Yes, but only with a plan. Beale Street, Sun Studio and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music sit in three different parts of Memphis, none within walking distance of the others. A car or a rideshare, a realistic order — Sun in the morning, Stax midday, Beale Street last — and roughly six to eight hours of actual moving-around time make it workable in a single day.
What order should you visit them in?
Most people who plan this day put Sun Studio first, Stax Museum second, and Beale Street last, and there’s a practical reason for it.
Sun Studio, at 706 Union Avenue, and the Stax Museum, in the Soulsville neighborhood south of downtown, both run as timed or guided visits with a working museum schedule — they close in the evening. Beale Street doesn’t. It’s a street, not an institution, and it runs late. Putting it last means the two sites with fixed hours get visited while they’re actually open, and the entertainment district — restaurants, bars, live music — becomes the evening stop it’s built to be. The full logistics of distance and travel time between all four Memphis music sites, including Graceland, are broken down separately on how far apart Beale Street, Sun Studio, Stax and Graceland actually are.
How far apart are these three places really?
Sun Studio sits roughly a mile and a half east of downtown on Union Avenue. The Stax Museum is a few miles south of downtown in Soulsville, on E McLemore Avenue. Beale Street is downtown itself, a few blocks from the river. None of the three routes between them is walkable — each leg is a drive or a rideshare trip, not a stroll, and that shapes the whole day more than any single museum’s opening hours do.
What does each stop actually give you?
Beale Street
Beale Street Historic District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It runs a few blocks from Second Street to the river and has functioned as an entertainment and commercial strip since the late nineteenth century, associated historically with W.C. Handy and the development of blues as a published musical form. Today it operates as a district of clubs, restaurants and live venues rather than a museum — there’s no single ticket or single building that explains it, which is why it works better as an evening stop than a scheduled one. A fuller account of what the street is, and isn’t, is at what Beale Street actually is.
Sun Studio
Sun Studio operates as a working recording studio and museum on the site where Sam Phillips recorded Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis through the 1950s. It is designated a National Historic Landmark. Visits run as guided tours through the original studio floor, and the site’s own materials describe specific sessions and equipment rather than a general music-history overview. What was actually recorded there, and what the tour covers, is set out at what Sun Studio recorded, and what’s on the tour.
Stax Museum of American Soul Music
The Stax Museum sits on the site of the original Stax Records studio in Soulsville, rebuilt after the original building was demolished in the late 1980s. Its own site describes a collection that includes Isaac Hayes’s gold-trimmed Cadillac, instruments and stage costumes tied to the label’s roster — Otis Redding, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, the Staple Singers, Sam & Dave. The museum sits within the Soulsville neighborhood, a community defined by the label’s history, described at what Soulsville is and how Stax shaped it. The museum itself is covered in more detail at what the Stax Museum actually holds.
Do you need a car for this route?
Practically, yes. MATA, the city’s bus network, connects these neighborhoods, but not on a schedule built for a tight one-day itinerary between three fixed appointments. The Main Street Trolley, useful for moving along downtown itself, doesn’t reach Sun Studio or Stax at all — its route stays within the downtown core. The honest assessment of whether a car is needed for a day like this one is laid out at whether you need a car in Memphis, and the bus network’s actual reach is covered at what MATA covers and how well it runs. A rideshare between each stop is the practical fallback for a visitor without a car, and it’s how most people actually cover this route in a day.
If driving, downtown parking near Beale Street runs on meters and garages rather than free curb space, and that’s worth knowing before the evening leg of the day — see how parking actually works downtown.
What does a realistic timeline look like?
A workable shape, not a fixed schedule:
- Morning: Sun Studio, arriving near opening. The guided tour runs a set length; check Sun Studio’s own site for current tour times before planning around it.
- Midday: travel south to Soulsville, allow time for the Stax Museum’s exhibits, which run self-guided but are dense enough to take a couple of hours.
- Afternoon: travel back downtown, with time to eat and to walk part of the core before evening.
- Evening: Beale Street, which only really comes alive once the clubs and restaurants open for the night.
This is roughly the same shape recommended in a Memphis day built around music, which covers the same three sites alongside the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame for anyone with slightly more time. It also overlaps with the broader single-day planning covered at what you can realistically see in Memphis in one day.
What if you only have a few hours, not a full day?
Cutting one stop is more sensible than rushing all three. Sun Studio and the Stax Museum both reward unhurried time — they’re compact but dense, and a rushed tour of either loses most of what makes it worth the drive. Beale Street, by contrast, doesn’t require a scheduled block; it can be folded into an evening after dinner without planning around it. If the day is genuinely short, most people drop Stax or Sun rather than trying to compress both into a half-visit, and add the missed site to a second day if one is available — see how a two-day Memphis visit is usually structured.
What’s worth adding if there’s more time in the city?
Graceland sits further south again, past Stax, and is often paired with it on a second day rather than crammed into this one — the distance and the scale of a Graceland visit don’t fit comfortably alongside Sun and Stax in a single afternoon. The Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, downtown near the FedExForum, gives a more general history of the city’s recorded music and can bridge the gap if Beale Street’s evening crowd isn’t the goal. Anyone building toward a longer visit will find the fuller sequencing worked through at a first visit to Memphis, in a sensible order, and the general shape of what a downtown walking day looks like at a walking route through downtown Memphis.
Access Memphis is an independent guide written from published, checkable sources. We have not visited the places described here and we do not publish personal recommendations or invented ‘local favourites’ — where something is singled out as notable, we say who says so. Opening times, fares, closures and prices change at short notice, so treat everything here as a starting point and confirm with the museum, operator or venue directly before building a day around it. We give no advice on visas, insurance, health or safety; use your own government’s official guidance for those.
Featured image: Photo by Warren LeMay from Chicago, IL, United States, source, CC BY-SA 2.0
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