Gone Dollywood

Dolly Parton's Mountain Dream

Graham Hoppe

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780821446379
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Dolly Parton isn't just a country music superstar. She has built an empire. At the heart of that empire is Dollywood, a 150-acre fantasy land that hosts three million people a year. Parton's prodigious talent and incredible celebrity have allowed her to turn her hometown into one of the most popular tourist destinations in America. The crux of Dollywood's allure is its precisely calibrated Appalachian image, itself drawn from Parton's very real hardscrabble childhood in the mountains of east Tennessee.

What does Dollywood have to offer besides entertainment? What do we find if we take this remarkable place seriously? How does it both confirm and subvert outsiders' expectations of Appalachia? What does it tell us about the modern South, and in turn what does that tell us about America at large? How is regional identity molded in service of commerce, and what is the interplay of race, gender, and class when that happens?

In Gone Dollywood, Graham Hoppe blends tourism studies, celebrity studies, cultural analysis, folklore, and the acute observations and personal reflections of longform journalism into an unforgettable interrogation of Southern and American identity.

1

Mountains, Parks, and Nothing Less Than Great

I refuse to settle for something less than great.

—Dolly Parton¹

ROUGHLY AT the center of Dolly Parton’s theme park, Dollywood, sits a replica of the two-room cabin where she was born. Both rooms are decorated with ancient-looking furniture and knick-knacks, visible through floor-to-ceiling Plexiglas windows. The viewing area is small, no bigger than a narrow hallway. I stood in that replica in December 2014. It was chilly; the wind whipped the mountain air through wooden walls almost as though they weren’t there. Dolly Parton remembers mountain winters in that cabin—the real version. With a sly wink she once told an interviewer that the wind blew snow through the cracks in the wall into straight lines across the floor, “like lines of coke.”² She’s America’s naughty girlfriend.

I was alone, comparing the homespun décor with the antiques and knick-knacks I’d seen on the walls of Pigeon Forge’s Cracker Barrel, the day before, when a woman in her eighties came into the cabin with her son. They commented on the pages from a Sears and Roebuck catalog that were plastered to the kitchen wall for insulation, feed sack curtains, and just one bed for so many people—Dolly has eleven brothers and sisters. Finally, speaking neither to her son nor to me, the woman said, in a voice that sounded like mountains themselves, “It was hard for them. It was hard for us too.” The words hung there for a few moments, and then the woman put a hand on her son’s arm, looked him in the eyes, and said, “She’s never forgotten it, never forgotten us. She’s done a lot for her people.” The woman’s son agreed and they made their way out of the cabin, into the fantastical wonderland that Dolly Parton has presented to her people. I stayed for a few moments more—wanting to feel the woman’s words in that space for another instant or two. Then I stepped out of the cabin into the park. The Christmas lights had come on, illuminating the trees around me. It had begun to snow.

* * *

A few months later I headed to Dollywood again. This visit was near the end of the summer. My wife and I went back to see two things: Dollywood’s new resort and Dolly Parton herself. I’d never seen Parton in concert before. Seeing her in her hometown theme park, staying at her newly opened resort, and seeing her perform would be a complete immersion in Parton’s empire.

As we drove into town I found myself wondering how Parton managed the logistics of coming home. How she balanced the professional obligations of being the face of a major business—the major business—in a tourist town with seeing friends and family. Not to mention getting in and out of town through traffic and to wherever she needed to go without creating too much of scene. Even though she seems like the luxury tour bus type, as we passed Pigeon Forge’s tiny municipal airport I wondered whether the airport was built for her. As we passed her alma mater, Sevier County High School, I also wondered if she had ever gone back to see her former teachers.

