The Merle Haggard Museum honoring the country music great will open in Nashville in the summer of 2018, sitting next to Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline museums.
The museum will be on the second floor of the Merle's Meat + 3 Saloon, which will also open next year, said Bill and Sharon Miller, founders of Icon Entertainment Group, Rolling Stone magazine reported.
The Millers, who are already running museums honoring Cash and Cline in Nashville's downtown entertainment district, worked with Haggard's widow Theresa Haggard to collect outfits, musical instruments, and other professional and personal possessions, per Rolling Stone.
The Tennessean said the location, at 121 Third Avenue South, is next to the Cash and Cline museums. Bill Miller purchased the building for more than $7 million last year, to go along with more than 73,800 square feet of commercial property he owns in downtown Nashville, the newspaper said.
Haggard died April 6, 2016, at 79 after a four-month battle with pneumonia, according to Billboard magazine. Haggard's outlaw persona, built on time he served in prison, was mentored by Cash and built a career and led him to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1994, Billboard stated.
Haggard's hits include "outsider" greats "Branded Man," "Big City," "If We Make It Through December," "Are the Good Times Really Over," and "Workin' Man Blues," Billboard noted.
At the end of a news conference announcing the opening of museum, Haggard was posthumously honored with the Country Music Association's Joe Talbot Award.
The Tennessean said CMA chief executive officer Sarah Trahern presented the award to Theresa Haggard, given in recognition of "outstanding leadership and contributions to the preservation and advancement of country music's values and tradition."
"Merle Haggard's contribution to American popular music is inestimable, and his death seems somehow unfathomable," Country Music Hall of Fame chief executive Kyle Young said last year, according to the entertainer's biography.
"He carried the sounds and spirit of his heroes Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams, and Woody Guthrie into the present day, and he wrote the songs that told, and will continue to tell, our stories," he continued.
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