Plenty of people leave the mountains. Almost nobody comes back the way Dolly Parton did.
She was born in Sevier County in 1946 and raised on Locust Ridge, in country so rural that her family’s cabin had no electricity for much of her childhood. Twelve children, a father who farmed and could not read, a mother who sang the old ballads while she worked. Dolly left for Nashville at eighteen and never pretended the leaving was easy. What made her different from every other kid who caught that bus is that she spent the next sixty years writing her way back.
Listen to the catalog and Tennessee is everywhere in it. “My Tennessee Mountain Home” (1973) is almost a set of directions — the porch, the crickets, the songbirds, the honeysuckle vine. “Coat of Many Colors” (1971) is a true story about her mother sewing a jacket out of rags and telling her the story of Joseph while she stitched; Dolly called it her favorite of everything she ever wrote, and she wrote it on the back of a dry-cleaning receipt on Porter Wagoner’s tour bus. “Tennessee Homesick Blues” (1984) is the sound of somebody who made it out and still felt the rope pulling. She took a childhood most people would have spent their adult lives trying to outrun and made it the thing she was proudest of.
Then she came home in the most literal way possible. In 1986 she put her name and her money on a theme park in Pigeon Forge, in a county that badly needed the work — and she built a replica of the Locust Ridge cabin right in the middle of it. She started the Imagination Library in Sevier County before it went anywhere else, naming it for a father who never got to read to her. When the November 2016 wildfires tore through Gatlinburg and Sevier County, she stood up the My People Fund within days and sent $1,000 a month to 921 families who had lost everything. There is a bronze statue of her on the Sevierville courthouse lawn, unveiled in 1987, standing at the courthouse where she used to sit as a girl and dream about getting out.
She died Tuesday in Nashville, at the other end of the same state, at 80. The ridges she wrote about are still right here, doing what they have always done — going blue at dusk, holding the fog in the hollers, waiting on the next person who needs a song about home.