10 Best Museums in Memphis (Costs & Tips, 2026)

Elvis Presley bought this mansion in 1957 at age 22 and lived here until his death in 1977 — the Jungle Room's green shag carpet, still original, tells you everything about how untouched the interior has been left. Seventy-seven dollars for the mansion tour package (iPad-guided, narrated in part by Elvis's own family), significantly more if adding the car museum and private jets across the street.

Built on the exact footprint of the original Stax Records studio — demolished in 1989 after the label went bankrupt, then rebuilt in 2003 as a near-replica once the neighborhood pushed to reclaim its own history. Fifteen dollars, and Isaac Hayes's gold-trimmed, fur-lined 1972 Cadillac Eldorado sits inside as the museum's most photographed single object.

Elvis Presley recorded his first single here in 1953, and Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and B.B. King all cut early tracks in the same small room — the studio still operates as a working recording space most nights, tourists by day, musicians by dark. Eighteen dollars for a 45-minute guided tour that ends letting visitors hold the actual microphone Elvis sang into.

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the balcony outside Room 306 of the actual Lorraine Motel, which now forms the core of the museum — the room itself is preserved exactly as it was that day, visible through glass, the single most sobering stop on this entire list. Eighteen dollars, and the museum's exhibits trace the full civil rights movement, not just the assassination, starting well before 1968 and continuing after it.

This Smithsonian-affiliated museum takes a genuinely unusual angle, tracing Memphis music directly back to the cotton fields and sharecropper culture that fed both the blues and, decades later, rock and roll, rather than starting the story at Sun Studio. Fifteen dollars, self-guided with an audio tour narrated in part by musicians who lived the history themselves.

Run by the Blues Foundation, the same organization behind the annual Blues Music Awards, with inductee exhibits covering musicians well outside the Memphis-only story — B.B. King alongside Chicago and Mississippi Delta blues figures the city's other museums don't really touch. Ten dollars, small enough to see properly in under an hour, and genuinely quieter than Beale Street's bigger-name stops a few blocks away.

Unlike the genre-specific museums nearby, inductees here span every kind of music with a real Memphis connection — soul, blues, rock, gospel, hip-hop — a deliberately wider lens than Stax's soul focus or the Blues Hall of Fame's genre-specific one. Twelve dollars, small and walkable in well under an hour, a reasonable add-on to a Beale Street evening rather than a full separate stop.

A small relocated shotgun house where W.C. Handy, widely credited as the "Father of the Blues" for being the first to publish blues sheet music in the early 1900s, actually lived while composing some of his best-known work. Five dollars, tiny and easy to see in twenty minutes, with his own trumpet and handwritten sheet music on display inside.

A nonprofit folklife center rather than a formal museum — free to walk through, with rotating photography and oral-history exhibits on the working-class Memphis culture that produced its famous musicians, not just the musicians themselves. Free admission, occasional live music in the attached cafe space, and a genuinely different register from the ticketed music museums surrounding it on Beale Street.

Dedicated entirely to Ernest Withers, a Memphis photographer who documented both the civil rights movement — including the Emmett Till trial and the Memphis sanitation workers' strike — and the Beale Street music scene from the same vantage point, often the same week. Ten dollars, small gallery space run by his family, genuinely different from any other stop on this list for pairing music and civil-rights history through one photographer's specific eye.