|
In October 2024, my friend Emily and I made a pilgrimage to Dollywood during a trip to Nashville.
Dolly Parton’s theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. is about three and a half hours east of the Tennessee capital near the Great Smoky Mountains, where the country music icon grew up.
Dollywood (Jen Zoratti / Free Press)
Dollywood isn’t just about Dolly. It’s an ode to where she’s from, which means it’s the kind of place where you can be surrounded by butterflies and sparkles and also take a rollercoaster ride through an abandoned coal mine. Some areas are less Parton and more Pigeon Forge, but the whole gives visitors a sense of place.
Advertisement
Parton was proud of her roots and her community, which is why Dollywood was built where it is. Since it opened in 1986, it has created over 20,000 local jobs and continues to fuel the East Tennessee economy today.
The replica bus at Dollywood (Jen Zoratti)
There are newer museum-quality exhibitions dedicated to her singular career, right from the bus she first took to Nashville. And Behind The Seams: Dolly’s Life in Rhinestones — where you can see her wigs and costumes and patterns and shoes — is worth the price of admission alone.
Dolly Parton’s wigs, as seen at Dollywood (Jen Zoratti)
But the best — and most moving — feature of Dollywood is the replica of the childhood cabin where she grew up in extreme poverty as one of 12 children. It is suffocatingly small, sleeping many to a room, but it’s clear, from all the little details, that it was home “rich in love” as she so often said.
A replica of Dolly Parton’s first home, as seen at Dollywood (Jen Zoratti)
A replica of the cabin where Dolly Parton grew up (Jen Zoratti)
Parton wanted visitors to know where she came from, without shame or embarrassment or apology. Her little scrap coat, the one she’d immortalize in song in 1971 — Although we had no money/I was rich as I could be/In my coat of many colours/My Mama made for me — is on view at Dollywood, too.
Dolly Parton’s coat of many colours at Dollywood (Jen Zoratti)
And when I saw it, I have to tell you: I got a bit misty-eyed.
Dolly Parton died on Tuesday at the age of 80. I have a column about her and what she meant to me as a child-free gal online today and in Thursday’s paper, but I wanted to share this little slice of Dollywood with you.
|
