“RIP Dolly Smoky Mountain Angel” was one of the first signs we saw as we pulled up on the side of a motel in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Just down the same road was another memorial to her on a Burger King sign. This was in early October. Dolly Parton, the country singer and actor, widely considered a Great American Who Everyone Loves, had died, at the age of 80, in late August. I am not the kind of person who cries over celebrity deaths, but after I heard that she died, I went to my closet to find a Dolly Parton T-shirt I had bought the one time I saw her live, at a concert of mostly acoustic songs in Queens in 2016. I couldn’t find it. I blamed my brief flirtation with the Marie Kondo method, but there was no way that T-shirt hadn’t sparked joy.
Early October in Sevier County, in far eastern Tennessee, where Parton was born, is full of cabins on some parcels of land that dot the ancient Appalachians. But among the rolling green expanses are Mexican supermarkets, coffee shops, apple orchards, and pumpkin patches. This is where she opened the amusement park Dollywood in 1986. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park draws masses about 13 miles from Dollywood. The fancier of my friends identified the area as where the Blackberry Farm resort is. But Pigeon Forge has a feeling of a Jersey Shore boardwalk in Appalachia, with a strip of businesses that sell vapes and ATV rides and Moon Pies a block from a Margaritaville hotel.
