My '9 to 5' sent me to sleep in Dolly Parton’s $10,000 tour bus suite — here’s what it was like

This article was originally published in 2022. TPG is republishing it today in loving tribute to Dolly Parton.I'm not alone in loving Dolly Parton.Most of us love Dolly, the 5-foot-tall East Tennessee multihyphenate bombshell who changed country music — all music, really — with her gift of storytelling and melodic magic.For me, though, Dolly created a special melody that played throughout my life. Growing up, I was lucky enough to visit Dollywood a handful of times and spent countless hours listening to her incredible songs on the road between Texas, where I grew up, and Tennessee.In fact, I love music so much that songwriters like her inspired me to move to Nashville the first second I could, just like she did, to study songwriting at Belmont University. And in college, I even worked as a backstage tour guide at the Grand Ole Opry, taking guests behind the scenes before and after shows to share the stories of the stage and dressing rooms where Dolly, as a member of the Opry, performed her hits.But in early September, I got to take my love for Dolly to a whole new level on a trip to her "Tennessee Mountain Home" of Pigeon Forge for an opportunity that's now probably the ultimate ex...