While visiting the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, Texas recently, I wondered how much longer a museum dedicated to a rock and roll singer who had been dead for 65 years would last as his memory fades with his original generation of fans.
I thought the same thing on an earlier trip to Nashville as I passed by the Patsy Cline Museum, another singer who tragically died in an airplane crash. How many Patsy Cline fans can there still be who would make the pilgrimmage to Nashville to visit a museum dedicated to her life story? I imagine that because it’s located directly above the Johnny Cash Museum that they benefit from the spillover of his enduring appeal.
Glen Campbell and George Jonas were big-time country singers and each of them had museums in Nashville that have since gone so maybe that’s the fate of all pop culture museums.
There aren’t many museums dedicated to the music stars my grandparents would have listened to, the kind that my kids would have no clue about because they don’t show up in their recommended playlists on Spotify. For example, the tenor Enrico Caruso was one of the world’s biggest recording stars in the years before , during and after the First World War. He had a museum in New York City which finally closed when its curator died. Interestingly, there is a museum in Caruso’s home town in Italy which endures.
Then there’s Rudy Vallée, the singing heartthrob who was a pop culture sensation in the 1920s. He doesn’t have a museum of his own, but he’s memorialized at the Music Museum of New England, but so are ‘Til Tuesday and New Kids on the Block, acts which I’m doubtful will stand the test of time.
Music stars who have stood the test of time include the likes of Mozart and Beethoven, who have multiple museums dedicated to their life stories, like Ludwig’s birthplace in Bonn, Germany and Wolfgang’s in Salzburg, Austria. Perhaps only a few select names from our era will endure long enough that there will be museums dedicated to them centuries from now.
Could it be that young couples are getting married today that have no interest in The King? Thus passes the worldly glory.
