Visit Tennessee, the home state of the First Lady of Country, Dolly Parton
Claire Webb - 5 November 2019
This year’s Country Music Association Awards in Nashville will be co-hosted by none other than country’s grand dame, Dolly Parton. To truly appreciate the scale of Parton’s rags-to-riches success, though, you need to head east to Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains, where she grew up in a wooden cabin with no electricity or running water.
The Queen of the South has transformed the dirt-poor backwoods of her childhood into a theme park called Dollywood. While its kitsch entertainments aren’t to everyone’s taste, her beloved Smokies are one of the most spectacular, biodiverse corners of the Deep South.
AMERICA’S FAVOURITE NATIONAL PARK
Dolly Parton once said in an interview that when she’s writing an album, she takes herself off to a cabin in the mountains that belonged to her great-grandfather and fasts to unleash her creativity. These days there are plenty of luxurious cabins available to rent on the outskirts of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge.
But the best place to get back to nature is the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which is named after the blue-tinged mist that fills the valleys on still summer days. The USA’s most-visited national park straddles Tennessee and North Carolina and its soaring, forest-carpeted ridges can be explored by car or on foot.
The park looks especially stunning in October, when the sugar maples, scarlet oaks, sweetgums, red maples and hickories are clothed in their autumn colours.
DOLLY COUNTRY
Born to a sharecropper in 1946, Dolly Parton shared her parents’ two-room cabin in the foothills of the Great Smokies with 11 siblings. “Life is as peaceful as a baby’s sigh... Crickets sing in the fields near by,” she sang in 1973’s My Tennessee Mountain Home — a bittersweet tribute to a life she couldn’t wait to escape. Aged seven, Dolly built herself a guitar.
The nearby neon-lit town of Pigeon Forge is now home to Dollywood, Parton’s theme park, which attracts more than two million visitors a year. As well as rollercoasters, rides and live music, there’s a replica of the cabin (old newspaper lines the walls) and a white clapboard chapel.
Parton also owns DreamMore Resort, and fans with cash to flash can book the Dolly Parton Suite — a sparkly penthouse with a gold-tiled shower. In the lobby, there’s a padlocked box containing a song called My Place in History, which will be released on her 100th birthday.
MUSIC CITY USA
When she was 18, Parton packed her bags and moved to Nashville, where she still lives, having met her husband in a launderette on her very first day in town.
Dolly devotees should begin at RCA Studio B, where Jolene was recorded and Elvis Presley, Jim Reeves and Roy Orbison, among many others, also recorded hits. Parton is also celebrated in the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Down river, there are nightly concerts at the Grand Ole Opry, which began as a radio show in 1925. Parton first sang on the show when she was ten, and at 13 she was introduced by no less than Johnny Cash. No visit to Nashville is complete without a night in the raucous honky-tonk bars of Lower Broadway.
MOUNTAIN MOONSHINE
Like many establishments in this conservative region, Parton’s empire doesn’t permit the drinking of alcohol. Ironically, the Smokies are famous for illicit stills. When Dolly was a child, many farmers supplemented their income by making moonshine — the unaged corn whiskey was distilled by the light of the moon (hence the name) or in caves, and mixed with fruit to make it palatable. Tennessee’s best-known export, apart from music, is probably Jack Daniel’s, yet liquor licences weren’t issued in most of the state’s counties until 2009. The first legal moonshine distillery, Ole Smoky Moonshine, which opened a year later, quickly became a tourist attraction.
This year’s Country Music Association Awards in Nashville will be co-hosted by none other than country’s grand dame, Dolly Parton. To truly appreciate the scale of Parton’s rags-to-riches success, though, you need to head east to Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains, where she grew up in a wooden cabin with no electricity or running water.
The Queen of the South has transformed the dirt-poor backwoods of her childhood into a theme park called Dollywood. While its kitsch entertainments aren’t to everyone’s taste, her beloved Smokies are one of the most spectacular, biodiverse corners of the Deep South.
AMERICA’S FAVOURITE NATIONAL PARK
Dolly Parton once said in an interview that when she’s writing an album, she takes herself off to a cabin in the mountains that belonged to her great-grandfather and fasts to unleash her creativity. These days there are plenty of luxurious cabins available to rent on the outskirts of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge.
But the best place to get back to nature is the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which is named after the blue-tinged mist that fills the valleys on still summer days. The USA’s most-visited national park straddles Tennessee and North Carolina and its soaring, forest-carpeted ridges can be explored by car or on foot.
The park looks especially stunning in October, when the sugar maples, scarlet oaks, sweetgums, red maples and hickories are clothed in their autumn colours.
DOLLY COUNTRY
Born to a sharecropper in 1946, Dolly Parton shared her parents’ two-room cabin in the foothills of the Great Smokies with 11 siblings. “Life is as peaceful as a baby’s sigh... Crickets sing in the fields near by,” she sang in 1973’s My Tennessee Mountain Home — a bittersweet tribute to a life she couldn’t wait to escape. Aged seven, Dolly built herself a guitar.
The nearby neon-lit town of Pigeon Forge is now home to Dollywood, Parton’s theme park, which attracts more than two million visitors a year. As well as rollercoasters, rides and live music, there’s a replica of the cabin (old newspaper lines the walls) and a white clapboard chapel.
Parton also owns DreamMore Resort, and fans with cash to flash can book the Dolly Parton Suite — a sparkly penthouse with a gold-tiled shower. In the lobby, there’s a padlocked box containing a song called My Place in History, which will be released on her 100th birthday.
MUSIC CITY USA
When she was 18, Parton packed her bags and moved to Nashville, where she still lives, having met her husband in a launderette on her very first day in town.
Dolly devotees should begin at RCA Studio B, where Jolene was recorded and Elvis Presley, Jim Reeves and Roy Orbison, among many others, also recorded hits. Parton is also celebrated in the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Down river, there are nightly concerts at the Grand Ole Opry, which began as a radio show in 1925. Parton first sang on the show when she was ten, and at 13 she was introduced by no less than Johnny Cash. No visit to Nashville is complete without a night in the raucous honky-tonk bars of Lower Broadway.
MOUNTAIN MOONSHINE
Like many establishments in this conservative region, Parton’s empire doesn’t permit the drinking of alcohol. Ironically, the Smokies are famous for illicit stills. When Dolly was a child, many farmers supplemented their income by making moonshine — the unaged corn whiskey was distilled by the light of the moon (hence the name) or in caves, and mixed with fruit to make it palatable. Tennessee’s best-known export, apart from music, is probably Jack Daniel’s, yet liquor licences weren’t issued in most of the state’s counties until 2009. The first legal moonshine distillery, Ole Smoky Moonshine, which opened a year later, quickly became a tourist attraction.