Stax Museum of American Soul Music

The Stax Museum of American Soul Music stands on the corner of McLemore Avenue and College Street in South Memphis, on the exact spot where the original Stax Records studio operated from nineteen sixty until nineteen seventy-five. The building you see is a reconstruction: the original was demolished in nineteen eighty-nine after the label's collapse, and the neighborhood it anchored fell into poverty and neglect. The museum, which opened in two thousand three, rebuilt the studio footprint from scratch, salvaging what could be found and reconstructing what could not.

Stax was one of the defining record labels of the twentieth century. Founded by siblings Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, whose names generated the company's first two letters, it developed a sound that was rawer and sweatier than the polished Motown model: Memphis soul, built in a converted movie theater with a sloped floor that gave the room its distinctive acoustic character. The house band, Booker T. and the M.G.'s, were notable not only for their musicianship but for being racially integrated in Memphis, Tennessee, in the early nineteen sixties, at the height of segregation.

The artists who recorded at Stax constitute a who's-who of American music. Otis Redding cut "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" at Stax just three days before his death in December of nineteen sixty-seven. Isaac Hayes recorded "Hot Buttered Soul" and "Shaft" here, winning the first Academy Award ever given to a Black composer for original film music. Sam and Dave, Rufus Thomas, Booker T. and the M.G.'s, the Staple Singers: all of it came out of this converted theater on a residential street in South Memphis.

The museum holds more than two thousand artifacts, including Isaac Hayes's gold-plated nineteen seventy-two Cadillac El Dorado, Otis Redding's flight jacket, and a recreation of the original studio with its sloped floor. Stax Academy, a music education program for neighborhood youth, operates on the same block. The institution is inseparable from the street it rebuilt.