CORNERSVILLE, Tenn. – Angela Pierce faced a drive of roughly 2,000 miles. She had two dogs in the car and a husband who was landing soon at the Knoxville airport. Though time was tight, she had to make one pit stop.
The Parton devotee, needing to fill up on Dolly, detoured to Dolly’s Tennessean Travel Stop.
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“I drove an hour and a half out of my way just to come here,” said Pierce, as her pups wrestled in the Doggy Parton dog park. “I’m going to buy merch, and I hope I have time to get a Cup of Ambition.”
Highway rest stops are fast becoming destinations in their own right. The Texas-based, beaver-faced Buc-ee’s ignited the trend; Dolly Parton is fanning it.
Last month, Parton unveiled Dolly’s Tennessean Travel Stop in Cornersville, better known as Exit 22. The country music star and businesswoman nonpareil partnered with Gregory H. Sachs, the rest area’s managing partner. (I am not related to Sachs.) After a devastating grease fire in 2021, he decided to reimagine the roadside attraction, envisioning a dream collaboration with the bespangled road warrior.
“It just dawned on me that Dolly Parton, with her bedazzle and her sparkles and her glitz and her genuine love for people, was what I was missing,” said Sachs, who lives near Cornersville. “And so one day I woke up and said, ‘Okay, this is Dolly’s Tennessean.'”
I have been on a personal Dolly quest in recent years, especially after she listened to my pandemic remake of “9 to 5” during an interview on her tour bus. I have spent days at Dollywood, stayed at both of her Smoky Mountain resorts and visited many of her Pigeon Forge attractions, including the singing animatronic poultry at Frizzle Chicken Café. I have crept along twisty country roads searching for her childhood cabin.
When I heard about a rest stop headlined by Parton, I wondered whether the attraction would be pure Dolly or a rhinestone-encrusted Sheetz. The online map with its 19-key legend looked promising. The 18-acre property has a dog park, mural, tour bus, back patio, and gas pumps and parking for cars, trucks and electric vehicles. Inside, the 25,000-square-foot space contains a full-service restaurant, coffee and ice cream shop, barbecue counter, general store, trucker’s lounge, live music stages and, not to be sniffed at, restrooms.
Of course, the only way to find out for sure was to take a summer road trip to Middle Tennessee.
Cowboy hats and tailgate energy
During its first few weeks in business, thousands of people converged on Cornersville, population roughly 1,400. Around noon on a recent Friday, I was one of two cars exiting the ramp.
The quiet drive did not prepare me for the packed parking lot that radiated tailgate energy. I had to carefully pick my way around visitors dressed in Dolly Parton T-shirts, cowboy hats, cutoff jeans or boots, despite the sweltering heat. One man had the audacity to wear a Buc-ee’s Hawaiian-style shirt.
With 200 parking spots for cars and the same number for trucks, I glided right into a space. Around me, billboards for Dolly’s Tennessean Travel Stop competed for airspace with the McDonald’s across the street. The logo – a mud flap girl with voluminous hair, alarmingly high heels and a microphone – outnumbered the Golden Arches.
Before going inside, I followed a painted walkway sprinkled with musical notes and butterflies to a mural titled “Butterfly Lullaby (Mountain Gospel).” Visitors waited for their turn to stand against the panorama of many colors and sprout wings. Nearby, a truck driver leaned in to snap a photo of the license plate of a bus emblazoned with an image of the songstress from her 1970s touring days. Decoding the tiny details is part of any Dolly adventure, so we mulled the meaning of “DLY 925.”
“Nashville area code?” I threw out and immediately regretted. Oh duh: It is the song/movie/TV sitcom/musical.
Glittery guitars and cinnamon bread
The main door opened to a Mall of Dolly, an emporium with rows and racks and shelves of gifts, some exclusive to the Cornersville site. To center myself in the maelstrom of merch, I searched for a North Star, landing on a tiered chandelier made of stringed instruments adorned with rhinestones and beads harvested from Parton’s wardrobe.
Because it was peak mealtime – one of many throughout the day – lines spiraled out from the full-service restaurant and switchbacked around the ice cream parlor and coffee shop serving Dolly’s new line of coffee, Cup of Ambition (“9 to 5” reference noted). At the barbecue counter, an employee restocked the pulled pork sandwiches and pizza; the grab-and-go crudités and cut fruit remained virtually untouched.
Eating, I decided, could wait.
