National Blues Museum will have you playing the blues in St. Louis

Lucille is around the corner, while the River City Revelers jug band awaits your participation near the entrance. Play the washboard, if you wish.

At digital kiosks, choose a lyric you like. Later, pick a guitar/harmonica/piano riff, then lay down a beat. Before you leave the new National Blues Museum in downtown St. Louis, you will have mixed your own song — sent straight to your email as a musical reminder of your visit.

On Saturday, visitors will be able to walk through the doors of the 16,000-square-foot space dedicated to a music genre that began its rhythmic life in America and spread its influence throughout the country and the world.

“There are artifacts here, but interaction is what draws people and engages them. And hearing people talk about the blues and hearing the music ignites something in them,” said the museum’s executive director Dion Brown during a recent private tour of the museum. It is located in a beautifully restored 1908 building in the Mercantile Exchange District on Washington Avenue just east of the convention center.

Even before its opening, word is out about the latest endeavor to draw visitors to St. Louis. The New York Times, Smithsonian and CNN already rank the museum as a must-experience for 2016.

“It’s not a giant space with lots of stuff,” said Rob Endicott, a musician and chairman of the museum’s board of directors. “We wanted to make it interactive and digestible.”

It’s all self-guided, but there will be docents stationed around the museum to answer questions.

Dion, who lives in O’Fallon, is the former director of the B.B. King Museum in Indianola, Miss. Originally from Decatur, he’s retired from the Air Force (assigned to Scott from 1995 to 1998). And while St. Louis has a strong blues presence, the new museum “is bigger than St. Louis blues. Here, we get to celebrate all the blues,” and its impact on modern-day music.

Dion, a relative newcomer to the blues — “It wasn’t a genre I listened to” — said he became “fully engulfed in it” while working in the Mississippi Delta and with “Mr. King.” Before taking on his new responsibilities in St. Louis last spring, Dion planned King’s funeral and burial on the grounds of the museum in Indianola.

You’ll find King’s iconic guitar, Lucille (Dion says there is more than one), on display, not far from memorabilia donated by St. Louis’ own legendary rocker Chuck Berry.

Using interactive displays with plenty of things to touch and music to listen to via headsets, the museum follows the blues as it traveled from the rural south along with black families headed to northern cities in search of work and a better life. Many packed their music and instruments in suitcases and trunks that now line a wall of the museum, along with historical photos that tell the story of that migration.

“It’s one of my favorite (displays),” said Dion. “They’re leaving the Delta. It’s this amazing migration. They took their culture and the blues spread.”

Learn about Kansas City and Chicago blues. Listen to Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds from the 1920s in an area devoted to women blues artists.

Other areas are devoted to the influence blues has had on modern music, from Motown to Janis Joplin to hip-hop, using rappers Nas and Kendrick Lamar as examples.

And don’t miss the interactive exhibit featuring St. Louis’ own River City Revelers jug band, where you can play along using a variety of simple musical instruments. Then, you get to watch yourself playing with them.

“The blues birthed a wide variety of music,” Dion said. “Since it did, let’s explore all of them.”

And that includes St. Louis blues. Jeremy Segel-Moss, president of the St. Louis Blues Society, said he and fellow artists are excited about the spotlight that will be put on the city and its music.

“It gives me a huge smile on my face. We have one of the greatest music scenes in the country.” Jeremy is a guitarist and member of the veteran band Bottoms Up Blues Gang.

“We all know how good music is here, but we’re not an industry town like Nashville. We do it because we love it.”

He noted St. Louis blues musicians, such as Albert King, the jazz of Miles Davis and the rock ’n’ roll of Chuck Berry show the interaction and influence that has made St. Louis an important music center.

A special exhibit on St. Louis blues features a history wall that lays out the blues in St. Louis from 1900 to the present, videos of local blues artists performing, iPad stations where visitors can listen to CDs they can buy at the gift shop and information about seven St. Louis clubs that specialize in blues music.

Also ensconced in the building are a concert venue, gallery, attached SugarFire Smoke House restaurant, private rental space and gift shop.

By May, live music will come to the museum’s concert venue, which can hold about 180 and has floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on Washington Ave. Expect to hear both weekday afternoon and weekend concerts by national and local musicians, broadcast live so you can hear them out on the streets, said Dion.

You can also tune in to National Blues Museum Radio, a nationally syndicated show broadcast locally on RAF-STL (107.3 FM) from 9 to 11 p.m. Fridays.

A traveling art exhibit of 31 paintings of Mississippi-based blues legends is housed in the Scott and Diane McCuaig and Family Gallery through June. “Blues @ Home: Mississippi’s Living Blues Legends” was created by artist H.C. Porter who paired her work with oral histories from each subject. The exhibition includes images of world-famous performers, including the late B.B. King, and Bobby Rush.

The museum will also host artist residencies, and Dion’s goal is to connect those musicians with young people in the community. The “Blues in Schools” program already has been taken to 2,000 students in Edwardsville, he said. Deep discounts are provided to school tour groups as well.

This story was originally published March 26, 2016 at 5:40 AM with the headline "National Blues Museum will have you playing the blues in St. Louis."