursuits, situating the institution as a site of interpretation, learning and reflection. The use of the third person is impersonal and distant, perhaps in pursuit of an objective and academic modality. The authenticity of the site is emphasised alongside its geographical relevance to its task of
“preservation”. Although any notions of race are elided by describing the blues as an “American musical art form,” the only artist mentioned by name is Muddy Waters – an African American. The site’s date of foundation is emphasised as are its awards and credentials as a museum, library, and a site of youth learning, alluding to a sense of tradition, reliability, and national prestige befitting an educational establishment. Critically, the statement makes absolutely no mention of what the museum contains – there is no indication of what (if any) artefacts are on display or which exhibitions might be found. In simple terms, the museum describes itself less as a centre of attractions or repository of public knowledge, but more as an almost monastic educational institution.
In contrast, the Blues Archive at the University of Mississippi (also known as ‘Ole Miss’), makes its function and target audience clear from the outset. In common with the Delta Blues Museum (DBM), the Archive mentions its preserving function, but unlike the DBM places this function in the indicative present tense, ‘preserves’, rather than the indicative perfect ‘has preserved’, suggesting an ongoing function rather than one which has been completed. In further contrast to the DBM, the Ole Miss Blues Archive is expansive and inclusive regarding its audience; ‘scholars of the blues’ need not necessarily be academic scholars. Where DBM elides the issue of race, Ole
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Miss is specific in mentioning African American studies. Similarly, Ole Miss is explicit in its description of the size, scope and format of its holdings. Whilst also mentioning its long-standing existence, Ole Miss emphasises the global and accessible nature of its collection and services. There is an allusion to its permanence in the “non-circulating” nature of its collection. The multi- media nature of the collection is indicated in passing, but the overall modality is of a scholarly library which invites users worldwide to make use of its institutional services.
The B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center (KMDIC) addresses readers and potential visitors directly, in the second person present tense. Perhaps in common with the introduction of a live musical or theatrical performance, the museum stresses the spectacle and emotional response that the museum will generate in visitors. The multi-media modality of the museum’s holdings is emphasised, and engagement and interaction with visitors is stressed. In this way, the KMDIC stresses a multi-sensory interactive and play-based narrative learning experience akin to a school or perhaps an amusement park, whilst making allusions to the museum and archive via its mention of ‘artifacts’.
The newly opened (at the time of writing) National Blues Museum (NBM) offers its position as an “Entertainment and Education resource” with a universalist agenda which takes blues music and blues culture as its starting point. The museum makes it clear that it wishes to transcend ‘boundaries of race and background’ in line with the Mississippi Tourist Board’s “No Black. No White. Just the Blues,” slogan (S. A. King, 2011, p. 149). The museum also appeals to an audience of “Blues aficionados,” perhaps underlining its ambition to grow “audiences in the genre”. The museum’s reference to ‘artifacts’ and ‘cutting-edge technology’ moves its potential beyond that of a traditional museum space and, like the KMDIC positions the institution as a multi-modal centre of engagement and learning rather than one of purely exhibition.
Finally, the Chicago Blues Experience (CBE) combines themes of universality which are centred on blues music and blues culture to promote the city of Chicago and “…all popular music genres”.
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Avoiding the label ‘library’, ‘museum’ or ‘archive’, CBE encompasses the functions of each under a broad and inclusive banner which references specific functions of each of these RPKs as an
immersive and interactive experience. In common with libraries, museums and archives the CBE offers exhibitions and memorabilia; similarly to a traditional seat of learning the institution promises technologically-driven interaction with blues history and blues culture in order to fulfil the role of academic truth-giving by building a contingent, teleological and biographic narrative (Foucault, 1976, pp. 112-113). The CBE’s academic potential is further supported by promising engagement with young people through music education and community outreach projects. In addition to these and beyond the previously mentioned RPKs, CBE offers a live music venue and restaurants, further emphasising its multi-modal and multi-sensory immersive engagement with users who might equally be described as scholars, tourists, pupils, audience-members,
researchers, customers or consumers.
The significance of the above illustration, comparison and analysis is that increasingly libraries, museums and archives dedicated to blues music and blues culture overlap in their practical function in the physical world. These bricks-and-mortar institutions also offer a multi-sensory physical experience beyond the static presentation of artefacts and information, leading to a more immersive and interactive experience than has traditionally been provided by physical repositories of public knowledge. With the exception of the Delta Blues Museum, all of the institutions here reference state-of-the-art [digital] technology which is deployed to provide physical, mental and emotional interaction with the materials in order to promote the engagement with blues music and blues culture. Whilst this use of digital technology is not perhaps explicit in the case of Ole Miss, curator Greg Johnson explained to the Oxford Eagle newspaper that “…one of his most frequent jobs is digitizing donated audio materials, transforming them from their current format on things like reel-to-reel tapes, audio cassette or 78 rpm records into more accessible digital audio files. Depending on usage agreements and copyright laws, some of these audio files are available for streaming from the Blues Archive from anywhere [in the world], while others are
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accessible only through computers at the J.D. Williams Library” (Posey, 2016). Additionally, each of the institutions offers a unique perspective on what is essentially the same narrative; DBM and CBE primarily from the perspective of geography and authenticity, Ole Miss and NBM from that of an HBCU/educative stance, and KMDIC using B.B. King as a diachronically unifying biographic presence.
Further, the discourse on blues is partly formed by institutions such as libraries, archives and museums, which delimit the ontological boundaries of the cultural practice. As Foucault explains, “…the archive is that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration” (1972, p. 129). In other words, institutions such as those discussed so far both produce knowledge, and enable and constrain meaning. For example, the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center is telling a specific story from a specific point of view. This is
particularly important as the perspective is that of an African American blues performer – King himself. This perspective is significant as overwhelmingly, the interpretation of the blues and the telling of its story outside performance has been undertaken by a secondary audience – as is discussed in chapters 4 and 5. In support of this point, Foucault further teaches that “[t]he archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the existence of statements as unique events…composed together in accordance with multiple relations” (ibid., p. 129). In simple terms, repositories of public knowledge such as the Delta blues Museum and the Chicago Blues Experience offer definitions of what can be considered as ‘the blues’. These are contained within “…the general system of the formation and transformation of statements” (ibid., p.130). The difference in the names of the institutions – one a museum, the other an experience – makes plain how the visitor/consumer is to interact with blues music and blues culture; on the one hand from a mediated distance as in a museum, and on the other from a close-up and seemingly immediate sensory perspective as with an ‘experience’. In both cases however, the perspective is constructed and subject to the control of a unifying and directional curatorial gaze.
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