Hello, Dolly!

Dollywood is the Disneyland of Appalachia

A while back, my editor at County Highway came to me and asked whether I’d be interested in writing something about Appalachia’s most beloved daughter: Dolly Parton. What came of it was as visit to Dollywood with my mom and the essay that follows (which I dedicate to my mom and the other Branham women). It first ran in Volume 2, Issue 3 of the magazine (where it was accompanied — thanks to the efforts of Matthew Fishbane — by a stunning portrait of Dolly from the artist George W. Jimenez). This work would not exist without County Highway, and I encourage you to support real humans making real things by subscribing (and/or gifting a subscription to a friend this Christmas)! There really is nothing that compares to the printed word. Thanks for coming along with me…

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On a crisp Friday morning in early October, before the first frost, mom and I set out for the Dollywood theme park in East Tennessee. We’d been there once before, years ago, when I was five or six years old. Dolly’s Eagle When She Flies album had just come out, and my parents bought me the cassette tape for Christmas. I loved Dolly on the cover, in her flowy white blouse and tight denim. I loved the tune “Silver and Gold” even more. Mom sang it to me as a lullaby: “Time can’t be brought back with silver and gold.” When I think of it now, I hear it in mom’s voice.

“Do you remember anything about that trip?” Mom looks over at me expectantly. Through the windshield, I watch the car swallow the pavement. “I don’t know,” I reply, hesitating. “I sort of remember women dressed in pink and purple spandex with butterfly wings.” Mom searches back in her mind. “You’re right,” she says, “but I think it was you wearing those butterfly wings.” I’d been plucked out of the audience by a cast member to participate in one of the park’s live shows. The butterfly wings were part of the gig. I have cloudy memories of bending my arms at the elbows and wrists and then slowly stretching them out again in simulated swallowtail flutters, captivated by the colorful fabric dipping and swaying, dancing in the daylight. “Yeah, I remember,” I tell her. “I was a butterfly.”

We are still a good 40 miles from the Tennessee line when we see a billboard on US 23 with Dolly’s face on it. “Find the good in everybody,” it reads. “KINDNESS.” It is a public service announcement from the Foundation for a Better Life. “Well, there she is,” mom teases, “and we didn’t even have to leave the state.”

Well before noon, we pull into the massive Dollywood parking lot and find a spot in Section C to drink coffee and share sweets from home, watching families arriving in their minivans and mid-size SUVs. “Look at all these people,” mom says, “look how excited they are, how … just … wholesome.” She’s right. Well-scrubbed children wearing autumnal oranges and reds hold hands with parents or siblings or cousins or friends as they advance toward the tram stop. Their gleeful anticipation is contagious. If Disneyland is the happiest place on earth, nobody has bothered to tell East Tennessee.

We take our place on the trolley with the other park-goers and then stand in line with them at the entrance to purchase day passes. No more than ten minutes later, we are walking through Dollywood’s arched gates. “Here you come again,” Dolly croons over the speakers. “Just when I’ve begun to get myself together / You waltz right in the door, just like you’ve done before / And wrap my heart ’round your little finger.”

The corridor is a bouquet of purple-orange chrysanthemums. Some of the flowers are arranged on an embankment in the shape of Dolly’s signature symbol — a butterfly. A young couple poses in front of it for a photograph, smiling anxiously in a camera-ready embrace. I think about our family photo albums on the shelves at home. I think about the faded snapshots of all the people I love. “That’ll make a nice memory,” I say to no one in particular.

There’s a rumor that Carl Dean, Dolly’s notoriously private husband of 58 years, sneaks into the park from time to time. And who could blame him? It’s a tender place for lovers. The couple met at the Wishy Washy laundromat in Nashville, Tennessee, back in 1964. It was Dolly’s first day in the city. She was 18 and he was 20. They were married two years later in Ringgold, Georgia, with only Dolly’s mother, the preacher, and the preacher’s wife looking on. “I was surprised and delighted,” Dolly has reminisced, “that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing for me). He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.” Sixty years later, I guess he’s still finding out. Love is like a butterfly, a rare and gentle thing.

***

Dollywood’s charm is that — not unlike Dolly herself — it captures nostalgia and ambition in equal parts. It’s a Smoky Mountain town in its ideal form, full of natural and divine forces conspiring to make life feel easier and more beautiful. Troublesome things, things that might grab your heart and hold it hostage, are left at the gates. “You know,” I say taking mom’s hand, “We’re not meant to be living forever in sorrow.” We walk on. “It’s true,” she says. “We’re not meant to be always slouching from grief to grief.”

