NASHVILLE — The pilgrims wandered among the relics of the honky-tonk hero George Jones, scrutinizing his bowling ball and his bowling shoes, his address book with its hand-scrawled numbers for Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, and his first guitar, a well-worn Gene Autry Melody Ranch acoustic.
On Monday night, one priceless attraction at the new George Jones Museum was Nancy Jones, Mr. Jones’s fourth and final wife, who is credited with saving her famous husband from an equally famous addiction to alcohol and drugs. She was standing by a collection of his sequined suits, accompanied by Bandit, Mr. Jones’s Jack Russell terrier, and welcoming a few pleasantly bewildered patrons.
“I plan to be here every day,” Ms. Jones, 66, said at the 7,500-square-foot museum she founded in honor of Mr. Jones, who died in 2013 at age 81. “A lot of stars forget that it’s the fans who make them.”
The George Jones Museum opened in April in the buzzing heart of the new Nashville, with a sophisticated business plan, a rooftop bar and an event space with exposed brick walls that on that same night was hosting a technology firm’s cocktail hour. With one boot in the old Nashville and one in the new, it reflects both a city being remade with gleaming condominium towers and an influx of newcomers, and one where country music remains a central if shifting strand of its DNA.
But the museum is also an embodiment of a more quaint and curious Nashville tradition — that of the lovingly curated shrine to the solitary country star. Just as a Roman Catholic visitor to Italy might hop from Venice to Cortona to Padua to commune with the basilicas and bones of saints, the country music faithful could, as late as the mid-1980s, build a tourism itinerary around museums dedicated to Conway Twitty, Marty Robbins, Minnie Pearl, Barbara Mandrell, Ferlin Husky, Jim Reeves, Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash and Hank Williams Sr.
Though many of the small museums have disappeared with the changing times, the George Jones Museum, along with an acclaimed new museum dedicated to Mr. Cash, which opened in 2013, are updating the form with more sophisticated, multimedia exhibits. But their core mission — a promise of intimacy that simultaneously extends the star’s brand — is the quintessence of old Nashville.
The Jones museum deploys his image to invoke rowdy good times, in an effort to compete with a nearby Hooters and a Coyote Ugly Saloon that share a touristy stretch of Second Avenue North near the city’s massive new convention center.
Visitors to the renovated four-story building first encounter an expansive gift shop selling T-shirts with salty descriptions of Mr. Jones’s rebel reputation, a restaurant offering American bistro fare, and a bar and retail space selling shots and bottles of George Jones White Lightning brand moonshine, named for the paean to homemade liquor that became Mr. Jones’s first No. 1 hit in 1959. Tickets to the museum on the second floor cost $20.
It goes against the grain of current country music historiography, which tends to be more sober-minded. Last year, more than 970,000 people visited the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, a state-of-the-art, 350,000-square-foot institution that bills itself as the “Smithsonian of country music,” and employs seven full-time historians who weave the stories of individual musicians into broader cultural narratives.
Still, Michael McCall, the Hall of Fame’s museum editor, said he was pleased that Nashville was home to a few less-august institutions. “You don’t want to take all of the hillbilly out of it, you know?” he said.
Beyond downtown are a few surviving shrines narrowly focused on the dreamers, hustlers and iconoclasts who played the guitars and sang the songs. At the Ernest Tubb Record Shop No. 2, near the Grand Ole Opry complex, visitors can still board the 1964 Silver Eagle bus the storied bandleader used to barnstorm the country, and take a close look at Mr. Tubb’s favorite set of golf clubs.
Nearby, the homespun Willie Nelson and Friends Museum features a pair of his jogging shoes, and a pool table that the management says was one of the items seized by the Internal Revenue Service after his infamous tax troubles. (The museum’s website also advertises, somewhat bafflingly, that it has a Playboy magazine “produced entirely in Braille!”)
It is less certain whether the current generation of youthful country stars, who tend to be kicked to the curb well before their first gray hair appears, will get the same treatment. But like Mr. Jones’s music, his museum is a deep trove of raw feeling, triumph, tragedy, humor, hokiness and eccentricity. Family photos show Mr. Jones as a beatific towheaded boy, and describe his upbringing in Depression-era East Texas, where his parents made their own soap and set their own broken bones and where a teenage Mr. Jones ran away from home to escape his alcoholic father.
Mr. Jones’s struggles with addiction and other demons are documented, though not as thoroughly as they were in his 1996 autobiography, “I Lived to Tell It All.” One of a series of informational plaques reads: “Did you know? In the 1970s George had several close calls with the Mafia and he was afraid they were plotting to kill him.”
One of the more prominent displays features a John Deere lawn mower similar to one Mr. Jones used to ride to the liquor store after family members hid his car keys, worried that Mr. Jones would drive while intoxicated. (Boxed in plexiglass, the mower, in a different museum setting, might be mistaken for an early work by Jeff Koons.)
Jaroslava Prossr, 77, a country music fan from Millbrae, Calif., was taking it all in with reverence on Monday morning. Ms. Prossr, a native of Czechoslovakia, said the opening of the museum had drawn her to Nashville. “I have been a fan of his since I moved to the U.S.A. 30 years ago,” she said. “This was the main attraction for me.”
The use of Mr. Jones’s image to market hard liquor has stirred some controversy here, but Ms. Jones said the museum and the alcohol brand had long been two elements in her husband’s three-pronged plan to profit from his story. The bottles feature a quote attributed to him: “Alcohol has owned me and controlled me much of my life. Now is my time to own it.”
Ms. Jones said the third element of the plan is a George Jones biopic, which she is currently trying to get off the ground. She said she imagines Bradley Cooper in the starring role, or Brad Pitt.
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