Amplifying Black Music and History: Nashville’s Jefferson Street Sound Museum
If not for the murals painted on its side—paying tribute to musicians Jimi Hendrix and Billy Cox, and Civil Right activists Rev. C.T. Vivian and Diane Nash—2004 Jefferson Street would look like a modest North Nashville home. But it’s actually a temple, a remarkable reminder of history and community. Or maybe it’s a time machine, because stepping inside the Jefferson Street Sound Museum is transporting.
The walls and display tables are covered with photos and artifacts of the historic Jefferson Street music scene of the 1930s through the early ’70s. And the sounds that rang inside places like Club Baron, the New Era Club, the Del Morocco, and Maceo’s launched Black rhythm and blues into the American mainstream, starting in 1946 when DJs from Nashville radio station WLAC began beaming recordings by the artists they heard on Jefferson as far as Chicago and Detroit. The talent was a who’s who that included touring performers Duke Ellington, B.B. King, Etta James, Jackie Wilson, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, and Ray Charles, as well as local sensations like Marion James, Bobby Hebb, Robert Knight, Jimmy Church, Johnny Jones, Charles “Wigg” Walker, and, in ’62 and ’63, a pre-breakthrough Hendrix.
But Jefferson Street was more than a musical mecca. Lorenzo Washington, who founded the non-profit Museum and is its beating heart, recalls a time in the 1950s when he and his friends would walk over the Jefferson Street bridge from their East Nashville neighborhood to enjoy the things that made the avenue a Shangri-La for the city’s Black residents, who often found themselves under the gaze of Jim Crow in other environs. Lively Black-owned businesses—restaurants, law offices, doctors and dentists, banks, hairdressers, record stores, bakeries, grocery stores, car dealerships, flower shops, clothing shops, barbers, a skating rink—crowded the street. There was a community pool, where Washington learned to swim, plus free movies at Hadley Park, the Sulphur Dell Negro Leage baseball stadium, and, of course, the still-presiding Fisk University.
“The streets would be full of college kids,” Washington recalls, “and on weekends families would be cooking fish sandwiches and burgers in their yards. My friends and I would walk along the street and buy hot dogs and cold drinks from the vendors lining it. People sold fish plates out of their houses. And when I was a teenager, I had a hot rod, a ’53 Chevy, and everybody would clean their cars up on the weekends and hit the line on Jefferson Street. There was a lot of life going on, besides the music and the clubs.”
Jefferson Street was also a nexus for the local Civil Rights movement in the ’50s and ’60s. Fisk and the nearby Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial school (now Tennessee State University) and Meharry Medical College were the hub of student activism. In April 1960, after the famed sit-in at the downtown Woolworth’s cafe—which Washington participated in—more than 3,000 protesters led by Vivian and Nash walked down Jefferson Street to City Hall to demand that Nashville’s lunch counters be desegregated.
All of that was despoiled in 1968, when the city’s white power brokers redlined the neighborhood via the construction of I-40. They’d long been vexed by the existence of Nashville’s own Black Wall Street, and had already managed to pressure WLAC’s owners to take R&B off the air and had shut down the country’s first Black music TV show, Nashville’s own Night Train. (A case can be made that Night Train, which aired from 1964 to 1967, inspired the nationally syndicated Black music show Soul Train, which debuted in 1970.) The highway’s path laid waste to roughly 128 businesses, about 80 percent of the city’s Black proprietorship at the time, and destroyed hundreds of homes. Easy access to downtown ended for Jefferson Street’s students and residents. Today, I-40 bridge pillars occupy the land where Club Stealaway and the Del Morocco stood.
So while the building at 2004 Jefferson is called the Sound Museum, all of this rich tapestry of life and history is also woven into its essence. No wonder the place was designated part of the U. S. Civil Rights Trail earlier this year, and is now a stop on both Civil Rights- and music-history tours of Music City.
Obviously, the Jefferson Street Sound Museum has gravitas, but it’s also a lot of fun. The interior has a friendly, juke-joint-like atmosphere that translates to its frequent, open-to-the-public conversations with people in the community who’ve made an impact, from artists to politicians and activists. On the first Monday of each month, it even sounds like a juke joint, as musicians, comedians, poets, storytellers, and other pro and amateur artists participate in SYMOR, an open mic night that’s an acronym for Start Your Month Out Right. There are also special events for kids, with music, snacks, coloring, and more.
When Lorenzo Washington first began renting the building in 2011, he intended to make it into a recording studio. After all, he’d been surrounded by music since he started visiting Jefferson Street in the 1950s—first as a fan and then a friend to many of its performers, as well as a driver for songwriter and producer Ted Jarrett, who wrote hits for Hank Ballard, Ruth Brown, Webb Pierce, and others.
