Springsteen Museum: A Modest, Big-Hearted Ode to American Music

In the Powell theater, the visitor’s journey begins with a 25-minute film by Thom Zimny, the director who has worked with Springsteen on many projects. The film is a tour of American music with mind-blowing footage, including a teenage Aretha Franklin belting one out in church. Springsteen narrates, talking about legendary figures and his own youthful hunger for success. “I wanted to hear all that screaming again,” he said of watching The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. “But I wanted it to be for me.”

The whole place is a joyous visual celebration of American music. There is a wall of album covers: Nat King Cole, Chet Atkins, the Bye Bye Birdie Soundtrack, The Beastie Boys, Connie Francis. “I had kids pick out album covers that they thought were cool,” Santelli said.

The exhibition halls are not large, so the ground covered is impressive. The gallery surveying the history of American music is just 2,200 square feet. It packs in sections on 11 music genres (American classics, pop, soul, jazz, Native American) and six themes (race, gender, technology, geography). Display cases hold some of the earliest electric guitars from the 1920s and 30s. A suit of Frank Sinatra’s. Louis Armstrong’s and Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpets. A Chuck Berry guitar. An Elvis Presley jacket. Odetta’s guitar from the 1963 March on Washington. A Michael Jackson glove. Lady Gaga’s space helmet.

The ground floor also holds a space for temporary exhibitions. When I visited, the installation was “Chimes of Freedom: Protest, Patriotism, and the Power of Song.” It tells the story of American political songs from “Yankee Doodle Dandy” to Springsteen’s “The Streets of Minneapolis,” written after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. There was a Woody Guthrie guitar and a handwritten set of lyrics to “This Land Is Your Land.”

Upstairs, it is all about Bruce. The E Street Band gets its due, as do Bruce’s pre-fame bands: The Castiles, Child, Steel Mill. It is interesting to be reminded of the racial diversity of The E Street Band in its early days. Clarence Clemons, obviously. At different times the band included David Sancious, the keyboard player whose stamp is clear on 1973’s The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Vini Lopez played drums on that record. Ernest “Boom” Carter laid down the drum track on “Born to Run” before leaving with Sancious to form a jazz fusion group. They all remained friends. The last time I saw him live, he played a song written as a tribute to George Theiss, The Castiles’ founder, who had been diagnosed with cancer. Springsteen remained close to him until he died in 2025.

There is a recording studio where you can listen to Max Weinberg or Gary Tallent explain a drum or bass part. There is a partial recreation of Springsteen’s old home library in Rumson, where the autodidact college dropout devoured volumes like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

And there is the archives room, Chapman’s domain. Springsteen wrote lyrics in Walgreens spiral-bound notebooks, many of which he held onto. Visitors cannot handle them directly, but many have been scanned. Chapman estimates the center has 45,000 to 50,000 documents. “His mom had scrapbooks,” Chapman said. “So we were gifted his mom’s scrapbooks, about six of them, plus other newspapers and correspondence.” You can sit at computers and browse through lyrics and old posters while listening to Steel Mill play live from 1970.

The Mona Lisa of this Louvre is The Guitar. The Fender Telecaster, natural finish with black pickguard, strapped across Springsteen’s back in the famous Born to Run cover shot by Eric Meola. It is badly gashed in at least two places. You can practically smell the flat beer and tobacco smoke. I, and nearly every other visitor I observed, lingered over it. “That’s probably worth about $12 million,” Santelli said. “That was the last thing we put in.”

Someday, the mandarins of the Smithsonian will decide that American music needs its proper home on the National Mall. Until that day, we have this modest, big-hearted, meticulously curated tribute to the America that has earned our love. Within these walls you might believe that our America will win, and that the old, weird America is the America that matters. You might believe, for an hour or two, in the promised land.