She Was Ours

Remembering Dolly Parton

This post in no way encapsulates the breadth of Dolly Parton’s legacy in the world. It couldn’t. But it does speak to what she meant to me, and to many others who grew up hearing about this big-haired country singer with the extra-long nails who grew up in a one-room cabin in the Tennessee hills.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about Dolly Parton, and I keep coming back to the fact that I grew up in the same little corner of East Tennessee that she did.

I was born and raised in Sevier County, and Dolly was never just some distant celebrity to me. She was ours. She came to the Pigeon Forge parade every year. I met her a couple of times. She was part of the landscape of growing up there in a way that is hard to explain to people who didn’t.

I remember my mamaw pointing out the sculpture of Dolly outside the Sevier County Courthouse and telling me who she was. Dolly was sitting there smiling, an acoustic guitar across her lap. I loved that sculpture. There was something about it that made her feel both larger than life and completely at home there.

I remember seeing her at the Pigeon Forge parade, too. She came back year after year.

And I remember one particular parade when my sister and I were on the Boys & Girls Club float. Dolly stopped her tour bus alongside the float to say hello to us. She asked us if we were cold. Which, in retrospect, is pretty funny because this woman was hanging out the window of the bus in a skin-tight, fully sequined, star-spangled dress while asking two little East Tennessee girls if they were cold.

I don’t remember what I did. I just remember being completely awestruck.

And I think that feeling stayed with me—not just the awe of meeting someone famous, but the particular kind of awe that came from watching someone who had become so enormously famous still come home.

I think one of the things I admired most about her, even as a kid, was how completely she seemed to know who she was.

Dolly never seemed embarrassed by where she came from. She never tried to distance herself from the mountains, from poverty, from her family, or from the people and places that shaped her. She became enormously famous without seeming to believe that becoming famous made her better than anyone else.

She knew who she was. She knew what she had to offer. And then she used what she had to help others.

I remember the Gatlinburg fires, and the way Dolly responded to people who had lost their homes and everything they had. There was something so characteristic about it: Dolly didn’t make a complicated production out of helping. She just helped. She gave people money when they needed it. She saw people who were hurting and figured out what she could do.

And then there was the Imagination Library.

There are children in rural Tennessee—and now children all over the world—who grew up with books in their homes because Dolly decided that children should have books. She started the program in Sevier County, inspired in part by her father’s inability to read, and built something that has reached millions of children.

That means so much to me.

I think Dolly taught me that you don’t have to become ashamed of where you came from in order to become something bigger. You can carry it with you. You can remember where you came from and let that remembrance make you more generous, rather than less.

You can be ambitious without becoming arrogant. You can be wildly successful without believing you’re better than other people. You can know exactly who you are without needing everyone else to agree with you or understand you.

And you can remember the people who helped you get there.

There is a particular kind of wisdom in knowing where you came from and refusing to let success convince you that you’ve outgrown it.

Dolly had that.

She was glamorous and funny and enormously talented and completely herself—but underneath all of that, there was something remarkably grounded about her. She understood that having more meant having the ability to give more.

Growing up in Sevier County, I think I absorbed some of that before I even had words for it.

So today I’m grieving not only an incredible musician and songwriter, but someone who was woven into the place I came from. Someone who showed generations of East Tennessee kids that you could come from a poor mountain community and dream very, very big without leaving the people who came from there behind.

Thank you for showing us that being humble doesn’t mean making yourself small. Thank you for knowing exactly who you were.

And thank you for remembering where you came from.

Thank you, Dolly. We will always love you.