Grammy Museum Mississippi

There are two standalone Grammy Museums. The first opened in downtown Los Angeles in 2008; the second opened on 5 March 2016 in Cleveland, Mississippi, a town of about ten and a half thousand people, and it was built and is run not by the Recording Academy but by the Cleveland Music Foundation, a non profit set up locally in 2011 to do it. It stands on the campus of Delta State University, on four and a half acres of the university's former golf course held on a ninety nine year lease from the state, next to a school that grants a degree in entertainment industry studies through its Delta Music Institute. The building cost close to twenty million dollars, six million of it appropriated by the Mississippi legislature and a further million and a quarter in federal money for the access road and services. The argument for putting it here was regional rather than local. The Academy's president at the time, Neil Portnow, framed it by proximity to the membership in Memphis, Nashville and New Orleans and to what he called one of the most musically vibrant regions in America, and roughly a fifth of the exhibits are specific to Mississippi while the rest run across every genre the awards cover. The building answers the Delta rather than Los Angeles: the architects clad it in corrugated metal in deliberate imitation of sharecropper housing and put a broad porch across the front. Dockery Farms is seven miles east and Charley Patton's grave twenty miles due south. Cleveland was a railway town chartered in 1886, on the same Louisville, New Orleans and Texas line that took Isaiah Montgomery to Mound Bayou, and it is named, by local account, for Grover Cleveland.