Explore Memphis

The Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum at the corner of Beale Street and B. B. King Boulevard tells how rural blues, gospel and country music met in Memphis and grew into rock and roll and soul. Based on an exhibition developed with the Smithsonian Institution, it shows instruments, stage clothes and recordings, with an audio guide of over 300 songs.

Beale Street in downtown Memphis was the centre of Black business and music life in the early 20th century, where W. C. Handy, B. B. King and other blues musicians played. Its central blocks between 2nd and 4th Streets are now lined with blues clubs, bars and restaurants with neon signs, and are closed to traffic in the evening.

The Orpheum Theatre at the corner of Main and Beale Streets in downtown Memphis opened in 1928 as a vaudeville and film palace, replacing an earlier theatre on the site. Its 2,300-seat auditorium, with gilded plasterwork, crystal chandeliers and a Wurlitzer organ, now hosts touring Broadway shows, concerts and ballet.

The Blues Hall of Fame on South Main Street in Memphis is run by the Blues Foundation, which has inducted blues performers, recordings and writers since 1980. The museum opened in 2015 and presents the inductees in galleries with instruments, clothes, photographs and listening stations with their recordings.

The National Civil Rights Museum in downtown Memphis is built around the former Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on 4 April 1968. Its exhibits trace the struggle for civil rights in the United States from slavery to the present, and the boarding house across the street, from where the shot was fired, is part of the museum.

Sun Studio on Union Avenue was opened by Sam Phillips in 1950 as the Memphis Recording Service. 'Rocket 88' was recorded here in 1951, and Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and B. B. King all made early records in the small room. Guided tours visit the studio, which is still used for recording at night.

The Stax Museum of American Soul Music stands on McLemore Avenue in South Memphis, on the site of Stax Records, the label of Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers and Booker T. & the M.G.'s. Opened in 2003, it shows a rebuilt studio, a 1960s church, stage clothes and Isaac Hayes's gold-trimmed Cadillac.

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, founded in 1916, is the oldest art museum in Tennessee and stands in Overton Park in Midtown Memphis. Its collection of more than 10,000 works spans European paintings from the Renaissance onward, American art, decorative arts, photography and African art; the museum is preparing a move to a new building downtown.

The Memphis Zoo opened in 1906 in Overton Park in Midtown Memphis and keeps more than 3,500 animals of over 500 species on about 30 hectares. Its entrance is built in the style of an ancient Egyptian temple, a nod to the city's namesake, and its areas include Cat Country, Teton Trek, Zambezi River Hippo Camp and an aquarium.

Overton Park is a 138-hectare public park in Midtown Memphis, laid out in 1901 by the landscape architect George Kessler. It contains the Old Forest, one of the last tracts of old-growth forest in a Tennessee city, as well as the Memphis Zoo, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the Levitt Shell open-air stage, Rainbow Lake and a golf course.

Graceland is the mansion in Whitehaven, about 14 km south of downtown Memphis, where Elvis Presley lived from 1957 until his death in 1977. He is buried in its Meditation Garden with members of his family. Opened as a house museum in 1982, it shows the mansion's rooms, and across the street the Elvis Presley's Memphis complex displays his cars, aircraft and costumes.