What would Dolly do?

respect and admiration from an unlikely cheerleader

I never expected to find myself writing an essay or blog post about Dolly Parton. In spite of being a southerner, I’m not much of a country music fan, and until recently, I hadn’t set foot in a theme park in many years.

My childhood idols generally leaned more toward nerdy than glitzy, and I knew almost no pop music until 7th grade when I begged my classical musician parents for a clock radio so I could learn some current songs and sing along with other kids when I was in someone else’s car.

So I wasn’t raised on Dolly’s music or any of the other country artists, for that matter. I did know who Glen Cambell and Mac Davis were because they both had TV variety shows in the 70s. (Dolly had one for a season, too, but I don’t remember ever seeing it.) I knew a few other big names in country music, like Johnny Cash and John Denver, but none of their records were in our home when I was growing up.

When I saw the movie A Coal Miner’s Daughter in 1980, about the life of Loretta Lynn, I already knew who Lynn was, and I think I was introduced to the late Patsy Cline in that movie, but country music was largely male-dominated in those days. Pretty “girl singers” served as sidekicks and occasional duet partners to some of the male headliners from the Grand Ole Opry. And that’s essentially how Dolly Parton got her start on the Porter Wagoner Show in 1967.

Dolly Parton in 1977

I don’t remember when I first became aware of Dolly Parton, but it would probably have been on a variety show or late-night talk show in the 70s. Her first appearance on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson was in 1977, so it was likely around then. I also saw the comedy 9 to 5 when it came out in 1980 with Dolly as one of its stars, alongside Jane Fonda, Lilly Tomlin, and Dabney Coleman, all of whom were big names by then.

9 to 5 was Parton’s acting debut, and she also wrote and performed the movie’s catchy toe-tapper of a theme song which, like so many country songs, shines a light on the plight of everyday working people.

Both the song and the movie were big crossover hits. The plot was filled with its share of fun and silliness along with a clear feminist message for its day that struck a nerve with millions of women dealing with harassment in the workplace, blatant pay discrimination, and limited childcare options. The movie went on to inspire a TV show and later a Broadway show that led to a national tour and eventually to the London stage, as well.

While the big screen may have been new to Dolly, the subject matter was not. She has never explicitly labeled herself a feminist and doesn’t talk directly about politics in public, but her songwriting highlights what’s important to her and includes songs as far back as the 60s that pointed to double standards between men and women and called out what today we might refer to as “slut shaming.”

I saw Dolly in both 9 to 5 and Steel Magnolias; I was familiar with several of her hit songs, including her collaboration with Kenny Rogers and her trio work with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris; and I knew she wrote the song I Will Always Love You, which was a hit for her and others even before Whitney Houston took it to a whole new level in 1992 with 20+ million units sold. Dolly’s flashy bubbly bigger-than-life persona would have been hard to miss by the 80s or so, but still I didn’t know much about Dolly Parton as a person beyond a vague awareness that she had a rags-to-riches story like Loretta Lynn before her.

Dolly at the premiere of Steel Magnolias in 1989.

I was scrolling through social media a couple of months ago, when I came across some nice photos of flowers in the Spring Flower & Food Festival at Dollywood, Dolly’s theme park in her hometown of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. I remembered taking our young son there years ago, when the park was much smaller and less fancy than it is today, because my husband loves the mountains and we thought Rob, who wasn’t yet old enough to enjoy thrill rides, might do better at a smaller park than Disney. Dollywood was also closer to where we lived in Atlanta and not as hot as Orlando in the summer.

The trip to Tennessee worked out great for us, and I remember recommending Dollywood to friends and family with little ones who might be overwhelmed by a big Disney excursion. The smallish park was affordable, well kept, and had a nice variety of offerings for people of all ages in the scenic Smoky Mountains.

I confess to wondering who on earth would name an amusement park after themselves? (The obvious answer eluded me at the time: Walt Disney did, and that not only worked out well for him but for millions of Disney-lovers all over the world.) Knowing so little about Dolly Parton beyond the blond wigs, stage makeup, rhinestones, and enhanced hourglass figure that she was (in)famous for, I had no clue about her vision or priorities. My incorrect assumption was that she probably had little to do with the park beyond putting her name on it.

Fast forward 25+ years, and the pretty photos of Dollywood in the springtime piqued my curiosity, not only because the flowers looked so nice but because it was quite a different vibe than I remembered from our trip decades earlier.

