Memphis’s gifts to American culture include the supermarket, the drive-in restaurant, the Holiday Inn, Elvis Presley, and Federal Express, and if you detect a pattern here you’ll understand why the city is at once entertainingly kitsch and supremely captivating. This is not to say Memphis (pop. 599,000) lacks a coherent character—just the opposite—but its charms can have unpredictable side effects.
Beale Street, downtown between 2nd and 4th Streets, has been Memphis’s honky-tonk central ever since native son W. C. Handy set up shop in the early 1900s with the blues he’d learned in Mississippi. Beale Street has been sanitized for your protection, turning it into a new! & improved! version of its old self, and a massive shopping mall and flashy new arena for the Grizzlies basketball team has transformed the entire south side of downtown Memphis; slap an adhesive name tag on your lapel and you’ll fit right in with the tour bus crowd strolling at night along the block of clubs—including B. B. King’s at 147 Beale Street (901/527-5464), marked by a giant neon guitar.
Fortunately, a number of other music-related museums and attractions capture a more authentic Memphis: The original Sun Records studio (daily; $9.50; 901/521-0664), where Elvis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and many others recorded their historic tracks in the 1950s, is a short walk northeast at 706 Union Avenue; while the site of Stax Records studio (daily; $9; 888/942-7685), at 926 E. McLemore Avenue, is now a museum documenting the soulful impact of Sam & Dave and Otis Redding during the 1960s.
If there’s one place that shouldn’t be missed, it’s the eloquent National Civil Rights Museum (closed Tues.; $10; 901/521-9699), at 450 Mulberry Street, south of Beale Street behind the restored facade of the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Aided by extensive video newsreels and life-sized dioramas, museum exhibits let you step as far as you like into the powerful history of the civil rights movement. However, unless you’re a conspiracy nut, you might want to miss out on the disturbingly expensive displays about Dr. King’s assassination, housed in the old rooming house across the street, where James Earl Ray fired the fatal shots.
Another key Memphis destination is the Center for Southern Folklore (daily; 901/525-3655), in Pembroke Square at 119 S. Main Street, a great place to immerse yourself in southern lifeways, with a captivating collection of folk art plus frequent live music, a fine café, and all sorts of fun events. Elvis’s favorite roller coaster, the Zippin’ Pippin’, lives on at Libertyland (about $25; 901/274-1776), south of Central Avenue at the Mid-South Fairground.
On the north side of downtown Memphis, Mud Island is a real island in the middle of the Mississippi River, connected to downtown by a pedestrian bridge and a monorail. This 50-acre island holds a five-block-long mock-up of the Mississippi River, with the Gulf of Mexico played by a huge, 1.3-million-gallon public swimming pool. Also here: the excellent Mississippi River Museum.
Right in downtown Memphis, but just a step away from the majors, the Memphis Redbirds ($5–15; 901/721-6050), Class AAA farm club for the St. Louis Cardinals, play at AutoZone Park at 200 Union Avenue
