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 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.

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.

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.