I had recently looked up Disney World prices in anticipation of a trip to Orlando and was shocked not only by the cost but also the complexity of planning a visit there! The last time I had purchased Disney tickets, it had been fairly simple. There are 4 different Disney theme parks, the most famous of which is still the Magic Kingdom, probably followed by Epcot, and you could either buy a single park ticket or a slightly more expensive “park hopper” that would allow you to go to more than one. Multi-day tickets were also available, which provided a small discount on the per-day price.

There were no expiration dates or park reservations to make back then! You could buy a 3-day park-hopper ticket at the Disney Store of your local mall and use one of the days that summer, saving the other two for years before returning to the park again to use the other two. (Oh, how I wish I had purchased some extras for the future!) These all-access tickets were a huge improvement over the old ticket booklets you needed at Disneyland when I was little, containing multiple individual ride tickets categorized by letter—an “E ride” being the most desirable.

As most of you probably know, buying Disney tickets is nothing like that anymore. For starters, they stopped selling tickets with no expiration date (as an option, for an extra fee) in 2004. Even for single-park tickets, base prices now vary not only according to the park you choose but also by date, so you pay more for the same ticket during peak times. It’s cheaper to buy tickets in advance than at the gate, and there’s a limit to how many guests they allow in the park per day. As if the tickets were not already expensive enough, there are multiple add-on options with additional fees.

The once free fast pass system at Disney has been replaced by paid Genie+ and lightning lanes, and there’s parking to consider, meal plans, photo plans, early entry days for some Disney resort guests, and more to sort out. While Disney World is surely more complicated and expensive than most, it seems that virtually all theme parks now have multiple ticket options, and none of them are what I would call cheap. An annual pass to Disney is about $1500, and you still have to make reservations for the specific days you want to go during the year. (There are discounts available to Florida residents, but there are blackout dates and other restrictions with those Florida passes.)

So when I came across those festive Dollywood photos and thought about the fact that it’s only a 2-hour drive from Asheville, NC if you are lucky enough to hit the traffic right, I decided to poke around on the Dollywood website. It’s still more complicated than in the olden days, but it didn’t appear to require an advanced degree in theme-park management.

Umbrella Sky on Showstreet at Dollywood in the Spring

Feeling cautiously optimistic, I took the next logical step and joined a Dollywood Facebook group. Within a month, I was the proud owner of a gold season pass (which includes parking) and Bill had a new silver season pass (because it’s less expensive, and only one person in the car needs a parking pass). I also learned from the Facebook group that Dollywood’s season ends in early January and they reopen for the new season in March with limited hours. There are seasonal festivals at designated times, during which the park decorations and some of the performances change. The nightly drone show with fireworks only takes place during the summer festival, mid-June to early August.

Dollywood has grown a lot since it opened in 1986, with even bigger plans for the future. It still has plenty of kiddie rides for little tikes, but there are also NINE different roller coasters, two or three water rides (in addition to Dolly’s neighboring water park), and a variety of things in between. There are 50+ rides in total, as well as a host of shows to watch, depending on the schedule of the day. Country music features heavily but not exclusively, and there are both outdoor and indoor (air-conditioned!) show venues. There are a cappella oldies near the antique train ride and a birds of prey show next to the bald eagle preserve in the park, featuring rescued birds that cannot safely be released back into the wild. During the summer festival, there’s a fun show in one of the theaters called Gazillion Bubbles that’s especially popular with families and a new Stunt Dog Show whose stars were trained for and featured in recent movies. There’s also some gospel music and authentic bluegrass in the mix.

With a few exceptions, food in the park tends to be a cut above standard theme park fare. A crowd favorite is fresh hot cinnamon bread, which can be purchased at the grist mill or the bakery near the entrance. The price went up this year from $9.99 to $12.99, but the lines for it indicate that the higher cost isn’t dissuading anyone.

One of the more touching displays at Dollywood is a replica—built by Dolly’s brother—of the little mountain home they grew up in, with 12 children and 2 adults in essentially two rooms. It has been furnished by the Parton siblings to look much as it did during Dolly’s humble childhood. There’s also a one-room schoolhouse and a little country church with hand-made quilts on the wall in place of stained-glass windows. The Robert F. Thomas Chapel was named for the doctor who delivered Dolly, and there’s a 30-minute non-denominational Sunday morning service held there each week that the park is open. All park guests are welcome to attend.

