More than two decades in the making, the National Museum of African American Music opened last month in Nashville, Tennessee, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Through its seven galleries and the some 1,500 objects in its collection—which range from one of Jimi Hendrix’s wrecked guitars to a trombone owned by the late musician Helen Jones-Woods, who played in the first integrated all-female jazz orchestra—more than four centuries of Black music, and the ways in which it contributed to the United States’s soundscape, are unpacked, preserved, and celebrated. “We want visitors to see how African-American music affects the music they listen to now,” senior curator Dr. Steven Lewis says. “And we hope they leave the museum with a deeper understanding of how today’s music fits into the context of Black music history as a whole.”