I had heard that the school has a plaque dedicated to Parton in its hallway. So I called to see if it had any other markers commemorating Parton’s time there. The librarian told me that she had forgotten about the plaque and, other than the occasional local who comes in looking for Dolly’s yearbook picture, no one makes much fuss about the school’s most famous alumna. The librarian told me that the students were mostly aware of Parton’s connection to the school through her financial support. Parton’s charitable efforts are credited with cutting the dropout rate in Sevier County by half. At one point she offered to pay every student who graduated $500 so long as they could convince a buddy to stay in school as well. Today she awards three $15,000 scholarships a year to the students. “There are quite a few kids who are the first in their family to go to college because of Dolly Parton,” the librarian told me.

When Parton came back to her hometown, she used to stay at her theme park. Since the park opened in 1986, Parton had kept a private apartment above one of the park buildings. The apartment was a kind of semi-open secret. The exact location was a mystery, but fans knew it existed and whispered about where exactly it might be. Evidently Parton got tired of being her own theme park’s only resident, and in 2010 the space was refurbished as office space for park executives. As a fund-raiser for the local medical center, Parton auctioned off her bedroom furniture—and revealed photos of the suite. The room looks a little like a dollhouse come to life. Everything in it is very pink, very ornate, and a little dated.³ The bed brought more than four grand on eBay.

When it was announced that Parton was building a new resort, I was curious to know if she had a new apartment built there. I can’t quite imagine the logistics of shuttling Dolly Parton through her own lobby and past her fans to her own elevator. It seems logistically almost impossible. I know how intensely some of Parton’s fans love her. It’s not hyperbolic to say that they worship her.

In a memorable scene in Tai Uhlmann’s 2008 documentary, For the Love of Dolly, two superfans track down the used car of Parton’s assistant and lifelong friend, Judy Ogle, on the lot of Darrell Waltrip’s Honda dealership in Franklin, Tennessee.⁴ They crawl through the car and pick through the upholstery looking for stray bottle-blonde strands of hair. “This one has a root!” one exclaims. The real coup, though, is when they rummage through the glove box and find an old insurance card issued to both Ogle and Parton. Like ecstatic Pentecostals they lay hands on the passenger seat, where they figure Dolly’s rear spent most of its time in the car.

As we drive toward Dolly’s resort, I think about that scene. Actually, when I think about Parton, I think about that scene a lot. There’s something unnerving about that kind of devotion. To know the make and model of Judy Ogle’s car seems to represent a profound level of personal knowledge about Parton’s life. The superfans profiled in the film aren’t shown to present any particular threat, but it is still a little uncomfortable to see. Imagine what it would be like to mean so much to so many people. That is celebrity on its most basic level: meaning more to every new person you encounter than they could possibly mean to you.

We drive past a billboard advertising Dollywood. I think how exhausting Parton’s life would be for a normal person. Parton isn’t normal, though. I suspect that after all this time she needs the constant pressure of fame to feel like herself. I say that with no sense of judgment. In fact, I feel only awe in face of Parton’s ability to constantly perform under that pressure. She thrives in the spotlight she has built for herself—maybe she feels she couldn’t survive without it.

Parton’s hotel is called the DreamMore Resort. It is named after the commencement speech that Parton gave at the University of Tennessee in 2009. That speech, where Parton popularized her mantra, “Dream more, learn more, care more, and be more,” became a best-selling inspirational book. Remarkably, that book has now become a destination hotel and resort. Dolly moves in remarkable ways.

The resort hotel is the largest part of a $300 million expansion of the Dollywood empire that also gave the theme park a facelift and a couple new roller coasters.⁵ The expansion provides, for the first time in Dollywood history, a place for guests to stay. The facility hosts business meetings and weddings and offers full-service dining, as well as a salon and spa. It boasts high-end guest rooms, including Dolly Parton’s “Suite Dream,” a 2,200-square-foot penthouse complete with décor “inspired by Dolly,” according to a 2015 press release. The subtitle of her book Dream More: Celebrate the Dreamer in You inspired the early advertising for the resort.

As we go up the lane leading to the parking lot, I’m not thinking about my dreams—I’m still obsessing about how Parton makes it back home. My biggest question is answered almost immediately as we enter the resort grounds and are greeted by Parton’s tour bus. The bus is parked in a small enclosure at the edge of the parking lot. Inside the fence is a small tent, set up with a cooler and some modest patio furniture. A golf cart sits nearby, along with a late-model burgundy van emblazoned with Dolly’s signature and butterfly logo. There will be a lot of butterflies.

