When Stax Records was forced into involuntary bankruptcy in 1976, the Union Planters Bank sold the studio for ten dollars to Southside Church of God in Christ, which planned to use it as a community center and soup kitchen. Those plans never materialized. The building deteriorated for years, and despite multiple attempts to save it, the original structure was demolished in 1989. The neighborhood around McLemore Avenue fell into blight. It took nearly a decade before a coalition of Memphis business leaders, anonymous philanthropists, and former Stax artists launched a nonprofit revitalization effort. Construction began in April 2001, and the Stax Museum opened on May 2, 2003 -- a faithful replica of the recording studio rising from the same ground where the original once stood.

The museum houses more than 3,000 items of memorabilia, but some exhibits transcend mere display. An authentic circa-1906 Mississippi Delta church was dismantled in Mississippi and reconstructed inside the museum to illustrate the gospel roots of soul music. Visitors can sit in its wooden pews and hear the connection between Sunday morning praise and the Saturday night recordings that came out of Studio A. Other standout exhibits include Isaac Hayes's restored custom-built 1972 gold-trimmed, peacock-blue Cadillac Eldorado, the Soul Train dance floor, and the Academy Award statuette Hayes won for Best Musical Score for "Theme From Shaft" in 1972. Skip Pitts's guitar and the wah-wah pedal used on that iconic recording are also on display, along with Floyd Newman's saxophone, which turned 100 years old in 2017.

Because the Stax Museum is one of only a handful of museums in the world dedicated to soul music -- the Motown Museum in Detroit being another -- its scope extends well beyond the Stax label. Exhibits feature vintage footage of Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, The Jackson Five, James Brown, Sam Cooke, Parliament-Funkadelic, and Ike & Tina Turner, alongside material from labels like Motown, Hi Records, Atlantic Records, and the studios of Muscle Shoals. TIME magazine named it "The Most Authentic American Experience in Tennessee," and it received the 2015 Tennessee Governor's Arts Award. In 2022, the museum was included in the United States Civil Rights Trail.

The museum is the anchor of a campus called Soulsville U.S.A., operated by the nonprofit Soulsville Foundation. Adjacent to the museum, the Stax Music Academy provides music education and mentoring to middle and high school students. Since 2008, every graduating senior has been accepted to college, and since 2021, every senior has received a music scholarship. In 2019, Justin Timberlake installed a permanent songwriting lab through the Levi's Music Project. The Soulsville Charter School, a college-prep institution on the same campus, combines classical academics with strings orchestra, band, and choir. Its Soulsville Symphony Orchestra has performed for Stevie Wonder, John Legend, and Isaac Hayes. The ten-dollar sale that nearly erased Stax from the map has been answered by a neighborhood that now produces the next generation of musicians, scholars, and artists.