We stop in front of an imitation OK Used Cars to watch old men checking out a very real 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air in cherry red. There is an improvised order to the operation. An old timer steps up and eyes the thing over hungrily, and once he’s had his fill, another takes his place and snaps a quick photo with an unholstered cell phone. Meanwhile, miniature automobiles zip around a road course that would have made Roger Miller proud. “Come on, let’s go for a ride,” mom prods, gesturing toward the “Rockin’ Roadway.”

We walk through the old dealership’s double doors, climb a set of stairs onto a platform, and look over the selection of miniatures. When it’s our turn, we luck out and snag the little ’57 Chevy, me on the driver’s side and mom riding shotgun. The ride’s operator politely recites his scripted instructions as we buckle in, but the clatter of the other automobiles drowns out his voice. An instant later we are off, taking sharp angles and edges. Because our car runs on a track, it doesn’t occur to me that I still need to direct its course. We’re banging back and forth past road signs and billboards while “Good Golly, Miss Molly” blares on the car radio. “Farahn, hawney, you’re gonna have to steer this thing,” mom directs. I grab the wheel, desperately trying to regain some control.

It takes me back in time. I was 16 years old. Mom was teaching me to drive on the narrow mountain roads at home. I checked the rearview and spotted an off-duty cop pulling up behind us. I can’t say now whether what happened next was the result of willfulness or sheer terror, but I floored it and caught air on the other side of a speed bump. I felt like Bo Duke behind the wheel of the General Lee. I pulled over onto the shoulder, still coming to terms with what had just happened. Mom couldn’t stop laughing.

“That was pretty freeing,” I tell mom as our little Chevy pulls to a halt in front of the ride’s exit doors. She chuckles, her almond-shaped eyes open wide in exaggeration. “I noticed.”

***

All over the park there are nods to people and places from Dolly’s childhood. The Robert F. Thomas chapel, a white steepled country church that offers an 11 o’clock service every Sunday morning, got its name from the mountain doctor that helped deliver Dolly in exchange for a sack of cornmeal. There are the butterflies to remind visitors about the time Dolly got lost in the woods chasing the winged insect and had to rely on the family dairy cow to drag her back home. The Owens Farm is an homage to her mother’s people, including her uncle Bill Owens, who Dolly credits for putting her on the path to success. Cas Walker, the well-known entrepreneur and self-made Tennessee millionaire who gave Dolly her first TV and radio gigs on his Farm and Home Hour variety show alongside featured performers like Bill Monroe and Jimmy Martin, lent his name to the grocery store next to the five-and-ten-cent shop on the mock town square.

When Dollywood first opened to the public in the spring of 1986, hundreds of visitors gathered outside the Dolly Parton museum to catch a glimpse of their local hero in her yellow button-up blouse, white pencil skirt, and chunky gold earrings. By then, she was already a country music icon and a movie star with 9 to 5, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and Rhinestone under her belt. “Good Morning, everybody! And welcome to Dollywood!” Footage from WATE 6 out of Knoxville has the country music legend raising an arm with a triumphant flourish. “I feel like today is the first time I really got to come home,” she tells the crowd, “because I have dreamed for many years of getting to come back, of bringing something back so you folks would know that I’m as proud of you as you’ve always been of me.”

That last line makes me unexpectedly emotional. Maybe it’s because I want to believe her. Maybe it’s because I do believe her.

At the newly opened Dolly Parton Experience, a three-building immersive multimedia museum that celebrates Dolly’s family, career, and glitzy wardrobe, a pretty older lady urges us toward the Precious Memories exhibit. “This, to me, is what this whole thing is about,” she says. “It’s really the best part of working here.” She’s wearing silver eyeshadow, pink lipstick, and heavy-looking clip-on earrings. I trust her implicitly. Mom is less sure. “What is it?” Mom presses. “How long will it take us?” The lady doubles down. “Oh it’s just a little video about Dolly’s family. It won’t take you but five minutes. Go on.”

Inside, black-and-white photographs of Dolly’s parents and siblings and close friends flash on windowpane screens as she tells the story of family life in the mountains. “Faith is the ribbon that binds us all together,” she says. “We help those who need to be helped and love those who need to be loved.”

