The nation's first museum dedicated to African-American music will be filled with tunes when it opens next year in downtown Nashville.

A Roots Theater with nearly 200 seats, and a portable stage in the lobby, are included in the latest design plans for the musical history collection.

Themed galleries will also intermittently go dark and digitally transform the room into live-concert experiences as guests browse the "Wade in the Water" gospel exhibition and "The Message" hip hop gallery, among others.

"Each gallery will be a different genre – gospel, blues, jazz, R&B and hip hop," said museum architect Harold Thompson. "You can trace the foundations of all of these genres back to gospel. We'll tell that story."

Visitors to the National Museum of African American Music will be greeted by colorful large hanging installations, sculpture and digital displays in the lobby.

The museum will also feature a research center with a digital music database and extensive media library.

'We want to energize this part of the city'

The National Museum of African American Music will be the cultural anchor of the $450 million Fifth + Broadway commercial development.

It will occupy a 56,000-square-foot building in the 3.2-acre project under construction.

A 32-story apartment building with 381 units and a 25-story office tower mostly filled by investment firm AllianceBernstein are also in the works.

An H&M store and a large, open food hall will be among the tenants inside 225,000 square feet of space for retail and entertainment businesses. About 2,100 parking spaces will accommodate the site's visitors, workers and residents.

"We've tried to be as thoughtful as we possibly could so it still feels like Printers Alley, if Printers Alley was built today," said Gresham Smith principal Joe Bucher, who oversees design plans. "We want to energize this part of the city that hasn't been energized."

Nashville's former convention center was located at this corner, at Broadway and 5th Avenue, before the new Music City Center opened five years ago.

The biggest challenge for construction and design teams has been keeping the Renaissance Hotel on the property running without interruption while the surrounding site is entirely redeveloped.

"We've been working on this ever since," Bucher said. "It's gone through a lot of trials and tribulations, but this thing is absolutely flying out of the ground now. It will be pretty transformative."

'It's overdue'

Unlike Detroit's Motown Museum and Memphis's Stax Museum of American Soul, the museum will include all musical genres rooted in African-American communities.

Its leadership includes musicians India.Arie, Keb' Mo, Darius Rucker and CeCe Winans, and its collection already boasts clothing from Dorothy Dandridge, Whitney Houston, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Bobby Jones and Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes.

Yolanda Adams and Charlie Wilson have been among the participants in the museum's fundraising events.

Already, a digital exhibition called Rivers of Rhythm online catalogs the influences and top performances of iconic artists.

"We are so blessed to have this building right in the heart of Nashville," said Gresham Smith architect Valarie Franklin, who is a founding member of the National Organization for Minority Architects. "It's overdue."

The museum was first conceived nearly 20 years ago, and was originally set for the corner of Jefferson Street and Rosa L. Parks Boulevard.

But the financial challenges involved with building a low-profit museum repeatedly sidelined plans.

Metro officials gave the project a needed boost by requiring that it be included in the Fifth + Broadway deal. The developer is constructing the building shell, and the city contributed $10 million to the museum. Another $30 million has since been raised through fundraising efforts.

Every inch of the museum has been designed – even the background color palette will be modeled after African landscapes, Thompson said.

"I want to give it some grit, some earthiness," Thompson said. "We're telling the story of African American music and exploring how it happened. We have museums focused on specialized areas but no museum that incorporates all of it."