The bluff came first. Everything else followed.
Access Memphis Editorial Team 
The Cotton Museum at the Memphis Cotton Exchange is a small history museum built inside the actual second-floor trading room of the old Memphis Cotton Exchange building, at 65 Union Avenue downtown. It uses that room, and the exchange’s own records and equipment, to tell the story of how cotton built the city’s economy and … Read more
What Is Slave Haven and the Burkle Estate? Slave Haven Underground Railroad Museum is a small history museum housed in the Burkle Estate, a mid-19th-century brick house on North Second Street in Memphis, just north of downtown. Local tradition holds that its owner, a German immigrant named Jacob Burkle, used the house to shelter people … Read more
The Memphis Music Hall of Fame is both an honor and a museum: an annual induction that recognizes musicians, producers and industry figures with a documented connection to Memphis, and a small dedicated gallery on Beale Street where inductees’ stories and objects are on permanent display. It covers blues, soul, rock and roll, gospel and … Read more
The Dixon Gallery and Gardens is an art museum and 17-acre garden estate in East Memphis, built around the former home and private art collection of Hugo and Margaret Oates Dixon. It combines a permanent collection strong in French and American Impressionism with formal and woodland gardens open to the public year-round. Where is the … Read more
The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art is Tennessee’s oldest and largest art museum, holding roughly 8,000 works spanning antiquity to the present. It currently sits inside Overton Park in Midtown Memphis. The museum has announced plans to leave that building for a new, purpose-built structure on the downtown riverfront, though it has not yet moved. … Read more
The Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum is a Smithsonian-affiliated history museum in downtown Memphis that tells one specific story: how Black and white musical traditions in the Mid-South — blues, gospel, country and rhythm and blues — merged in the 1950s and 1960s into rock and roll and soul. It is not a former recording … Read more
Graceland is the mansion Elvis Presley bought in 1957 in the Whitehaven area of Memphis, and it is now a house museum and entertainment complex open to the public. A visit covers the home itself, the graves of Presley and family members in the grounds, and a separate exhibition campus across the street covering his … Read more
The Stax Museum of American Soul Music is a museum in South Memphis built on the site of the original Stax Records recording studio, which operated from 1957 to 1975. It holds instruments, costumes, gold records and artifacts tied to Stax artists, and it is run today by the Soulsville Foundation, a nonprofit that also … Read more
Sun Studio is a small recording studio at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, opened in 1950 by Sam Phillips as the Memphis Recording Service. Between 1951 and 1956 it recorded early sessions by B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. It is a National Historic Landmark and still … Read more
The National Civil Rights Museum is a history museum in Downtown Memphis built around the former Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. The museum’s exhibits trace the American civil rights movement from slavery through the present, and the motel building itself — including the preserved room and … Read more
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