Memphis

Top things to do in Memphis

1. 01

   Graceland - Elvis Presley's house and grave

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   The colonial-revival house Elvis bought at twenty-two and kept until he died, preserved down to the green shag carpet and indoor waterfall of the Jungle Room, with the family buried out in the Meditation Garden. Across the boulevard sit his cars, his two jets and a warehouse of jumpsuits and gold records. Smaller and stranger than the myth suggests, and a better record of American taste in the seventies than any museum.

2. 02

   National Civil Rights Museum - built into the Lorraine Motel

   history ⭐ Highly recommended

   The balcony where Dr Martin Luther King Jr was shot in April 1968 is left exactly as it was, two period cars parked beneath it, and the galleries behind run from the slave trade through the bus boycott, the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides. The boarding house across the street holds the second half of the story. Allow far longer than you think; most people do not manage it in one go.

3. 03

   Sun Studio - the room where rock and roll was cut

   nightlife music history 👍 Popular

   One storefront on Union Avenue where Sam Phillips recorded Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King before Elvis walked in, then Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis, and where the Million Dollar Quartet photo was taken in 1956. The tour runs in the actual room, original acoustic tile overhead, and it still books sessions at night.

4. 04

   Beale Street - blues bars and the old Black main street

   nightlife music 👍 Popular

   Three neon blocks closed to traffic after dark, with live blues coming out of every second doorway and a dry goods store that has been trading since the 1870s. It is a tourist strip now and makes no secret of it, but the history under it is real: this was the commercial and cultural main street of the Black mid-South, and W.C. Handy's clapboard house was moved here to prove it.

5. 05

   Stax Museum of American Soul Music - Soulsville

   nightlife music history ⭐ Highly recommended

   A faithful rebuild of the converted cinema on McLemore Avenue where Otis Redding, Booker T. and the M.G.'s, Sam and Dave and the Staple Singers cut the grittier, Southern answer to Motown, sloping cinema floor and all. Isaac Hayes' gold-trimmed Cadillac turns slowly in the middle of it. The label's integrated house band in 1960s Memphis is the story the building is really telling.

6. 06

   Memphis barbecue - dry-rubbed ribs and the pulled pork sandwich

   food

   Pork, and mostly shoulder: slow-smoked, pulled, piled on a soft bun and topped with slaw right in the sandwich. Ribs come dry, crusted with spice rather than sauced, at the basement rib house off a downtown alley; chopped pork with mustard slaw comes out of a converted service station on Lamar; and the smoked Cornish hen and barbecue spaghetti at Cozy Corner are the local oddities worth the detour.

7. 07

   The Peabody - the duck march through the lobby

   culture arts

   Ducks live on the roof of the grand old downtown hotel and ride the lift down at eleven each morning to spend the day in the marble lobby fountain, marching back up a red carpet in the late afternoon behind a uniformed Duckmaster. A daft, entirely sincere ritual running since the 1930s, and free to watch if you can get near the rope.

8. 08

   Bass Pro Shops at the Pyramid - the glass pyramid on the riverfront

   scenic shopping

   A thirty-two storey stainless steel pyramid built as a sports arena in 1991 and now a megastore with a cypress swamp, live alligators and a bowling alley inside it. The point for visitors is the glass lift up the inside face to the rooftop deck, which gives the best high view of the river, the bridges and the Arkansas flats.

9. 09

   Big River Crossing - walk the Harahan Bridge into Arkansas

   scenic

   A boardwalk bolted to the side of a working 1916 rail bridge carries you a mile out over the Mississippi to the Arkansas bank, with freight trains passing an arm's length away and the whole downtown skyline behind you. Lit up after dark, and the best free thing in the city.

10. 10

    Overton Park - the Old Forest, the zoo and the shell

    nature wildlife scenic

    Midtown's green heart holds genuine old-growth bottomland forest, saved when residents took the federal highway department to the Supreme Court in 1971 and stopped an interstate being driven through it. The zoo, the art museum and the open-air shell where Elvis played one of his first paid shows in 1954 all sit inside the same gates.

11. 11

    Shelby Farms Park - bison, lake and the Greenline

    nature wildlife

    One of the largest urban parks in the country, several times the size of Central Park, with a resident bison herd, a big lake to paddle and miles of trail. The Greenline, a paved rail-trail, runs out to it from Midtown, which makes it the one Memphis outing you can genuinely do on a bike.

12. 12

    Cooper-Young - the Midtown eating and record-shop crossroads

    food shopping

    A bungalow neighbourhood built around one intersection, marked by a sculpted trestle over the railway, with the city's densest run of restaurants, dive bars, a long-standing independent bookshop and a record label and shop on Young Avenue that punches far above the city's size. Where Memphis goes when it is not entertaining visitors.

13. 13

    Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum - the Smithsonian's version of the story

    nightlife music history

    Built by the Smithsonian at the top of Beale, this traces the line from Delta sharecroppers and their field recordings through the radio stations and studios to the soul era, with an audio guide loaded with the actual records. The best hour you can spend before doing the studios themselves, because it puts them in order.

Getting to & around Memphis

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