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.

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.

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.