Remembering Dolly Parton—and the Mountain Ways She Carried to the World
All of us are in mourning. Our favorite daughter has entered the heavenly realm. Dolly Parton left us on Aug. 25. It is difficult to imagine these mountains without her in them. But not before she blessed our county, our state, our nation—and really, the world. I don’t believe these Smoky Mountains could ever have asked for a better ambassador.Dolly took the very best of our mountain ways and the very best of our hospitality and carried them around the world. And people believed her because she was real.
The hospitality was real.
The generosity was real.
The laughter was real.
Her faith and her love for these mountains was real.
She Showed the World Who Mountain People Really Are
People sometimes think hospitality is something we developed here because millions of visitors come to the Smokies every year. Those of us who grew up around here know better. Hospitality was here long before tourism. It’s just our way. It’s the lady at the drive-through who can’t get the register to cooperate and finally says:
“Drive around, darlin’. I’ll give you your total when you get up here.”
Nobody behind you gets upset. You drive around. She figures it out. You probably talk for a minute. And everybody goes on with their day. That’s mountain hospitality. It’s taking somebody a casserole when they’re sick. It’s stopping when you pass someone who’s car is broken down. It’s showing up after a storm with a chainsaw. It’s putting another plate on the table because somebody unexpected walked through the door. And when somebody loses everything, you
don’t spend too much time asking what somebody ought to do. You help. Dolly understood that because she came from that. She didn’t learn generosity after she became rich and famous.
She learned it here.
When Our Mountains Burned, She Came Home
We saw that perhaps most clearly after the terrible wildfires of 2016. Our neighbors lost homes. Families who had spent lifetimes building something watched it disappear. And Dolly didn’t simply send her condolences. She said, essentially, these are my people. Through the My People Fund, families who lost their primary residences received direct financial assistance month after month as they tried to put their lives back together. More than $12 million was
ultimately raised and distributed. She didn’t just love the Smoky Mountains region and its residents when they were beautiful. She loved us when they were burning. That is something those of us who live here will never forget.
Then There Were the Children
Maybe this is the part of Dolly’s story I love most. Her daddy, Robert Lee Parton, was a smart, hardworking mountain man who never had the opportunity to learn to read and write. Dolly never forgot that. And instead of being ashamed of where she came from, she used what had been missing in one generation to change the future for the next. In 1995, right here in Sevier County, she began the Imagination Library. The idea was beautifully simple: Put books into the
hands of little children. Not just children whose parents could afford them, not just children living in the right neighborhood, but all of them with a book arriving at their home, addressed to them, month after month from birth until kindergarten. It began with our children. Children tucked back into the same kinds of hollows and mountain communities where Dolly herself had grown up. And then something extraordinary happened. The idea traveled across Tennessee, across America, and eventually around the world. Hundreds of millions of books later, little children who will never walk these mountains are learning to love reading because a little girl from Locust Ridge remembered her daddy.
Imagine that legacy.
She Brought the World to Us—But Never Left Us Behind
Then, of course, there is Dollywood. We joke around here that Dolly employed half the county. And some days it has felt like she did! Over the years, I have known more than one senior citizen who retired to our area with a particular dream: Get a little job at Dollywood and be paid to go there every day. What a retirement plan! But underneath the humor is something enormously important. Dolly could have invested anywhere. She had become one of the most recognizable women in the world. She could have built her dreams in Nashville, Los Angeles, New York—or anywhere else her imagination took her. Instead, she invested here. She created jobs here. She brought visitors here. She celebrated Appalachian craftsmen, Appalachian music, Appalachian food and Appalachian stories. She showed millions of people that being from the mountains wasn’t something you needed to overcome. It was something to be proud
of, and we were. The world knew her as Dolly Parton. But somehow, around here, she always remained simply our Dolly.
She Never Outgrew Home
Maybe that is what I admire most. Success didn’t require Dolly to become somebody else. She didn’t lose the accent. She didn’t distance herself from the little mountain cabin. She didn’t rewrite the story of where she came from once she had somewhere grander to live. She put the cabin in the middle of Dollywood! She took the very things the world might once have considered unsophisticated—our accents, our music, our humor, our faith, our storytelling, our
mountain ways—and wrapped them in rhinestones and said: Look again. There is something beautiful here. And the world did.
Now It Is Our Turn
Dolly famously reminded us that if we want the rainbow, we’re going to have to put up with some rain. Well, in this season of loss there has been some rain in these mountains. We are grieving. But perhaps the best way to honor Dolly isn’t simply to remember her. Perhaps it is to continue what she represented:
Welcome the stranger.
Help the neighbor.
Feed somebody.
Employ somebody.
Encourage somebody’s dream.
Put a book into a child’s hands.
Laugh at yourself.
Be generous.
Don’t become so successful that you forget where you came from.
And when your neighbors’ world is on fire, show up.
To Dolly’s family, her Dollywood family, and the millions of people around the world who loved her, those of us here in her Smoky Mountains grieve with you. But we also make a commitment. We will carry on. We will keep welcoming people to these mountains. We will keep sharing the hospitality she showed the world. We will keep telling our stories. We will keep taking care of our neighbors.
And we will try to make certain that when people come here, they still discover the qualities Dolly Parton spent a lifetime showing them were here, qualities like kindness, faith, humor, generosity, and hard work. And most of all, she showed them this can be a place where a door is always open. She carried the best of our mountain ways into the world. Now it is our turn to carry them forward. Thank you, Dolly. From your mountains — and from your people — we will always love you.
