Before the curtain came down on Dolly Parton’s extraordinary life at August’s end, sparking a river of global tears, the Queen of Country had been just weeks away from cutting the ribbon on her brand-new museum and 245-room hotel in Nashville.
If the singer’s first major tourism venture, her East Tennessee theme park Dollywood, which opened in 1986, remains a love letter to the Smoky Mountain region that raised her, then her last – The SongTeller Hotel, which houses the 20,000-square-feet Life of Many Colors Museum on its third floor, is a parting gift to the city that made her.
Four years
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