***

Back out on the sidewalk, I get my phone out to check the news. Not 40 miles down the road, Dolly is standing in front of a crowd that has gathered in a Walmart parking lot in Newport, Tennessee. “I really wish that we were together for another reason,” she says. “I mean, who knew that our little part of the country here, where I was born and raised just right down the road, that we would have this kind of devastation? I look around and I think, ‘These are my mountains, these are my valleys, these are my rivers flowing like a stream, these are my people, and this is my home.” Dolly announces a $1,000,000 donation to victims of flooding from Hurricane Helene in Appalachia. The Dollywood Foundation and her businesses in East Tennessee have matched that amount, bringing the total contribution to $2,000,000.

I tell mom about Dolly’s donation. Already, I feel guilty about being in the park, and not out in the mountains helping people reclaim their lives after the storm. “I think she understands what all of this is about,” mom says.

It’s undeniable that Dolly is as committed to supporting the causes she cares about as she is to her career as a country music megastar. A section in her Songteller exhibit is dedicated to the Imagination Library, a literacy program she launched nearly twenty years ago to benefit children in East Tennessee. Since, the program has grown to serve children in all 50 states as well as Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Monthly, the Imagination Library sends a carefully selected book to each registered child, personally addressed to them, at no cost to their family. To date, the program has given away nearly 250,000,000 books. Meanwhile, the Dollywood Foundation offers a $15,000 college scholarship to five Sevier County high school seniors each year.

Dolly talks about the inspiration for her education programs in her Songteller book. “My dad couldn’t read and write,” she says, “and he was always kind of ashamed of that. But it’s not a thing to be ashamed of, because in my daddy’s case, he grew up in a family of fifteen kids back in the mountains. You had a one-room schoolhouse, and it was sometimes a mile away. Kids had to go to work in the fields to help feed the family. Because of the weather and because of conditions, a lot of kids couldn’t go to school. Daddy got to live long enough to see [the Imagination Library] doing really well, and he just loved it when the kids would call me ‘The Book Lady.’ He took pride that he was part of that.”

There’s a lot to love about Appalachia’s patron saint. This is what I love the most. Every person deserves dignity and respect. Every child deserves to experience the pure delight of bringing home a physical book — his or her own book — and learning where it can lead them.

***

Mom and I spend an hour or so chatting with a luthier in residency at the park. He’s here, among dozens of other artisans, for the Harvest Festival. As we came across his booth, he was sitting in a rolling chair astride a metal waste basket brimming with little wood carvings, a tool in one hand and a backplate in the other. I wanted his photograph, so we couldn’t help but say hello. “Did you ever hear of a guy out of Whitesburg, Kentucky, named Marion Sumner?” Mom asks him while I’m snapping away. A grin spreads across his face. “Marion Sumner was one of the best fiddlers I ever had the pleasure of knowing.”

This exchange further affirms a theory I have about there being just one degree of separation between every person in the whole of Appalachia. Marion taught mom to play the fiddle, sort of. A touring musician who earned the nickname “The Fiddle King of the South,” Marion is a mountain legend. He’s credited, for instance, with having influenced Kenny Baker, who played alongside Bill Monroe for a quarter of a century. In the early days, Marion played with Ralph and Carter Stanley, but he could never get shed of his relentless homesickness. “He could have done anything he wanted, and I guess he did,” mom once told me. “He lived a simple life — the way he liked it — back home in the mountains.”

Without another word, the luthier puts down his tools and picks up his fiddle and starts sawing away. “Mind if we dance?” Mom asks him. “Not if you got it in you,” he replies. Mom grabs my arm and pulls me onto the sidewalk dance floor. This sort of impromptu production isn’t all that uncommon for us. My grandparents liked to flatfoot. Mom led a clogging team for years. She taught me to dance before I could really walk. I’ve got baby shoes at home with heel taps on the outsoles.

When the song ends, we hear applause from the ladies at one of the park’s concession stands. “Y’all girls can dance.” The fiddler is surprised. No one could blame him. It’s a dying tradition. “Let’s see if I can play you another one here.” He starts sawing again. Before we leave him, he tells us a story about playing at an old time music festival in the Holy Land, overlooking the Sea of Galilee. “Those are the dancin’est people you ever saw,” he drawls, “the dancin’est people you ever saw.”

We have tickets to see Dolly Parton’s Stampede dinner show at 6 PM, and not wanting to be late, we hurry through a lot of the park. We hurry past a series of enormous farm-grown pumpkins from small towns all over the United States, past a pumpkin tower, past a pumpkin owl, past a pumpkin spider with pumpkin legs, and, finally, past a wall of pumpkins with pumpkins carved into them.

