For most of its life, the museum told the story of the blues the way museums tell most stories: with objects behind glass, laminated captions, and a respectful hush. A newly completed redesign throws much of that out. The centerpiece of the reimagined space is not a guitar or a photograph but a darkened listening room where recordings play at close to their original club volume.

The shift reflects a growing belief among the museum's curators that artifacts alone flatten the music into history. "A steel guitar in a case is a dead thing," one curator said. "The point was never the object. The point was the sound coming out of it."

Visitors now move through a sequence of rooms tuned to different eras and moods, each built to be felt in the chest as much as heard. The old artifacts remain, but they orbit the audio rather than the other way around.

Early attendance figures suggest the gamble is paying off, with longer visits and a noticeable uptick in younger guests. The deeper test will be whether an institution built to preserve the past can keep a living tradition from feeling embalmed.