For many years, the Memphis neighborhood known as Soulsville USA was a bustling and thriving community where a young grocery sacker named David Porter became one of Stax Records' most famous songwriters, where Aretha Franklin was born and sang in her father's Metropolitan Baptist Church until moving to Detroit at age eight, where Calvin and Phinneas Newborn honed their jazz skills, where Al Green recorded his super hits of the 1970s at Willie Mitchell's Royal Studios, where Maurice White grew up and grew into Earth Wind & Fire, and where Elvis Presley sneaked into Rev. Herbert Brewster's East Trigg Avenue Baptist church as a teenager to listen to gospel music, much of which Rev. Brewster had written for Mahalia Jackson.

With the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis in April 1968, the closing of Stax Records due to forced bankruptcy in 1975, and general suburban sprawl that left many of America's inner cities in the shadows, Soulsville USA fell into an era of decline.

By 1998, the lot at the legendary intersection of McLemore Avenue and College Street, where Stax Records had once stood, was a vacant patch of land, identified by only a single historic marker telling visitors it was the site where some of the most famous music in the world had been made. An abandoned 65-unit apartment building stood on the adjacent lot. It was emblematic of the neglect and decay Soulsville USA had come to know.

But a group of dedicated Memphians had a vision. They believed that Soulsville USA could be revitalized and that pride could be once again instilled in its residents and that economic opportunity could be reinvigorated. They believed that Soulsville USA could have better housing, safer streets, and the sweet sound of soul music wafting through neighborhood again.

Working with the city, county, and federal government; LeMoyne-Owen College Community Development Corporation, The Plough Foundation, anonymous private donors, the Memphis Housing Authority and a collective of individuals who all shared this vision, and with some assistance from the state government, they turned that vacant patch of land at McLemore and College into a multimillion dollar, state-of-the-art Stax Museum of American Soul Music. They demolished the adjacent abandoned apartment building and built the spectacular Stax Music Academy to help enrich the lives of potentially at-risk neighborhood children through music education. Today, the museum and academy are the crown jewel in a $100 million neighborhood revitalization project.

While there is still much work to be done, the neighborhood is visibly on the rebound. Indeed, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and the Stax Music Academy have helped mend the neighborhood's blight and put Soulsville USA back in the local, national, and international limelight. Just a few blocks away, where one of the city's largest and most neglected public housing developments once stood, is an 80-acre mixed-income community of winding streets, mature trees, and beautiful new houses, playgrounds, a facility for senior citizens, a bank, and offices that offer homeownership resources and other programs for mixed-income residents. According to Memphis Police Department officials, the new urban subdivision is virtually crime-free. In fact, they say, crime in the entire neighborhood is down roughly 90 percent from its rate of 10 years ago.

Throughout the neighborhood, empty in-fill lots are filling up with new construction homes designed to blend with the unique character of Soulsville USA. Across McLemore Avenue from the Stax Museum, abandoned buildings have been demolished and a Soulsville USA Town Center is in the plans, offering commercial, retail, and other public and private use space. Adjacent to that, yet more substandard apartment buildings are giving way to new cul de sacs with yet more new homes designed to revitalize it in a careful manner in keeping with Soulsville USA's rich past. Large murals of Stax Records artists line the walls of railroad trestles that serve as the gateways to Soulsville USA. And residents of the neighborhood are again proud to say, "I live in the neighborhood that's home to Stax, now the Stax Museum of American Soul Music."