Having made our way back toward the entrance with a few minutes to spare, we linger a while at Dolly’s Tennessee Mountain Home. The one-bedroom cabin is a replica of the old Parton homeplace, where Dolly’s parents Avie Lee and Robert Parton raised her and ten of her brothers and sisters. The reproduction was built by Dolly’s brother Bobby and decorated, with a handful of original Parton family heirlooms, by her mother. Mom and I peer inside. The walls are insulated with newspaper, just like the ones at my grandparents’ homeplace had been. Canned goods line modest kitchen shelves. Over an old wooden dinner table, there hangs a picture of Jesus Christ shepherding his flock. In the other room, there are a pair of old iron beds covered with intricately stitched quilts. Denim work shirts hang on hooks over a meager bedside table.

It’s impossible for me to think about Dolly or her music without thinking about my family. “Isn’t it strange,” I ask mom as we are leaving the park and heading back out toward the car, “how alike you are in some ways?” Mom grew up in a coal camp in Eastern Kentucky, and though she’s ten years Dolly’s junior, their families shared a lot of the same joys and sorrows. “It’s just mountain people,” Mom says. “It was hard, it was so hard, but mountain women… well… we just try to make that into something beautiful.”

I’ve heard Dolly say that the way she looks is just a country girl’s idea of glamor. I didn’t really understand what she meant until I heard her talk about her childhood infatuation with the Sears Roebuck catalog. Mom and her sisters have told me about that too, about thumbing through the pages, studying photographs of the models, yearning for clothes their family couldn’t afford, and daydreaming about the women they would become. Mom specifically remembers wanting a little yellow cowgirl costume that came with white, daisy-themed holsters. I’ve seen it in antique stores and framed on the wall in certain diners. Those were fantasies for mom and her sisters then, just as they were for Dolly. Reality was quite harsh. Maybe that’s why, when I wanted to dress up as a cowgirl for career day in grade school, mom was quick to indulge me. She always wanted me to have pretty things. She wanted to make my life beautiful. I lost touch with that part of myself that appreciated that for a while. But I’m getting that back.

Listening to Dolly’s 1973 concept album My Tennessee Mountain Home, I feel like I don’t have to explain that, really. I don’t have to explain anything at all. It’s like bumping into an old friend. The album, a chronicle of Dolly’s early homesick days in Nashville, didn’t do that well compared to Dolly’s more mainstream fare (it topped out at number 19 in the US country music charts), but that doesn’t really matter. As a chronicle of mountain life in the second half of the 20th century, it holds up. Just a couple years back, the title track was officially named one of Tennessee’s state songs.

“Daddy’s Working Boots” could just as easily be about my papaw working third shift in low coal and at home on the farm as it is about Dolly’s dad working as a sharecropper. “Old Black Kettle” reminds me of stories I’ve heard about my great aunt Verna baking cathead biscuits for her brothers before they’d head out to work the fields each day.

Dolly captures something in “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)” that’s hard to pin down exactly. It gets at the core paradox of Appalachian life: bitter truth on the one hand, and radical contentment on the other. “No amount of money could buy from me / The memories I have of then / No amount of money could pay me / To go back and live through it again.” I’ve played the tune over and over again, like an incantation. “Anything at all was more than we had / In the good old days when times were bad.” Love is abundance. Generosity is wealth. Hard times build endurance. Nowhere is that made so plain as in the midst of material need.

The latter part of the record nurses its own contradictions. The track “The Wrong Direction Home” announces one of them. “There’s no place like home / But I’m headed in the wrong direction home.” I thought at first that the line had to do with leaving the things you love to chase the things you’re supposed to want. Now, I think maybe it’s about a different sort of homecoming, about getting to know the person you are, about coming home to yourself. “Teardrops mingled with the summer rain that was a falling / The day I left my mountain home behind / With a suitcase in my hand and a hope in my heart / I was following a dream I had to find.” I’ve chased dreams too, and I’ve caught a few of them. Then there were mistakes and regrets, but that’s the way it was always going to be. “Let’s go so we can hurry up and get back.” That’s my motto these days.

Dolly has spoken about her songwriting, about its insistent vulnerability. “My heart and mind are always open to feeling,” she says in her book Songteller. “I have to leave myself wide open. I suffer a lot, because I am open to so much. I hurt a lot, and when I hurt, I hurt all over. Because I can’t harden my heart to protect myself. I always say that I strengthen the muscles around my heart, but I can’t harden it.”

