In recent months, the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame has been active, inducting Allen Toussaint, Benny Spellman and Ernie K-Doe at the Mother-in-Law Lounge, Louisiana LeRoux at the Voice of the Wetlands Festival, and Coco Robicheaux at the House of Blues.
Where is the Hall of Fame? Online, at the moment.
Initially created by Del Moon in 1980, the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame (LMHOF) failed to prosper until Mike Shepherd began its recent revitalization in 2005. Shepherd began to notice how many local musicians were simply fading away without being properly honored. “We were losing our artists,” Shepherd says. “John Fred became very ill and we lost him (in 2005). That was a wake-up call. Something absolutely had to be done.”
At this point, the LMHOF is simply a Web site—a “virtual museum,” it calls itself. Its inductions have been documented online at LouisianaMusicHallOfFame.org, but no hall actually exists yet. Shepherd hopes to renovate the Loew’s State Palace Theater in New Orleans and convert it to their flagship institution—a plan floated in 2004 when Pres Kabacoff and Troy von Otnott, the developer of the ill-fated Grammy Hall of Fame, proposed a “Louisiana Music Experience” for that location. An agreement is largely in place, he says, and he is jumping through many of the financial and political hoops necessary to make it happen. If Shepherd can acquire the building and renovate it into a brick-and-mortar museum, he envisions it to be one of several facilities across the state which will embody Louisiana’s musical past, possibly with a café and performance space attached. “We’re just waiting for a domino to fall,” Shepherd says.
