What began as the Funky Tucks is now ever closer to launching the greatest museum of music in the nation — a cultural, educational and economic boost for all of Louisiana.
The Louisiana Music and Heritage Experience on March 4 signed an official letter of intent with the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center to build and operate a 120,000-square-foot facility replete with interactive music exhibits, live music venues, training in the music industry, and educational offerings to share with classrooms statewide. Oh, and good food, too, because Louisiana music and food go together like coffee and chicory.
As a crucial adjunct to the neighboring River District, the new museum offers breathtaking possibilities for lovers of jazz, blues, Cajun, zydeco, R&B, street funk and other musical forms that were birthed or crucially boosted here in Louisiana. As an economic driver, meanwhile, it could make it substantially easier for musicians and sound technicians to make a living at their crafts, while driving tourism statewide.
Much of this, including details on financing the $165 million project and other numbers, has been ably recounted in these pages by reporter Stephanie Riegel. But sometimes numbers don’t tell the whole story, and sometimes the “back story” can help explain why the numbers work so well.
The back story here has wonderful twists and turns, but the thumbnail sketch is this: Local entrepreneur Chris Beary is captain of Funky Tucks, a sub-krewe of the Tucks carnival parade. When Funky Tucks added a new float to the few it had, a friend suggested they put a live band on the float and, said Beary, “produce it like a music club,” with “studio-quality sound for 360 degrees all around the float.”
The float, which debuted in 2018, was a huge hit. That led to using the float year-round as a movable bandstand for fairs or charitable events, or whatever. And that led, through other steps, to the Funky Uncle group, which, beginning during the COVID pandemic, raised more than $1 million for musicians and gig workers.
Eventually, Beary said, he “started to realize that there was a giant cavern, if you will, between how we as Louisianans laud our affection for, and almost worship, our music culture, and how we actually treat it.” How, he pondered, could we better nurture our music industry?
“Things like Mardi Gras, things like Jazz Fest, they bring people in here to spend real money for a short window of time,” he said. “We need something that will bring people here every day.”
From there came, first, the NOLA Funk Fest, already a hugely popular October event, and now the drive, with great momentum, to build a museum and culture/education center second to none in the nation.
One lesson we can take here is that, at each step of doing something bigger and better than the previous iteration, the audience and popularity grew. That, in turn, hints at the answer to the one pressing question: Will a museum and cultural center like this just re-arrange the spending of the tourists who come to New Orleans annually anyway, or will it act as a force multiplier? Will it not just slice up the available pie in more ways, but instead lead to more and better pies, and beyond New Orleans to other Louisiana places where musical genres had their roots and where music aficionados might be inspired to visit because the museum promotes them?
Plenteous evidence from other major music museums — the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, for example, and the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville — indicate that these places are indeed major, major force multipliers. That is certainly how area music-venue operators seem to see the coming museum.
“I think this is something that this area really needs and deserves, at the caliber [Beary] is talking about bringing into fruition,” said Rachael Arrington, general manager of the Maple Leaf near New Orleans’ riverbend, as she pronounced it “absolutely” promising.
In just four years before the pandemic, from 2015 to 2019, the number of visitors to New Orleans alone (not to mention the rest of the state) doubled from 9.78 million to 19.75 million — and in 2025, it again exceeded 19 million. Still, the hotel-motel occupancy rate statewide hovers down near 60%, leaving plenty of room for growth. And surveys show music, in both the south and north of the state, is significantly more of an attractant to visitors here than in other parts of the country.
In sum, the museum-plus being developed by the Louisiana Music and Heritage Experience is close to a sure thing as a proverbial win-win-win for the whole state. As it moves through various phases of the approval and financing processes, it amply merits enthusiastic choruses of support.