Rock 'N' Soul Museum

 March 2025 - Memphis TN

On a quick break in Memphis, driving from Little Rock AR to Brentwood TN, we decided to visit the Rock 'N' Soul Museum.

It started with a video.

Click here for an overview.

Active since 1947, it soon became the first radio station in the United States that was programmed entirely for African Americans. It featured black radio personalities; its success in building an audience attracted radio advertisers suddenly aware of a "new" market among black listeners.

WHER - The Nation's First All Girl Radio Station. . , On October 30, 1955, in a Holiday Inn at 972 S. Third Street, the nation's first radio station to staff only women as disk jockeys went on the air as "WHER-1,000 Beautiful Watts." Sam Phillips of Sun Studio and Kemmons Wilson of Holiday Inn developed the idea.

Stax Records is an American record company, originally based in Memphis, Tennessee. Founded in 1957 as Satellite Records, the label changed its name to Stax Records in September 1961. 

Stax was influential in the creation of Southern soul and Memphis soul music. Stax also released gospel, funk, and blues recordings. Renowned for its output of blues music, the label was founded by two siblings and business partners, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton (STewart/AXton = Stax). It featured several popular ethnically integrated bands (including the label's house band, Booker T. & the M.G.'s) and a racially integrated team of staff and artists unprecedented in that time of racial strife and tension in Memphis and the South. According to ethnomusicologist Rob Bowman, the label's use of "one studio, one equipment set-up, the same set of musicians and a small group of songwriters led to a readily identifiable sound. It was a sound based in black gospel, blues, country, and earlier forms of rhythm and blues (R&B). It became known as southern soul music."

Following the death of Stax's biggest star, Otis Redding, in 1967, and the severance of the label's distribution deal with Atlantic Records in 1968, Stax continued primarily under the supervision of a new co-owner, Al Bell.[3] Over the next five years, Bell expanded the label's operations significantly, in order to compete with Stax's main rival, Motown Records in Detroit. During the mid-1970s, a number of factors, including a problematic distribution deal with CBS Records, caused the label to slide into insolvency, resulting in its forced closure in late 1975.

In 1977, Fantasy Records acquired the post-1968 Stax catalogue and selected pre-1968 recordings. Beginning in 1978, Stax (now owned by Fantasy) began signing new acts and issuing new material, as well as reissuing previously recorded Stax material. However, by the early 1980s, no new material was being issued on the label, and for the next two decades, Stax was strictly a reissue label.

After Concord Records acquired Fantasy in 2004, the Stax label was reactivated, and is today used to issue both the 1968–1975 catalog material and new recordings by current R&B and soul performers. Atlantic Records continues to hold the rights to the vast majority of the 1959–1968 Stax material.

Estelle Axton

Johnny Cash.

April 2015 Johnny Cash Museum Nashville TN.

Elvis.

It had some displays dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr.

April 2017 Martin Luther King Jr. Lorraine Motel

Domingo Samudio (b. February 28, 1937 in Dallas, Texas, United States), better known by his stage name Sam the Sham, is a retired American rock and roll singer. Sam the Sham is known for his camp robe and turban and hauling his equipment in a 1952 Packard hearse with maroon velvet curtains.[citation needed] As the front man for the Pharaohs, he sang on several Top 40 hits in the mid-1960s; "Wooly Bully" by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs was the number one song of 1965 according to Billboard magazine's year-end Hot 100. However, the song never reached number one on the weekly charts. "Li'l Red Riding Hood" was another charting song for Samudio.

In the 1960s, the Memphis Housing Authority (MHA) planned to redevelop Beale Street into a suburban-style area that would attract white tourists. The plan included a covered mall, cobblestone walkway, and a revolving tower restaurant. However, the project displaced many Black residents and businesses. 

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