Dolly Parton has spent six decades turning her life into song. This year she turns it into an address.
Songteller Hotel is arriving in downtown Nashville with 245 rooms and suites, each designed around the stories and songs of a woman who needs only one name. Parton chose the site herself, on the seam between Lower Broadway, the loud heart of the city's live-music scene, and the older charm of Second Avenue, so guests step out the door into the newest and the most historic corners of Nashville at once.
The music does not stop in the lobby. The hotel holds two original live-music venues, Parton's Live and Jolene's, where sets from Nashville artists share the bill with craft cocktails and elevated Southern cooking, and a Listening Lobby sets the tone from the moment of arrival.
The centerpiece sits on the third floor. Dolly's Life of Many Colors is a roughly 20,000-square-foot museum billed as the largest exhibition ever devoted to her life and career, tracing the path from a one-room Tennessee cabin to the top of American music. The hotel and museum come from a partnership between Parton and Herschend, the company behind Dollywood's DreamMore Resort and HeartSong Lodge, with architecture by Pivot Studio.
Reservations and pre-sale museum tickets are already open, a measure of how much anticipation has gathered around a project that gives one of the most beloved figures in country music a permanent home in the city that made her a star. When the doors open, downtown Nashville will have something it has never had, a hotel that is also a stage, a museum, and a love letter under one roof.