The Country Music Hall Of Fame to Launch Of Two Online Exhibitions

It has been recently announced that the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum has unveiled new, free-to-access online exhibitions: Suiting the Sound: The Rodeo Tailors Who Made Country Stars Shine Brighter and Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City. These multimedia exhibits are the first designed exclusively for the museum’s website.

“As a national history museum and global cultural institution, we are charged to consistently expand access to the museum’s collection and the interpretive work of our curators and historians, while advancing the documentation and preservation of American musical history,” said museum CEO Kyle Young. “These online exhibitions, made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, enabled the museum to create this novel exhibit platform. With it, we are not only able to reshare the story of the artists and musicians who helped to broaden Nashville’s reputation as a true Music City, but also to tell a new story, that of the clothiers who created unmistakable designs that are now synonymous with country music.”

Suiting the Sound: The Rodeo Tailors Who Made Country Stars Shine Brighter
Curated specifically for an online audience, Suiting the Sound: The Rodeo Tailors Who Made Country Stars Shine Brighter draws from the museum’s exhibit galleries and permanent collection to explore the artistry of Western-wear designers, often known as “rodeo tailors,” whose couture designs helped to create the indelible “rhinestone cowboy” image for country music.

The exhibition examines the emergence of this unique look in the 1940s and 1950s, largely from the tailor shops of Eastern European Jewish immigrants – who carved a successful niche for themselves by embracing America’s fascination with cowboy culture and Western imagery. Viewers will learn how the creative vision of the early designers – including ”Rodeo Ben” Lichtenstein, Nathan Turk and Nudie Cohn, who were all Eastern European Jewish immigrants – endures today, especially through Cohn’s former apprentices Manuel Cuevas and Jaime Castaneda, each of whom moved from Mexico to Los Angeles.

The exhibit also looks at today’s contemporary clothiers – including Union Western’s Jerry Atwood, Fort Lonesome’s Kathie Sever, and “Katy K” Kattelman – who continue to draw both inspiration from Cohn, Turk, Lichtenstein and Cuevas’s expressions of cowboy style. Today’s designers’ modern spins on classic Nudie suits and vintage stage costumes have been spotted on a wide range of recording artists including Charley Crockett, Jenny Lewis, Post Malone, Midland, Margo Price and Lil Nas X.

As a result of Nashville’s changing image, more and more artists chose to record there. In addition, there was a new blending of musical genres that further influenced musicians in Nashville and beyond. This is evident today as Nashville’s music community includes internationally recognized rockers, pop hitmakers and singer-songwriters of every genre, many drawing inspiration from the groundbreaking work of Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats, who expanded the image and meaning of Music City USA.

Both online exhibitions are made possible by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) CARES grant award.1 With NEH funding, the museum built a platform to support these and future online exhibits. In addition, the grant award underwrote the photography of more than 300 collections objects for addition to the museum’s digital archive.

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