The SongTeller Hotel and Where to Find Her in the City
Photos Courtesy The SongTeller Hotel
Every hour on the hour, a Dolly song plays in the lobby of her SongTeller Hotel. The room is called the Listening Lobby and the programming is called 9 to 5 Music Moments, which is about the level of fun you should expect from a building she had a hand in designing herself.
She unveiled the plans for the hotel in June 2024 at CMA Fest, and she picked the corner it was built on. The hotel stands at 211 Commerce Street, wedged between Lower Broadway, where the live music is, and 2nd Avenue, where the old brick buildings and the restaurants are. There are 245 rooms, and Dolly’s pink is on the walls, the couches, and the duvets.
Downstairs there’s Jolene’s, the cocktail lounge, with live music and shareable plates, and Parton’s Live, a venue with a stage and bar-style dining that runs songwriter sessions and rising-star showcases. The gift shop is on the first floor. Upstairs, the Six Sisters Suite is named for her siblings. Guests get a writing hour with supplies laid out in case anybody wants to try their hand at a hit, and a turndown service that leaves something sweet or savory depending on the day of the week.
The third floor is the reason a lot of people will book. Dolly’s Life of Many Colors is the largest exhibit about her anywhere, running every decade of the career: her wardrobe across seven decades, the Imagination Library zone, a Hall of Fame room of awards, a Life On The Road section on the touring years, and Dolly’s Writing Room, which gets at the part of her journey she always said mattered most.
Reservations are available to book now, and the museum officially opens this fall.
If there’s not enough Dolly for you at the hotel, here’s where to go find her in the rest of Nashville.
Get Lunch at Wendell Smith’s, the Meat-and-Three She Kept Going Back To
Wendell Smith’s has been feeding Nashville for 70 years and is one of the few authentic meat-and-threes left. Dolly and Porter Wagoner had a booth in the back where they’d eat after taping their WSM television show. You can still sit in the booth for your own meal. If you want to dine like Dolly, just know she went for the turnip greens.
The room holds about 110, thirteen of those on counter stools. The menu changes daily, though roast beef, baked ham and pit barbecue are there every day. There’s a hand-scrawled sign at the front door that reads “No Saggy Pants, Thanks Management,” and it has clearly outlasted several trends.
Book the RCA Studio B Tour on Music Row
Dolly cut “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” in this room. It’s a small building on Music Row with an outsized claim, opened in 1957 and folded into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1977. The list of people who recorded there runs from Elvis Presley to Roy Orbison.
The only way in is a timed, guided tour you add on to a Country Music Hall of Fame ticket, so buy them together and plan the afternoon around the tour time. It’s worth it.
See the Opry House Where She Debuted at 13
The Grand Ole Opry has been putting country music in front of an audience since 1925, first over the radio and then on a stage. In 1959 Johnny Cash introduced “a little girl from East Tennessee,” and a 13-year-old Dolly walked out and sang George Jones’ “You Gotta Be My Baby.” The crowd pulled her back for three encores. They seemed to know what was coming.
She became a member in 1969 and has played the stage more than 100 times since then. The Opry house keeps memories of Dolly in it: there’s a mural on the second floor, and her stage clothes are glittering in the galleries.
End Up at Tootsie’s, Same as Everybody Else Did
Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge sits across the alley from the Ryman and has been a country music fixture since 1960. Willie Nelson drank there. So did Waylon Jennings and Patsy Cline.
“When I moved to Nashville, it was known that if you couldn’t find someone backstage, there was a good chance they were at the bar at Tootsie’s,” Parton told Air Mail. It’s three stories high, with a full food and drink menu, live music on the floors and memorabilia on most of the wall space. Go late.
Walk the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge in the Morning
She filmed the video for “Together You & I” out here in 2011, and it costs nothing to stand in the same spot. The bridge went up over the Cumberland in 1909 as the Shelby Street Bridge, closed to cars in 2003, and was renamed in 2014 for the longtime Tennessean editor who spent his career on free speech and civil rights.
It connects Riverfront Park downtown to Cumberland Park on the East Nashville side, so you can walk across, sit in either park and walk back. The skyline is the reason most people come out, and the best view is when the sun is setting.
