The Stax Museum of American Soul Music sits on the original site of Stax Records at 926 East McLemore Avenue, where between 1957 and 1975 a converted movie theater birthed a catalog of 167 Billboard hits. Isaac Hayes recorded Hot Buttered Soul in Studio A. Otis Redding cut "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" weeks before his death. Booker T. and the M.G.'s laid down the groove that defined Memphis soul. The label's integrated house band defied segregation-era norms, and the Stax sound—raw, immediate, bass-heavy—stood in deliberate contrast to the polished Motown approach emerging from Detroit. When the original building was demolished in 1989, the neighborhood lost its cultural anchor. The museum opened in 2003 as a full-scale replica of the Stax studio, complete with the sloped auditorium floor and original control-room equipment. Today the museum preserves more than 2,000 artifacts: Isaac Hayes's 1972 peacock-blue Superfly Cadillac Eldorado, Otis Redding's stage suits, the original Studio A console where Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn engineered the Stax groove. Exhibits trace the label's role in civil rights activism, the economic collapse following the King assassination, and the eventual bankruptcy that scattered the catalog. The Stax Music Academy, housed in the same complex, trains 1,500 young musicians annually in the tradition established by Rufus Thomas and Carla Thomas. Sun Studio, located at 706 Union Avenue, anchors the city's broader studio tour circuit—Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and B.B. King all recorded there under Sam Phillips. Heritage bus tours link Stax, Sun, Beale Street's preserved clubs, and the Lorraine Motel, weaving a narrative of how Memphis became the incubator for rock, soul, and blues. These Memphis music studio tours position visitors inside the physical spaces where American popular music pivoted, not through myth but through preserved equipment, session logs, and the acoustic signatures still audible in the original rooms. The museum operates Tuesday through Sunday from 10:00 to 17:00, with final admission at 16:00. General admission is twenty dollars. The building's exterior replicates the marquee and brick facade of the original Stax theater, a visual anchor in the Soulsville neighborhood that has seen gradual revitalization since the museum's opening. The studio floor itself is small—most sessions packed ten musicians into a space designed for seventy theater seats—and that intimacy forced the sonic proximity that defined the Stax sound. Al Bell, the label's co-owner, described the room as a place where "the music had nowhere to hide." Unlike larger commercial studios, Stax recorded live to two-track, capturing full performances in single takes. The control room's Scully tape machine and custom-built mixing board remain on display, the physical tools that translated improvisation into permanence.