Memphis, explained
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
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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