The Craftman’s Valley section of the park features glass blowing, blacksmithing, candlemaking, and more. The Country Fair section is filled with the kinds of rides and arcade games you might find at a real country fair, including several suitable for very young children. The Dollywood Express is the beloved antique steam engine that runs once an hour. In spite of the soot and cinders that passengers encounter, it’s always packed.

All of these tributes to Dolly’s roots in the Smoky Mountains give Dollywood a depth that I wasn’t entirely prepared for. There’s a palpable sense of gratitude and encouragement in the air. Dolly and her team want you to have a great time, but they also encourage you to pay attention to the magic—and the lessons—of life.

Dolly herself emerges as something of a paradox. Beneath her energetic and ambitious rhinestone exterior is a thoughtful, talented, and compassionate woman with a genuine sense of purpose.

An expanded Dolly museum area called The Dolly Parton Experience opened at the park this spring with exhibits divided between 3 different buildings rather than the single museum they had before, presumably to accommodate more people at a time and make it easier to add (or rotate) exhibits in the future. There’s also one of Dolly’s old tour buses you can walk through.

By and large, the Dollywood staff is friendly and helpful throughout the park, there are plenty of convenient stations to fill up your water bottle, and even the restrooms are surprisingly well-maintained. An impressive amount of thought has been put into the family-friendly design of the park, which has an enthusiastic multi-generational following and many season passholders.

If you’re curious, the Dollywood 2024 calendar is here.

Bill and I plan to go back in the fall for the Harvest Festival and again for the Smoky Mountain Christmas Festival that begins in November. For years, I bemoaned the early display of Christmas decorations and music, but I seem to be mellowing in my old age. By going before Thanksgiving week, we hope to beat both the crowds and the colder temperatures of December. (Besides, Bill’s silver pass expires on Thanksgiving week.)

I’m surprised to be enjoying Dollywood as much as I am, since I don’t care about many of the rides or shows. The shops are pleasant to look through. It’s also fun to explore how they have designed and decorated various sections of the park and notice changes from season to season. There’s definitely also some nostalgia involved. And somehow, with all the hatefulness and difficulty in the world right now, being surrounded by people just having fun in a very wholesome way is restorative, if only briefly.

Dollywood serves as a small, deeply southern oasis.

It turns out that Dolly herself plays an active role in planning at the park and has had meaningful ideas from the beginning about the kind of environment she wanted to create for her neighbors in Pigeon Forge as well as visitors from far and wide. What I’m about to say may sound corny and naive, but Dollywood feels to me like it was created with love and genuine good intentions—a small, deeply southern oasis.

Here’s an interesting little video from 4 years ago when they were about to open a new section of the park called Wildwood Grove. They have since added another family coaster to this area, called Big Bear Mountain. (It’s the one coaster Bill and I decided to ride because it’s quite smooth, as roller coasters go… no headbanging.) On summer evenings, Wildwood Grove is where you go to see the drone show at the end of the night. As the sun sets, there’s a big dance party.

I especially enjoyed the seasonal themes and accompanying decorations at Dollywood and was taken aback when all the cute spring topiaries had abruptly been removed for the summer festival, with its road trip theme. Even the coat of many colors display had disappeared, which honored Dolly’s mom making a tiny much-needed coat for her little girl one winter from a box of rags that someone had given them. As Dolly watched her mother craft the coat, her mom told her the Bible story of Joseph and his coat of many colors.

The display hadn’t looked at all temporary to me during my first visit, but on my next, it had been completely replaced with a multicolor hose contraption for children to cool off with during the summer festival!

Dolly fans will know that earlier in her career she wrote and recorded a well-loved song about this childhood experience that became the title cut of her 1971 album, Coat of Many Colors. A replica of the little coat is now on display in the museum at The Dolly Parton Experience.

The spring tribute to Dolly’s mom, who sewed her little girl a coat of many colors, made from rags. Dolly’s song about it was playing, with a voiceover of her sharing more details of the precious memory.

I’ve done some reading (and watched some video documentaries) about Dolly since rediscovering her theme park this year, and I have to say she is a truly impressive and inspiring woman. On the one hand, she knows what she likes and wants and isn’t embarrassed to say so, whether it comes across as sensible and sophisticated or not. Yet virtually everyone who has worked closely with her says the friendly and outgoing qualities so evident in interviews and on stage are not an act. Dolly is the real deal: She’s consistently caring and committed to others while being true to herself and a brilliant businesswoman.