At the front desk my wife asks the clerk if Dolly really stays on her bus while she’s here. She nods, adding that Dolly loves the new hotel: “Yesterday she was sitting in that rocker, greeting everyone and singing. It’s just so exciting when she’s here.”

The hotel is tastefully appointed, not over the top, very Southern Living. Portraits of Parton are everywhere—like a benevolent Smoky Mountain Mao—as are more butterflies. They cover every available surface. Our room has a large print of a monarch butterfly dancing across a field of flowers. Stitched on an afghan with blue butterflies on it is “‘Put wings on your dreams’—Dolly.” Even the toilet paper has a little butterfly embossed on it.

Our window has a nice enough view of the Smokies, but it also has a great view of Parton’s bus. From our room we can see that the bus is separated from the resort grounds by a large lawn. The lawn is out of the way enough to make it clear when someone is headed to Parton’s bus and not just wandering around the grounds. A girl who seems to be about fifteen and her mother are looking at the bus from across the meadow. They have made several false starts at crossing the lawn, so I figure she’s nervous. When they finally make it across, they walk around the enclosure several times until a security guard comes out to speak with them. After a short while he disappears into the enclosure and quickly returns to let them in, apparently for an audience with the queen. Later in the afternoon I spot the girl admiring her newly autographed Dolly Parton T-shirt in the lobby.

* * *

The first time I went to Dollywood was several years earlier, at the end of the summer of 2011. August in the Smokies can often provide a respite from the rest of the South. Sometimes the temperatures at the higher elevations can be as much as twenty degrees cooler than they are in the muggy piedmont of North Carolina or Tennessee’s central basin. But during that particular visit in 2011, there was no respite. The temperatures were well into the 80s. Instead of lowering the temperature, the altitude just made it feel like we were being pressed against the sun. Everyone at Dollywood was sweating, and gasping for air—myself very much included.

Pigeon Forge is often sold as the heart of the mountains, but it’s actually comparatively flat. This stretch of land was at one time probably desirable farmland compared with the surrounding hills and hollers—but now that flat ground is used for miniature golf courses, hotels, restaurants, and parking lots. The sun’s rays pound directly onto the scalps of those of us waiting our turn for one of the park’s rides. Dollywood has plenty of rides—more than forty and adding more every year. They range from roller coasters and water rides to tamer fare like Ferris wheels and a vintage carousel—the kinds of attractions familiar to anybody who has been to a Busch Gardens or a Six Flags or wherever. The rides make it tempting to presume that the park is just another easily digested theme park, one of many rather than a unique place.

On that hot day in August, I made that mistake. Maybe it was the smell of tar from the heat-softened asphalt mingling with the smoke from the barbecue stand and whatever chemical they use to clean the water in the log flume, but I thought I understood Dollywood pretty quickly. See, by my own hazy calculations, I thought that this could be anybody’s attraction. Dolly Parton is from Pigeon Forge, so it makes sense that she’d stick her name on a tourist magnet like a theme park. It could be anybody’s name on this park, I thought, so the remarkable feature of this place is Parton’s fame. That a country singer could be famous enough to support this kind of attraction is a straightforward novelty. After a day at the park I’d concluded that I’d figured the place out: it is a wild and wacky symptom of Dolly Parton’s fame.

Rest assured that I was wrong. I hadn’t figured anything out at all; in fact, I wasn’t even perceptive enough to understand what I didn’t know.

If you’ve ever read something about Dollywood, online or in a travel section of a newspaper, for example, you’ve probably encountered what I consider one of the great sins of writing about this theme park or anywhere else, for that matter: not meeting the place halfway. Making Dollywood a kitsch joke allows for a couple of punch lines, but it doesn’t really get anybody anywhere. Dolly Parton might be funny, but she’s no joke.