***

Some time ago, I came across a recording of the influential singer/songwriter and banjoist Ola Belle Reed, from out of Lansing, North Carolina. “I’ve been asked many times to describe my life in the mountains,” she says. “There’s one point specifically I’d like to make and want to make. I don’t believe that there would be any way in the world that you could possibly describe it. There could be no fun made of it, because it was life with the earth.” My mother has said this to me over and over again. It’s our family’s model ethic.

“As far as music was concerned,” Ola Belle goes on, “we did gospel, we did blues, we did everything. There had to be every nationality in the mountains at one time for them to know each other’s ways of life. There was communication between people, because I think people needed one another, and they realized it you see, they realized it so much, and I believe one of the reasons was because they were so close to the earth and the elements and to God’s creation. I think that all of your music and everything comes through communication with people. The people that lived with the earth. That’s why I say you cannot separate your music from your lifestyle. You cannot separate your lifestyle, your religion, your politics, it’s a part of life. And that’s what our music was in the mountains. It was part of our life.”

The earliest music I remember, besides the sounds of bullfrogs and crickets chirping, is the lonesome whistle out of the head of the holler where my mamaw and papaw lived in McRoberts, Kentucky. I’d sit out in the yard alone in the cool evening air, watching fireflies, and waiting for the show to start. Oftentimes, when it did, it would be accompanied by the steady percussion of wood splitting. It was years before I learned the identity of the musician — a distant cousin called Patton who was known to be a good man who kept the old ways and took care of his family.

When I first left the mountains and went out on my own, I thought about that whistle all the time. It was tangled up in my homesick mind with the scent of Folgers coffee brewing in my grandparents’ kitchen, the taste of honeysuckle, the coolness of creek water on my bare feet, and the comforting touch of my mom’s hand. I scribbled a couple of lines out on a piece of scrap paper I still have tucked in a book someplace. “Take me back with all my dirty clothes, and I swear to God I’ll whistle that tune and drink black coffee every morning.” It took me 15 years, but I finally made it.

A few years back, Dolly bought the original Parton homeplace out on Locust Ridge Road, in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. I drove my Buick out that way once, not to the spot, just near it. It was late in the day, and the sunlight was playing peekaboo with the shadows. The Little Pigeon River gurgled contentedly. Black-eyed Susans gathered here and there to watch passersby like me navigate the serpentine two-lane roads. Cattle grazed in green pastures while kudzu climbed the latitudes of fence posts. I guess the place looked the way I thought it would. It looked a lot like home.

***

We make it down the road to Dolly Parton’s Stampede Dinner Attraction just in time to grab our tickets and get settled in before the food is served.

The arena is massive, with family-style seating that stretches in a semicircle from one side of the place to the other. Mom and I scoot close together to give the folks around us a little elbow room. The wait staff are somehow both pleasant and efficient as they dash back and forth across the enormous hall answering questions, filling drink orders, and preparing to deliver four courses of country home cooking to more than a thousand guests. It’s like watching a show before the show.

As dinner is being served (we’re talking homemade biscuits and gravy, a whole rotisserie chicken, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, hickory smoked barbecue, and an apple turnover), the emcee enters the arena on horseback and the LED-lit sky starts swirling and swaying. The next hour and a half is like looking through a cowboy-themed kaleidoscope, jam-packed with trick riding, aerial acrobatics, lassoing, horse-back square dancing, barrel racing, flame jumping, chicken chasing, pig racing, and horse prancing (with horses sometimes costumed in monarch butterfly wings). In short: It’s fun.

Man, I’ve missed fun. When did everyone get so cool, anyhow? When did discontent become fashionable?

Next to us, on either side, moms and dads are watching their young kids while the kids watch the show, all of them in rapture, delighted with the contagious spectacle of the thing. There is a smile on every face.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about time. I’ve been thinking about how unbelievably long the days used to be when I was a girl growing up in the mountains, about how slowly the seconds and minutes seemed to pass. The sky was big then, and the clouds were trampolines. Everything was electric. I could have swallowed the world.

“I open up my door to greet the early morning sun / Closing it behind me and away I do run,” Dolly sings. “To the meadow where the meadow lark is singing in the tree / In the meadow I go walking in the early morning breeze.”

Strength is the lesser part of resilience, it turns out. The greater part is enchantment.