Congress of Country Music May Change Central Mississippi

PHILADELPHIA, Miss.–Marty Stuart’s Congress of Country Music will soon show his 20,000 item strong collection of country music artifacts, amassed over his lifetime. A ribbon-cutting is planned in Neshoba County today for the new building. 

Stuart said he began collecting items from the days of classic country when he was kid

“Bands would come through Neshoba County when I was a kid, whether they played at the Neshoba County Fair or the Choctaw Indian Fair or out on the edge of town there was a gospel music facility,” he said. “I would buy records, get people to autograph them, aske musicians for their guitar picks or whatever.”

When Stuart began performing he continued collecting. He took that passion with him when he moved to Nashville.

“As time went on I started noticing when the world of country music started changing, the costumes, the manuscripts, the personal effects, the instruments of all the old masters were starting to appear in junk stores in Nashville, music stores, vintage clothing stores,” he said. 

To him seeing those same costumes and instruments that had graced the stage of the Ryman being sold for peanuts was not fitting.

“It just looked wrong to me because those were the people who raised me.”

To give those items a more “dignified surrounding” Stuart made it his personal mission to collect as much of it as he could. The collection began in his bedroom.

He said he had an epiphany after leaving the BB King Museum one day where he had been helping raise money for a project there, about what should happen to his collection and that’s where the idea for the Congress of Country Music was born. 

Today’s ribbon-cutting is one part of a project that is large in scope and may make Philadelphia as much of a destination for music lovers as both Clevelands, Mississippi and Ohio, homes to the Grammy Museum and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.