How Dollywood Captured the Essence of Dolly Parton

From her girlhood in the hollers of Tennessee, Dolly Parton had many outsize ambitions. She announced one of the most outlandish in an interview with Barbara Walters in 1982: She wanted to build “a fantasy city” in the Smoky Mountains — a “mountain Disneyland” in what she called “one of the most wonderful places in the world.”

Like most of Parton’s monumental dreams, this one was achieved in just a few years’ time. Dollywood opened in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., in 1986, with a steam train whistling through the towering Great Smokies where Parton grew up. An expansion and rebranding of an existing amusement park, Dollywood at first represented a shrewd business deal: Parton was splitting the stakes with the park’s previous owners, a company called Herschend Family Entertainment, who benefited from her fame and promotional skills. Back then, Dollywood’s museum displayed “a girl’s small, faded coat made of pieces of corduroy by Miss Parton’s mother,” as one 1986 account put it.

It was a replica “Coat of Many Colors,” but still stitched by hand. Dollywood never lost that homey connection to its founder, and as it grew it came to symbolize much of what Parton, who died at 80 on Tuesday after a brief battle with cancer, stood for: uniting people through music, community, a good time — sometimes raucous, often corny, always genuine — and a faithful devotion to the region, the people and the culture that raised her.

I visited Dollywood a few years ago, during its busy Christmas season, and heard bluegrblock, folk and other Americana styles, with string bands, fiddlers or a teenage banjo virtuoso around every corner. The park serves as a significant boosting ground for Appalachian roots music, a professor in the field told me. It also employs many members of Parton’s large extended family, as singers and more; an uncle who conserved chestnut trees is memorialized with a plaque. It is profoundly local, and proud of its place.

Though Pigeon Forge is home to many entertainment businesses, Dollywood is still the largest employer in the county. A 2021 state government report said it directly generated $1.8 billion annually, and it now has nearly twice as many visitors, upward of four million. In 2022, it announced a full tuition payment program for college at partner institutions, available to any of its thousands of employees — including part-time or seasonal staff — starting on their first day of work.

“We want people to have opportunities,” Parton, whose title at the park was dreamer in chief, told me in 2022. “The employees to feel proud to be working there. You don’t want them to feel like they’re just there to serve you. You also, in turn, want to be able to do some things to help make their lives better, and to serve them.”

Her vision for generosity was evident all over the park grounds, especially in the many performers and workers who relayed one of her mantras: “Dolly always says, ‘If someone doesn’t have a smile, give them yours.’”

Parton was a regular presence on the grounds, parading around in vintage vehicles at the annual opening day. One of her last public moments was on Aug. 14, when she appeared in a video introducing Dollywood’s newest roller coaster, NightFlight Expedition, a one-of-a-kind indoor attraction that cost more than $50 million. It’s part of a planned decades-long expansion to the park and its adjacent resorts that Parton and Eugene Naughton, the operation’s president, announced in 2021.

Naughton noted that Parton was an orchestrator of the project, especially its new hotels: “She’s been able to help us develop and narrate each of the story lines,” he told The Knoxville News-Sentinel last year. (She got too queasy to partake in the park’s thrill rides herself, she often said. But she was still excited about the new coaster: With NightFlight, “we’re able to tell stories about what happens in the mountains after the sun goes down,” as she put it.)

To those who knew her, the fact that Parton was busy into her final days came as no surprise. “If she’s still asleep at 3 a.m., it’s a miracle,” her longtime creative director, Steve Summers, whom she plucked from the performance line at Dollywood, once told me. “You can’t outwork Dolly Parton. Nobody can.”

Her ambitions for the park extended through at least 2050. “I hope they keep building on, even after I’m gone,” she told The Wall Street Journal in May.

And so, in mourning her death on Tuesday, Dollywood announced that, in her spirit, it would remain open the following day — “as Dolly wanted.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.