Dolly: Folk Saint of Appalachia

By: Brendan Hammond

Dolly Parton once joked that it “costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” She told many interviewers that her look was based on “the town tramp.” Her mother said that woman was trash. Parton said she was beautiful. She joked that had she been born a man, she would be a drag queen. Parton had a unique ability to give love to everybody and, usually, receive it right back. Her magnetic, large, pearly smile framed by bright, red lips is a sight well known and adored by folks all across America. It should come as no surprise that when she passed on Aug. 25, the nation entered mourning for Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean. 

Dolly Parton

Parton was born Jan. 19, 1946 to Avie Lee Caroline Owens Parton and Robert Lee Parton. Her family, at the time, consisted of three older siblings. They all lived in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Pittman Center, Tenn. When she was a little girl, they moved to nearby Locust Ridge and upgraded to two rooms. Eventually, the family grew to have 12 children. 

Parton’s childhood was shaped by music, family, storytelling and her Appalachian identity. Being “dirt poor” like most in her area at the time, her mother entertained them with stories from the Bible, Great Smoky Mountain folklore and ballads as well as stories from Avie Lee’s Welsh ancestry. Avie Lee’s father, Jake Owens, was a preacher and the family attended his Pentecostal church regularly. The Pentecostal musical tradition is vibrant, highly participatory and very emotionally expressive. Parton developed a great musical knowledge simply from her environment.

Though she began performing at the age of 10, she was not very successful until she was 21. In 1967, Porter Wagoner, another major country star of the time, invited Parton on his show as a regular to replace Norma Jean, who had just left. Though Parton was initially met with some resistance, the audience eventually accepted Parton with the influence of Wagoner. Wagoner then convinced his label to sign Parton. She grew in popularity, but really only in the duet scene with Wagoner. In 1974, Parton released “I Will Always Love You” about her professional break from Wagoner. Often regarded as Parton’s most iconic solo hit, it topped the country charts. From then, it was only up for her. She won a Grammy in 1979 surrounded by constant chart-toppers. This little gal from the Smokies had found her stardom. 

And that is precisely what Parton remained: a gal from the Smokies. She never forgot her Appalachian roots, investing in the area through her Dollywood amusement park, which created thousands of jobs in her little pocket of Tennessee. This was far from the end of Parton’s philanthropy. She founded the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, which delivers free books to children all across the country, and now internationally. In 2016, after wildfires devastated the Smokies, she donated money to the families impacted. She founded multiple scholarships and health programs for children. Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt research that contributed to the development of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. She fed people, sheltered people, cared for the sick and shared her wealth. 

Parton’s place in American culture grew into something larger than a simple celebrity. She has begun to resemble the cultural image of a folk saint. Folk saints are made by the people who remember them, through stories of their goodness, recognizable symbols, attachment to a particular place and the belief that their lives represented something worth imitating. Parton had all of these. Her towering blonde hair, rhinestones and bright smile became an iconography of their own. Stories of her generosity are repeated almost like legends and the mountains of east Tennessee remain inseparable from her identity. For many Appalachians, she represented a version of their home that could be poor without being shameful, rural without being backward and deeply Christian without surrendering kindness or compassion.

Her appeal also stretched far beyond the mountains that formed her. Parton became beloved by people who seemingly had little else in common. Country fans, Christians, queer people, children receiving books from the Imagination Library and generations of families all found something in Dolly that felt like it belonged to them. She rarely seemed interested in deciding who was worthy of that love. Instead, she built much of her public life around giving it freely. In that way, the reverence surrounding Parton resembles the old tradition of folk sainthood: ordinary people recognizing holiness in someone long before any institution could think to name it.

Parton spent her life trying to live a good, holy, Christian life, and by the measure of the people who loved her, she succeeded. She fits the narrative of a folk saint perfectly, her sainthood recognized through neither miracles nor canonization, but through the reverence, stories and love of the people whose lives she touched. Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean, folk saint of Appalachia, we will always love you.