It All Started Here: Dolly Parton

What do you know of Dolly Parton? Were you a fan of her music, performed over a 60- year career with more than a 100 million records sold? Did you love the music she wrote that others performed to great success? You possibly are not a country and western music fan, but did enjoy her performances in several well-received movies. Have you been to Dollywood or were you aware of her Imagination Library? With her recent passing, it would be hard to find a person in our country that did not know her name, even if they had never connected with her before.

Dolly Parton was born to a poor farmer in the mountains of East Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children sharing a one-room home. She learned her music from her mother who performed ballads based on Smoky Mountain folklore and performed in her grandfather’s church at an early age with her siblings. At seven, using a homemade guitar, she began to perform locally and with her uncle’s gift of a real guitar the following year, shared her music with her community in Pittman Center, Tennessee. First with the folk songs she learned at home, Dolly began writing her own songs to include in her performances.

She attended Sevier County High School in Sevierville, Tennessee, and was a percussionist in the band. Her musical career continued with performances on local radio and television shows and her first record. That led to a performance on the Grand Ole Opry and and a meeting with Johnny Cash. Her songwriting, with her uncle and partner Bill Owens, was expanding with her compositions being performed by multiple artists and reaching the top 10 on several record charts, both country & western, and popular. The day after she graduated from high school, she moved to Nashville to continue her career.

Parton’s first record company considered her a bubblegum pop singer and produced several songs that were not very successful. When one of her songs, recorded by Bill Philips, reached No. 6 on the country chart, the company relented and let her record the music she wanted to sing. Success followed for the next six decades with many of her songs reaching the top of the charts twice, once when she performed them and then again, years later when done by other artists. She added television star to her resumé in the 70s, receiving awards for her performances on several musical variety shows. And then came the movies, with 9 to 5, being her breakout role starring alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.

Dolly used her fame and the fortune that followed to create Dollywood, a tourist site used to bring traffic and economy to her home county in Tennessee, as well as Dollywood Foundation, a non-profit that raises funds for children literacy efforts across the country.

Parton challenged the students in Sevier County schools to graduate by having them find a buddy in seventh grade and offering funds if they both graduated high school. The foundation was instrumental in the rapid development of the Covid vaccine and in supporting families affected by floods, wildfires and other disasters in Tennessee. She partnered with the US Fish and Wildlife Service through her American Eagle Sanctuary at Dollywood to help save the bald eagle and supported efforts of LGBTQ+ advocacy groups.

But before all of that, Dolly Parton was a chorus and band member in junior high and high school in Sevier County, Tennessee.

Steffen Parker is a retired music educator, event organizer, maple sugar maker, and Information Technology specialist from Vermont who serves as the Performing Arts/Technology representative on the NFHS High School Today Publications Committee. He received the NFHS Citation Award in 2017 and the Ellen McCulloch- Lovell Award in Arts Education in 2021. He can be reached at steffenparker@gmail.com.