In the land of Dolly Parton, queen of the Smokies
The country legend, who died at 80, was born in a one-room cabin in an isolated village in rural Tennessee. With fame and fortune, she built a business empire that gave back to the place she called home
There are some 12 miles, more than 80 years and almost an entire world between Locust Ridge and Dollywood.
Locust Ridge can barely be called a town. A shack here, a barn there, a one-lane road winding timidly through a forest that may one day swallow it whole. If you reach the white chapel, you’re close; you’re almost there when the asphalt turns to gravel and you come upon a tall wooden fence that blocks both the way and the view beside a creek. The road has no name, the house no number, and the spot does not appear on any map. That’s it: the one-room log cabin with no running water or electricity where the queen of the Smoky Mountains was born.
Dollywood is much easier to find. It is a sprawling theme park fronted by an enormous parking lot in the resort town of Pigeon Forge. It appears on every map and tourist guide. Long before you arrive, you pass countless signs bearing the face of the platinum-blonde star who built it in her own image, along with an entire industry that has flourished around it: copycat theme parks, family restaurants, motels and souvenir shops. Visitors might find it surprising that this lush valley in the mountainous heart of Tennessee should be home to a kind of working-class Disneyland.
Between Locust Ridge and Dollywood lies the story of Dolly Parton: from her birth on January 19, 1946, to her death on Tuesday at the age of 80.
In the good old days, when times were hard, as she sang, Dolly Parton entered the world as the fourth of 12 children born to a farming couple who rented the land they worked and clothed their children in garments stitched together from scraps of recycled fabric. Her father paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal because he had no money. Her mother filled the house with old ballads and gospel songs. These are the facts of her biography, and later the raw material for the songs that carried that country girl far beyond the Smokies, all the way to Nashville, the world capital of country music.
The nearest real town to that isolated cabin was Sevierville, neighboring Pigeon Forge at the foot of Locust Ridge, the three points of a triangle on the map of Dolly’s life. The Partons rarely ventured down to Sevierville, except for when one of the 12 children had a toothache, there was business to attend to at the courthouse, or the urge to glimpse a world beyond the woods and faces beyond the family became too strong.
In interviews, Dolly often recalled how she spent those rare visits wandering the streets and taking everything in. It was there that she first saw the most beautiful woman she had ever laid eyes on: blonde hair, red lips, red nails, and clear high heels with tiny plastic fish floating inside them as she walked.
Dolly used to say that whenever she mentioned that woman to other women, they would reply, “She’s nothing but trash.” So Dolly decided that was exactly what she wanted to be when she grew up: trash. She would tell the story with her trademark Southern wit whenever an interviewer brought it up, then burst out laughing. “That was a country girl’s idea of glamour.” Years later, when her own name had become an institution, she paid tribute to that unlikely style icon in her song Backwoods Barbie.
Thus Dolly grew up between the isolation of the Smokies and her fascination with the people who lived there. With a bit of what she was and a bit of what she wanted to be, she made the leap to Nashville. In 1967, she scored her first Top 40 country hit with a song that already bore the hallmarks of her music: Appalachian melodies, the sound of the mountains where she was born, and her ability to laugh at herself. The song was Dumb Blonde.
Over the years came My Tennessee Mountain Home, in which she sang about her childhood; Jolene, which many consider the most beautiful song of desperate love ever written, the one in which Dolly pleads, “please don’t take my man”; and I Will Always Love You, which she wrote and Whitney Houston turned into a global phenomenon, greatly enriching Dolly and, indirectly, much of Tennessee, where she invested the proceeds.
She won 11 Grammy Awards from more than 50 nominations, was inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, appeared in more than a dozen films and earned hundreds of millions of dollars. She bought back the isolated log cabin in Locust Ridge where she was born, along with the surrounding land that her parents had only ever been able to rent.
“Have you been to the park and seen the replica of the house where she grew up? That little cabin? Well, I grew up in a house like that too,” says Mary Sloop from Dollywood.
She also grew up on a farm, the daughter of a cattle farmer and a mother who tended a vegetable garden, about 30 miles north of Charlotte, North Carolina. When butterflies began appearing around the farm each summer, Mary and her siblings would kick off their shoes and spend the season barefoot.
“The soles of your feet got so tough they were practically leather. That’s just how we lived and grew up,” says Sloop. What she means by this is that she has credentials, “real country roots.” By her reckoning, she has spent at least a third of her 82 years making pilgrimages to Dollywood. She now lives in Horseshoe, another of those remote corners of rural America that can barely be called a town, with her husband Wayne, who poses for photographs with a broad smile and a red cap calling for Trump’s reelection in 2028.
“And Dolly, she was the real deal. Another genuine country girl who worked very, very hard for everything she had. She was immensely talented, and she used that talent to give back to others,” says Sloop.
Over the years, and with her growing fortune, Dolly Parton became one of those quintessential American institutions: the self-made success story, the rewards of hard work, the myth of the American dream embodied in a blonde woman with a tiny waist and an ample bust. Through plastic surgery, she crafted an image that became every bit as recognizable as her voice, modeled on that beautiful woman she had once spotted on the streets of Sevierville: a country girl’s vision of glamour.
A machine for memorable one-liners, Parton liked to joke: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” But she added: “This isn’t all I am. It’s not even most of what I am. Hopefully people can see beneath the hair to know there’s a brain, beneath the boobs to know there’s a heart and behind all the other stuff to know there’s some talent.”
Of the fortune she earned, she donated a considerable share to hospitals and schools in her home region. The daughter of illiterate parents spent a small fortune providing 300 million books to children in Tennessee.
She became both a heroine to the white working-class visitors who flock to Dollywood and an ally of LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities. All those people Dolly felt a kinship with, the kind of people the women back home used to dismiss as “trash.”
Wes Woolf, 43, sells industrial equipment for a living and had come to Dollywood from Decatur, Alabama, with his two children. One of them wore pink cowboy boots and a T-shirt her mother had made that simply read: Dolly.
“I don’t remember the first time I heard Dolly Parton. I’ll tell you one thing: she’s one of those people like Elvis, you know what I mean? She’s someone you’ve heard about since you were a child,” Woolf says. “Everybody knows and loves her. I remember her being present my whole life.”
In Sevierville, they paid her the highest tribute they could think of: a bronze statue of Parton holding a guitar outside the county courthouse. On Wednesday, locals were still stopping by, leaving flowers and balloons, taking photographs and lingering for a while, either standing silently before the statue or chatting with the person next to them, remembering Dolly.
In this green, mountainous corner of the country, birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll, Tennessee whiskey and Nashville country music, nothing brings people together quite like the queen of the Smokies.
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