Stax Museum of American Soul Music

Stax began in 1960, when Jim Stewart, a bond salesman, persuaded his sister Estelle Axton, a schoolteacher, to mortgage her home for $2,500. The name came from the first two letters of Stewart and Axton. They moved into the Capitol, an old movie house on East McLemore Avenue, and the theater's sloping floor and big speakers shaped the sound that came out of it.

The company was racially integrated at a time when Memphis was not. Booker T. and the M.G.'s, a mixed-race house band, cut "Green Onions," Al Bell, who is Black, became national sales director, and Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, Sam and Dave, Isaac Hayes and the Staple Singers recorded here. The studio stood in a mostly Black neighborhood now called Soulsville. Stax went bankrupt in 1975 and 1976, the building was sold to a nearby church for ten dollars, and it was demolished in 1989.

The museum opened on the same corner in 2003, built around a near-exact replica of Studio A with its sloped floor. Inside are Isaac Hayes's 1972 peacock-blue Cadillac Eldorado, a reconstructed Mississippi Delta church from about 1906 and more than three thousand pieces of memorabilia. The Stax Music Academy and a charter school share the campus, so young musicians are still learning in the building next door.