Dr. Kerry Joels is having a fair amount of trouble keeping a lid on his excitement as he ponders the creation of the Cain's Ballroom Music Museum and Historical Society.

"I'd be out there digging footers tomorrow if they'd let me," he said.

Joels, who will serve as chairman and executive director of the museum and accompanying nonprofit organization, views the famed live music venue on Main Street as one of Tulsa's greatest and largely untapped cultural resources, a musical heritage site on par with the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, home of the Grand Ole Opry.

Joels doesn't arrive at that conclusion lightly. A native Oklahoman, he is a former division director and curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and therefore knows a thing or two about cultural gems.

So there's one thing he's sure of--with Cain's, and a dozen or so other projects that are planned for the area during the next couple of years, Tulsa is sitting on a rare opportunity to convert the Brady district into a cultural draw that would have few rivals anywhere in America.

"The potential is extraordinary," he said. "It would almost be like a mini Smithsonian, if everything gets built."

The Cain's Museum would be just one part of that complex, but it would be a significant element. Joels said the idea for the project came two years ago from the ballroom's current owners, Jim and Alice Rogers. The couple was searching for some way to commemorate the building's rich history. After a series of conversations, it was determined that the best way to proceed would be to establish a museum and nonprofit group as a separate entity for the ballroom itself.

The museum will not only convey the history of Cain's--which opened in 1924 and became famous as the headquarters for Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, before returning to the spotlight in the 1970s and '80s, when it helped launch the careers of such groups as the Sex Pistols, The Police, Van Halen and U2--it also will serve as a repository for the stories of those who frequented the establishment. A great many Tulsans have personal tales to share about how their parents or grandparents met on the dance floor at Cain's while twirling to Wills' music.

Others have stories about personal encounters with the King of Western Swing himself, while still others were in the crowd that night in 1978 when the then-largely unknown Johnny Rotten and his band of fellow miscreants from the U.K. stumbled through a sloppy set on their way to achieving rock 'n' roll infamy.

Naturally, the museum will include a great many Cain's artifacts among its 3,000 or 4,000 square feet of exhibits, but its main drawing card may turn out to be the mini Cain's Ballroom that's planned, a performance or meeting space featuring salvaged boards from the original Cain's floor.

There will also be an extensive library of video and audio clips that encourages user interaction, as well as a series of small rooms that can be used for teaching or as a conservatory. There also will be a gift shop designed to enhance the visitor's Cain's experience, rather than merely offer overpriced trinkets.

"We want visitors to understand the history and how it impacts music, as opposed to a passive experience of reading labels and watching video clips," Joels said.

Serving as curator for the museum will be Tulsa music historian, author and screenwriter John Wooley, who currently is working on a book about Cain's.

The historical society's board of directors is in the process of raising $2.5 million to build the museum and fund the exhibits, Joels said. The board also is in negotiations with developer David Sharp to buy a plot of land just south of Cain's on Main Street on which to build. Joels envisions a structure that fits in with the surrounding architecture.

"We want it to look like it's been there a hundred years, even if it hasn't," he said.

Joels said organizers hope to break ground on the museum within the next 24 months, although that schedule could be impacted by the economy.

He believes the museum will have tremendous meaning for generations of Tulsans who experienced magical nights at Cain's.

"Because that building is there and did what it did, you have this enrichment of Tulsa's culture that is measurable only in the quality of anecdotes you get," he said.

If You Are Keeping Score

The Cain's Museum is designed to help anchor what Joels hopes will turn out to be a series of attractions that serves as a destination for visitors from across the globe. That was the focus of a "museum summit" he helped organize last August with Jack Crowley, the mayor's adviser on urban planning and development who is compiling a plan for revitalizing downtown Tulsa.

That event brought together the various groups that are planning on building arts, cultural, educational or recreational facilities in the area in an attempt to determine what it would take to get them all built. Out of that experience came a white paper authored by Joels called "Brady By Day ... The Tulsa Museum District."

"To get a comprehensive picture of how a city works, categories of activities that occur in specific neighborhoods add up to the total city experience," Joels writes in the paper's introduction. "The Brady District is well on its way to becoming Tulsa's cultural center."

Among the projects in the works or being considered for the area are the National Fiddler Hall of Fame, the Western Swing Experience, the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa's visual arts center, a children's museum, a KOTV Channel 6 weather museum, a performing arts high school, a museum focusing on Oklahoma's contributions to America's energy industry, the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Center, a baseball museum, the George Kaiser Family Foundation's extension of the Philbrook Museum of Art, and a recording studio owned and operated by the Tulsa music group Hanson.

Already, the area is home to a glass-blowing studio, a violin shop, the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame, the Brady Theater, a number of restaurants and nightclubs, and, of course, Cain's Ballroom. By next spring, ONEOK Field--the city's new ballpark--will be open. And by 2013, Oklahoma Pop--an eye-catching $33 million museum operated by the state Historical Society focusing on the state's contributions to American pop culture--is expected to welcome visitors.

"We're talking about a tremendous critical mass of things sandwiched between the BOK Center and the ballpark," Joels said.

Despite the excitement all those projects create, Joels said one of the biggest challenges organizers will face is the need not to go to the well too often in terms of fundraising.

"We have to do it in a way that the charitable market and the corporate market can do it and not feel overwhelmed," he said.

Joels envisions an orderly process by which project organizers work together to reach their goals, both for their own facilities and the district as a whole. Eventually, he believes, a visitor to the area would need to spend several days in Tulsa in order to see and experience everything the district would have to offer.

In the meantime, Joels is hoping to promote interest in the area with a new event scheduled for next year. Along with developer Jamie Jameson and Ken Busby, executive director and CEO of the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, Joels is in the midst of planning the International Festival, an event patterned after a similar event in Edinburgh, Scotland. Joels said the festival will stretch from Mayfest to Juneteenth, highlighting different parts of the city.

"The idea is to aggregate all of the affiliate things going on during what is a tremendous actively month culturally," he said. "Our goal would be not to take over things, but to widen the audience for existing events."

Joels sees the International Festival as a means of attracting out-of-town visitors not only to Mayfest and Juneteenth, but to such area events as Bartlesville's OK Mozart Festival and Pryor's Country Fever. It also will sponsor a few signature events of its own to round out the list of offerings, perhaps initiating a Route 66 road rally that stretches from Tulsa to Clinton, home of the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum.

"There are 50 to 100 things going on that month," Joels said. "The issue is using technology to make sure people understand it all."

But the key to making all those plans for the area's future successful is cooperation, said Joels, who is serving as a consultant for several of the planned projects in the Brady.

"A lot of this is going to happen whether we coordinate it or not," he said. "What I want to do is develop a synergy so that one and one can be three instead of two."