Mission Mondays: What Else Are We Going To Do?

by Lorenzo Windrow, Associate Director of Development for the National Museum of African American Music

Have you ever sat with someone and started drawing parallels you didn’t expect? 

I met with Gail Carr Williams over breakfast on the kind of Nashville morning that hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet. Gail knows about change; she’s been a catalyst of it for a long time. The lawyer, philanthropist, and community servant is a very busy woman. She serves formally on multiple boards and informally as a mentor to rising young leaders and a sounding board to many.

I wore a vintage “Class of ’75” shirt– one of those pieces you throw on without thinking (1975 was 20+ years before I was born). At some point, it came up, and she smiled. “That was my year.”  The year she graduated high school. You don’t plan moments like that. They just happen. 

That brings us to Detroit.

The city matters in her personal story and in her story with the museum. Detroit, in the 1970s, wasn’t just producing music; it was engulfed in it. Motown, yes… but also, everything else. The sounds that didn’t need a stage, the ones that lived in neighborhoods and memory. That kind of upbringing doesn’t just make you a fan, it gives you a reference point. Gail appreciates that much of the work of NMAAM is to surround the people growing up in Nashville or visiting Nashville with a wide range of music, much in the same way she was surrounded by it growing up. 

She arrived in Nashville in 2000, not trying to plug in, not trying to figure it out, already clear. Over time, her name started to echo powerfully in the rooms that shape the city: Vanderbilt, the Symphony, the Frist… Not because she was chasing visibility, but because she offered valuable ideas, insight, and resources. If something needed to move, she helped move it or found her way near it. 

At one point, she mentioned writing a paper asking whether she had the right to call herself a philanthropist. She meant it. For her, that word requires something most people skip: understanding the issue before attaching yourself to it. Not the organization, the issue! Where it lives… Who it affects… What happens if nobody steps in. Once you understand that, the investment changes. 

I asked what Nashville loses if a place like the National Museum of African American Music doesn’t exist. She didn’t hesitate:

“Culture.” 

The spirit. The soul. The parts of the story that don’t survive on their own. 

She came back to storytelling more than once. Not as a theme—as a concern. Because music carries time. What people were living through. What they were pushing against. What they were building. And if those stories aren’t handled with care, they don’t just fade; they get replaced. 

Gail calls out a name quietly and with honor— David Williams, II. 

Her late husband was a builder of systems, institutions. Vanderbilt’s first Black Vice Chancellor. When NMAAM was being born, he provided the kind of visible and invisible leadership that helped make a museum like this possible in the first place. Quietly and with honor, she’s keeping up that work, carrying his legacy forward. She sustains the connection that her husband began, and that’s the work that keeps institutions from becoming hollow. 

Toward the end of our time together, I asked what she would say to someone thinking about getting involved. 

“What else are you doing?”

She made clear that engagement was not a choice. It was inevitable. She helped, because what else could you be doing more important than helping? Because if a place like NMAAM is going to continue telling the truth—with depth, with care, with permanence—it will always come down to people. People who understand. People who choose to act. 

That’s Gail Carr Williams. 

And if you’ve read this far, her question is yours now: 

What else are you doing? 

Lorenzo Windrow serves as Associate Director of Development at the National Museum of African American Music, where he manages an $8 million contributed income pipeline and leads transformative campaigns that sustain the museum’s mission of celebrating black music and culture. Read his bio here.

Mission Mondays is an initiative by The National Museum of African American Music to highlight the stories of the major donors who help make our mission possible. Want to be featured? Please contact marketing@nmaam.org. Inspired to support?