Washington’s studio produced just one album—Don Adams’ Caution: May Cause Passion—before the concerns of vocalist Marion James, who burst onto the Jefferson Street scene with her 1966 Top 10 R&B hit for the Excello label, “That’s My Man,” planted a different kind of seed. James, who was known as Nashville’s Queen of the Blues, “was really worried about the legacy of all her friends and musicians that were part of the scene and played here,” Washington recounts. “There had been so much excitement and positivity here on this street, and a lot of the people who were in the middle of it were dying off. Once Marian inspired me with the idea of turning my house into a museum, I was off and running. I wanted to see the history that was made get preserved.”
So Washington, who’d already collected some artifacts, like a cornerstone from the New Era Club, began chasing more, and soon objects like the old soundboard from WLAC and songwriter Jesse Boyce’s guitar, as well as James’s own stage wear and souvenirs of pioneering trans soul singer Jackie Shane, made their way into the Museum.
A few years into the life of the non-profit Museum his longtime friend, Karen Coffee, stepped in. She’d spent her childhood on Jefferson, growing up on the Tennessee State University campus, where her parents were educators, and knew and loved the Street’s culture and history, and the museum that her friend of 50 years had opened.
The circumstances of Coffee joining Washington in his quest were born from potential tragedy. She was diagnosed with cancer, and her prognosis was poor. “I called Lorenzo and said, ‘I’ve been given three months to live, and I want to spend my time at the museum. Let me help you” She became the institution’s vice president. In short order, Coffee used her professional background in sales and marketing to help Washington heighten the Jefferson Street Sound Museum’s profile and open up new avenues of revenue from government, institutional, and private sources. “Looking for grants and funding to keep the Museum running has been a challenge,” says Coffee, “and often funds that have sustained the Museum have come out of Lorenzo’s pocket.”
Coffee also created the annual Lorenzo Washington Day Gala, the Museum’s big spring fundraiser. It began in 2023, coinciding with a series of proclamations designating April 3 as Lorenzo Washington Day, in honor of his efforts to preserve the culture of Jefferson Street.
Luckily, an innovative treatment set Coffee’s cancer at bay, and today she and Washington are the Museum’s big-hearted team—opening the doors to warmly greet visitors every Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday by appointment, and personally hosting every event, from talks to SYMOR nights.
As Marion James foretold, many of the artists who played Jefferson Street are now gone. She died in 2015. However, Jimmy Church, Frank Howard, and Charles “Wigg” Walker, who are all in their 80s, are still vital performers who play locally and internationally. They are represented in the Museum’s exhibits and appear there in conversation occasionally, along with lesser known fixtures of Jefferson like Lucious “Spoonman” Talley, whose playfully percussive way with utensils is a direct link to the earliest days of African American music.
But Lorenzo and Karen are truly the Museum’s soul—warmly greeting visitors and making them feel at home, hosting and providing snacks and beverages for SYMOR nights and talks, and doing all they can to preserve the pulse of Jefferson Street, which is of the main historic arteries of Black American life. Lorenzo, in particular, is the Museum’s most important exhibit. At 83, the lean and dapper charmer’s memory and storytelling skills are exquisite, and he leads all of the Museum tours. Washington can talk from first-hand experience about Hendrix’s days as a maverick in the world of straight R&B, of the menus served while the musicians entertained, of B.B. King driving dancers into a frenzy, and even about the Nashville Stars, the city’s beloved Negro League baseball team that was bankrolled by Sou Bridgeforth, a numbers operator and the owner of the New Era Club, where Etta James recorded her blazing, classic Rocks the House album in 1963.
Washington has also been the subject of a living legends exhibit at the National Museum of African American Music (NMAAM) in downtown Nashville, and he and Karen were presented with a Keeping the Blues Alive Award for the Museum by the international Blues Foundation in 2025.
“Before I did this, nobody was talking about the history of Jefferson Street,” Washington observes. Now the city government is looking at Jefferson Street again, via a development plan, and several business and community organizations are also considering options for the corridor’s future. “I know I won’t be here forever,” Washington adds, “but with our designation by the U.S. Civil Rights Trail, the honors we’ve received, and the visitors who come here from all around the world, I do think the history of the music and the community that make Jefferson Street important will not be forgotten.”
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Ted Drozdowski is an award-winning Nashville-based journalist, musician and filmmaker. His writing has appeared in publications around the globe, including Rolling Stone, Travel & Leisure and Guitar World, and various music encyclopedias, and he has served as editorial director for Premier Guitar, the U.S.’s largest guitar magazine. He is the leader of psychedelic roots band Coyote Motel, whose latest work is the multi-award-winning feature film and soundtrack The River: A Songwriter’s Stories of the South.