No one was waiting to enter the trucker’s lounge, a quiet retreat with recliner chairs, two TVs and, in an adjoining room, the Wishy-Washy laundromat ($4 for washer and dryer) and showers ($16 or free with a tank of gas).
I joined two women decompressing after a four-hour drive from Memphis. The pair had organized the road trip for their guest of honor, a friend visiting from Italy who craved Dolly’s signature cinnamon bread, a Proustian memory from her years of living in Tennessee.
“It’s a great one-day road trip,” said Mary Collins, an office manager at a labor law firm. “You get a bunch of girlfriends in the car, hang out and eat some cinnamon bread, buy a T-shirt or a cool hat and have fun.”
Collins eventually extracted herself from the pleather lounger and tracked down her friend, Melissa Therrien, who was squeezed into a vinyl booth eating ice cream. Therrien had bought one loaf, which she planned to consume before her flight to Naples.
“I didn’t even check a bag,” Therrien said, “so it’s not like I can bring a bunch of breads back.”
Music under Dolly’s gaze
The lunch crowd had thinned out and my sweet potato had grown cold by the time the first musicians of the day started setting up. Simply by chewing slowly, I had lucked into a front-row seat of the main stage, which faced the restaurant buffet. Dolly hovered above us, in an enlarged photo from her “Dumplin'” soundtrack, her red stiletto heel pointing like a finger at Aaron Willis and Maxwell Tyler.
As soon as Willis started strumming, the early-bird diners glanced up from their trays of meat-and-threes and tall glasses of sweet tea. They sang along to the songs they liked and talked over the ones they didn’t.
“It’s a chill vibe,” said Tracy Sachs Auster, the special projects manager who is expanding the music programming beyond Fridays and Saturdays. “We don’t want people screaming over their meals.”
Upstairs and through the “Rockstar”-themed bar, the members of the Billmon Rd Band were tuning their instruments for the 9 p.m. show on a screened porch with industrial fans (on) and fire pits (off). Sachs Auster said the rest stop had originally focused on country music but, in the spirit of inclusivity, was broadening to other genres, such as bluegrass from Alabamians.
“It’s kind of cool when you tell people you’re playing at Dolly’s Tennessean Travel Stop,” said Kelsey Faivre, the band’s fiddler. “Not everybody gets to do that, and not every place you stop on your road journey is a place like this.”
During a break from the three-hour concert, I ducked into the trucker’s lounge. I sat in silence with two drivers and a western movie set on mute.
Sunday morning, I returned to Cornersville to hear Chelsea Rhodes, a Nashville singer-songwriter who was also back for an encore performance. She had played the Tennessean before the Dolly makeover. This time, she said, was different.
“I am now part of the Dolly family and experience,” Rhodes said.
Before showtime, she dropped by my table and shared photos of her dog, Dolly Mae. As she scrolled through her phone, I caught flashes of the “Jesus & Gravity” tattoo on her wrist.
Buc-ee’s vs. Dolly’s: How do they stack up?
On the back patio, near the cornhole, three women from the Knoxville area posed in front of a Cup of Ambition sign. They were returning home from a conference in Nashville and wrapping up an unofficial tour of travel rest stops.
Three days before their visit to Cornersville, they had stopped by Buc-ee’s. The beaver, they told me, scored better on restrooms and prices. I had to agree with them.
The line for the downstairs women’s restroom was frequently long, though I did appreciate the photos of Dolly primping. The restroom by the upstairs bar had only two stalls and no portraits. They said the barbecue here was $4 more. For souvenirs, I paid $30 for a Dolly’s travel stop T-shirt; a Buc-ee’s sweatshirt cost me $20.
Meanwhile, Dolly crushed the competition in decor, pet-friendliness and seating areas. At Buc-ee’s, I ate on the hood of my rental car. At Dolly’s, I had more seating options than meals.
After two days at Dolly’s rest stop and too few Cups of Ambition, I started to fade. I needed to recharge, as did my phone.
Both roadside attractions fail in the category of public charging outlets. However, I did find a power strip on the upstairs patio. I sat on the stage alone, but not for long.
A dachshund named Jake bounded over and barked at me. His owner, a truck driver hauling boats, sat down with a beer and started telling me about the journey that had led him here.
We talked for so long, I had to bolt to catch my flight home. I was full on all fronts – food, coffee, souvenirs, music, conversation, Dolly – except one: I neglected to leave time to fill the gas tank.
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