I stumbled around this trap when I first went to Dollywood and began thinking about the park. Those who dismiss Dollywood as junk will say something like this: “You’ll never believe what the mountain folk in East Tennessee have done: they’ve built a theme park about Dolly Parton! How weird! How kitsch! They’ve taken a beautiful landscape and dropped a fake thing about a woman who has become a caricature of herself with plastic surgery right in the middle of it.” Then maybe the writer, some dope like me, will try to throw in some ironic detachment or perhaps a lame supposition that the joke’s really on all these southerners who are basking in Parton’s mountain fantasy without realizing how odd the idea of Dollywood sounds.

I’m sorry, but that’s all wrong. Dolly Parton says it best herself: “I may look fake, but where it counts I’m real.”⁶

The first time I went to Dollywood I was expecting all that. Like many, I had equated Parton’s park with the weird surreal world of roadside kitsch. I actually looked forward to chintzy souvenirs. I’m a genuine fan of Parton’s career and thought it would be a worthy thing to check off my bucket list in the same way that a stop or two at Graceland during the course of a lifetime seems mandatory to me as a fan of Elvis Presley’s.

I had no idea what I was talking about.

Pigeon Forge has plenty of kitsch, camp, and crap. Some of it has to do with Parton, but most of it does not. Don’t be fooled into thinking that somehow the locals or the employees or even Dolly Parton herself don’t get what’s going on in their town. Dollywood is a deliberate place. The choices made there offer a corrective—albeit a gentle one—to both the constant stereotyping of Appalachia and the rampant commercialism of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg. To put it another way: Dolly Parton is smarter than I am. She’s probably also smarter than you are.

Wherever I looked for irony at Dollywood, I was disappointed. There was no distance, no room for detachment. No hillbillies were winking from behind a moonshine jug or from beneath threadbare straw hats. The souvenirs weren’t that crass either. They were just the kind of souvenirs you’d find anywhere. I learned, on that first trip, that it wasn’t that nobody here got the joke—it’s that there isn’t any joke at all. Dollywood isn’t a fake place. Obviously, some elements are incredibly artificial. Everything about any theme park is manufactured—it is a created reality after all. But it is very real in its intention to present Dolly Parton’s fondness for her home.

There is an expectation that Dollywood’s theme is built around Parton’s outsized public persona, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. I think it would be more accurate to say that the park is built around Parton’s imagined idea of the Smoky Mountains.

Clues to this idea appear all over the park. You turn a corner and stumble upon a facade made to look like that of a grocery store. Cas Walker’s Super Market is named for the Knoxville television personality who gave a ten-year-old Dolly Parton a spot on his local show. Next door is Red’s Diner, named for the Sevierville cafe where a young Parton ate her first hamburger. The diner is just past a restaurant named for Parton’s best friend’s grandmother—Granny Ogle’s Ham ’n’ Beans. The crown jewel of this nostalgia is that replica of the Parton family’s cabin. A hand-painted sign by the entrance states: “This cabin is a replica of the Parton homeplace where Lee and Avie Lee Parton raised Dolly and her 10 brothers and sisters. The replica cabin was constructed by Dolly’s brother Bobby, and the interior was reproduced by her mother Avie Lee. Most of the items on display are original family treasures. The original cabin still stands at its location in Locust Ridge.”

Imagine all those children crowding those rooms and bursting onto the porch. Imagine Avie Lee. What can it possibly have been like to decorate that house? Remember, two rooms and eleven children. She was showing the world how relatively few possessions she had—...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Mountains, Parks, and Nothing Less Than Great
• 2. Rebels, Tourists, and a Tennessee Mountain Home
• 3. Daisy Mae, Dreams, and Dolly
• 4. Pancakes, Paula Deen, and the Pigeon Forge Parkway
• 5. Okra, Chicken Livers, and a Break for Dinner
• 6. Biography, Persona, and Reality
• 7. Artifice, Celebrity, and Learning Something from Dollywood
• A Note about Sources
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index