She does guard her privacy, particularly with respect to her husband Carl Dean, who famously dislikes the spotlight and any sort of public life for himself, but she prides herself on being honest about the things she chooses to talk about, including thoughts of suicide during some particularly low points in her life.

The Parton family was too poor for Dolly to find role models by going to the movies or in the pages of magazines as a young girl, so she patterned her look after the “town trollop” whose bleached hair, heavy makeup, and bold colors were, to her young mind, the prettiest thing Dolly had ever seen.

Finances were also a factor in her fashion choices. Dolly couldn’t afford expensive clothing until later in life, but she wanted to develop a distinctive attention-getting look for herself, so she found a way to do that. It’s refreshing to hear a woman admit to preferences that many would describe as unsophisticated or over the top. Lots of little girls (maybe also boys?) love sparkly things and bright colors as children, but there’s a societal expectation that those tastes should become more “refined” and understated by the time we reach adulthood. Dolly still likes what she likes and wears what she wants to wear.

But Dolly doesn’t stop at being true to herself. She is endlessly encouraging and supportive of others, and one of Dolly’s strongest core values has always been giving back to her community.

Dolly bought and reimagined the amusement park in her hometown specifically because she wanted to create something special for her neighbors in Sevier County—including the kinds of experiences she didn’t have as a child. Dollywood is now the largest employer in the area, by far. Dollywood pays full tuition, fees, and required book costs for its employees enrolled at any of 30 participating institutions of higher learning. (Cornell is on the list!)

Twice a year, for about a week each a time, Sevier County residents and those who work in the county can get admission to Dollywood by simply making a $5 donation to the local food bank. (One-day admission is typically $92 plus 12% tax.) And there are inspiring little stories and sayings sprinkled throughout the park, urging visitors as well as employees to dream more, learn more, care more, and be more.

It’s notable that Dolly’s lawyers and other advisors strongly warned against investing in a theme park as a crazy waste of money, so she ultimately replaced them with people who better understood her vision and were committed to helping her create it.

Dolly Parton’s philanthropy and dedication to her home and family don’t end with an inviting theme park. She regularly donates to and raises money and awareness for causes near and dear to her heart.

In 1990, the high school dropout rate in Sevier County was a staggering 30%, so Dolly worked with the school to create The Buddy Program in 1991 to foster a culture of encouragement and support among students, teachers, and families. Students choose an accountability buddy in middle school, and if they graduate from high school on schedule, Dolly will personally hand them a $500 check with no strings attached. The dropout rate among participants plummeted from 30% to 6% and has held at approximately that level ever since.

During the pandemic, Dolly gave a million dollars to Vanderbilt University for early vaccine development efforts which helped lead to what became the Moderna RNA vaccine. She then appeared in a public service announcement encouraging people to get vaccinated by having her own vaccination administered on camera.

The list of ways Dolly has helped her community is long, from scholarships to aiding victims of wildfires and floods, but perhaps my favorite initiative of Dolly’s is her Imagination Library, a wonderful literacy program for children that started in Sevier County and has grown to most of the United States as well as Canada, the UK, and Australia. Children enrolled in the program receive a free book in the mail every month from birth to age 5. Dolly Parton is now affectionately know by the children of her community as “the book lady.”

Dolly’s own father never learned to read or write, although she proudly describes him as a very smart man and a hard worker. Before Robert Lee Parton’s death in 2000, he told his daughter that he believed the most important thing Dolly ever did was create the Imagination Library.

So… as usual, I’m late to the party, but count me as a Dolly convert. The video above is 5 years old but still an interesting documentary she did on ABC that you might want to check out. I’m not sure how it’s possible to dislike someone like Dolly Parton, but she has dealt with her share of strong criticism over the years, as most people in the limelight do.

As polarized as everything feels right now, it’s all the more amazing that even people who agree on little else often share an appreciation of Dolly Parton. Since reading up on her, I’ve wondered how she made it through so many challenges in life without losing her optimism and love for it. So next time I find myself in a situation where I feel discouraged or overwhelmed by how spiteful people can be or how divided our country has become, maybe I’ll try asking myself, What would Dolly do? and see if I can do a better job of focusing on solutions rather than problems.

In the meantime, I’m already looking forward to our fall and winter excursions to Dollywood!

How about you?
Are you a Dolly fan?
Have you been to Dollywood?
(Would you like to?)

I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Dolly in the annual opening day parade at Dollywood.