She Announced the Museum Herself. It Opens September 29.
For most of this year the SongTeller had the strangest status of any building downtown: visibly nearly finished, taking reservations, and refusing to name a day. When the reservation book opened, the opening date was still blank.
It is blank no longer. The SongTeller Hotel and Dolly's Life of Many Colors Museum are set to open together on Tuesday, Sept. 29, at the corner of Commerce Street and Third Avenue North.
They arrive about a month after Dolly Parton died on Aug. 25, at 80, in the city where she built nearly all of it. She announced this museum herself. She will not see it open.
What is in the building
The hotel holds 245 guest rooms and suites, sorted into four categories — Signature Rooms & Suites, Acoustic Suites, Six Sisters Suites, and a single SongTeller Suite at the top of the range. It was developed as a partnership with Herschend, the company that has run the Pigeon Forge side of her world for decades.
Two live entertainment venues sit inside it, which is the detail that separates this from every other hotel on the block. Jolene's occupies the top floor. Parton's Live is on the second. A café and other guest spaces fill in around them.
The programming has actually started ahead of the doors. Her cousin, Richie Owens, is scheduled to perform Sept. 16. Her niece, Jada Star, begins a twice-weekly residency on Sept. 17 and 19. There is something quietly right about the first voices in the room being family.
The museum
Dolly's Life of Many Colors takes the third floor — more than 20,000 square feet of interactive exhibits, personal artifacts and multimedia. Museum tickets go on sale Sept. 29, the same day the doors open.
The piece that will land hardest is the filmed content: she recorded material to guide visitors through her own life story. Anyone walking those rooms after Sept. 29 will be led through them by her, on screen, in her own voice. That was designed as a warm touch. It is now something closer to a last word.
The museum space is also built to host private events — weddings, receptions, business gatherings — which is an unromantic detail that tells you the building was designed to keep working long after the opening-week cameras leave.
Why downtown, and why this block
Nashville has no shortage of places to stand and look at country music history. What it has had less of is a building where the history, the rooms and the stage are the same address. The SongTeller was always pitched as that: you can sleep upstairs from the archive and walk down two floors to hear someone sing.
The location matters too. This is a stretch of downtown that has spent a decade converting from parking and low-rise commercial into towers, and the project came with commitments to the surrounding block rather than just the parcel — including plans for the park next door and a fire station. That is a more civic-minded footprint than most hotels of this size bother with, and it is consistent with how she tended to operate.
What to expect that week
Expect crowds, and expect a tone that is not entirely celebratory. An opening that was planned as a triumph is now also a memorial, and the people who show up on Sept. 29 will be doing two things at once. That is likely to be true of Nashville generally for a while.
There is at least one other date on the calendar in the same spirit: on Sept. 25, a Broadway bar is giving away every dollar it takes that day to her Imagination Library.
Reservations for the hotel are open now. The museum sells tickets starting the 29th. And the woman who spent sixty years explaining this town to the rest of the world will, starting this month, be doing it from a permanent address.
