Dollywood's quietly radical thrills - by Michelle Delgado
When I was maybe 4 or 5 years old, I remember sitting in a dim theater with my family as artificial leaves fell all around us. Next came a light mist of raindrops, signaling spring’s arrival. On the screen or stage before us, I can’t remember which, a story unfolded, about a young girl whose family was too poor to afford new clothes for school. Instead, her mother stitched a patchwork coat from scraps of fabric — an old shirt, a blanket — and instead of being ashamed of her family’s poverty, she felt grateful.
It was no accident that the lyrics echoed the Biblical story of Joseph, but the anecdote was actually about Dolly Parton. Channeling Gospel, lived experience, and her Appalachian roots, Parton had long since transcended her humble beginnings. In fact, the theater where I encountered her “Coat of Many Colors” was nestled in a much more significant testament to Parton’s fame: a theme park called Dollywood.
Dollywood officially opened its doors in 1986, after “9 to 5” but still a few years before “Steel Magnolias.” The park embodied one of Parton’s long-held ambitions: to bring a significant number of jobs home to Sevier County, Tennessee, where she’d grown up. As of 2015, the park was Sevier County’s biggest employer; it needs a big team to manage the approximately 2.5 million people who visit Dollywood each year.
What’s perhaps even more incredible is that the park exists at all: it’s the only amusement park on the planet that centers its theme around a woman.
Parton’s fame injected new interest into what is actually a much older theme park. Dollywood traces its roots to 1961, when a pair of brothers opened a small attraction designed to introduce visitors to the culture of the Great Smoky Mountains, a subrange of the Appalachian Mountains that forms a natural border between North Carolina and Tennessee. This park featured a coal-powered steam train called Klondike Katie, which endures today.
Over the years, other owners added their own embellishments to this foundation. Between 1970 and 1977, the park was owned by Art Modell, then owner of the Cleveland Browns. Under Modell, the park renamed “Goldrush Junction” and gained a campground, outdoor theater, log cabins, a wood shop, and a working saw mill, plus a few rides for kids. Goldrush Junction also inherited a Log Flume from the New York World’s Fair, officially pushing it into theme park territory. Like the steam train, these attractions attempted to capture the spirit of Appalachia, distilling the region’s culture into a plot of land visitors could easily roam.
In 1977, the park fell into its final pre-Dolly iteration when it was purchased by the Herschend family, whose tourist attraction lineage dated all the way back to 1894 when they welcomed tourists to Missouri’s deepest cave. In a peculiar move, the park was renamed Silver Dollar City in honor of Appalachia’s old cash-only days, and visitors regularly received silver dollars among change for their purchases.
Despite nearly a decade of growth under the Herschends, nothing could beat Parton’s golden touch and name recognition. When she joined forces with the existing park, attendance shot up an incredible 75 percent. Today, attendance is up 160 percent over its 1985 levels.
All of this helps explain how Parton used her fame and story to invest in her home region. Dollywood is designed to be simultaneously aspirational and accessible, pairing Parton’s unlikely rise to fame with gift shops where you can buy your own Dolly-style outfits and quite literally step into her shoes.
As writer Susan Harlan notes in Racked:
Although Dolly is known for her embrace of spectacle and high artifice — her character in the 1989 film Steel Magnolias famously said, “There is no such thing as natural beauty” — she is also utterly authentic. She manages to collapse these seeming opposites into one another. The real is the fake; the fake is the real. If Dolly Parton is magic, and she may very well be, this is part of her magic.
Dolly herself is everywhere and nowhere in the park. She visits for business meetings, parades, and performances (including surprise performances), but otherwise, she is an absent presence, like a theme park spirit: an idea as well as an actual person.
While Parton’s influence might seem overly commercial, she’s consistently made her presence in her home state very real. Just a few weeks ago, the FBI (??) recognized Parton’s efforts to rebuild Tennessee after wildfires tore through the eastern half of the state in 2016. (The flames also damaged parts of Dollywood.) Parton sent 900 families each $10,000 as they rebuilt their homes. Parton is also known for her Imagination Library, which has sent a staggering 85 million books to children since its creation in 1995.
As for the coat, like much of Dollywood, it’s a replica instead of the real artifact. Its seams were eventually ripped out so it could be turned into something new — which might even be more true to Parton’s philosophy.
Something else
Over the holiday weekend, I spent some time enjoying old copies of The Cartoon Picayune, a comics journalism anthology zine by Josh Kramer (whose story about cafeterias in federal government buildings you might remember from a few weeks back). The zine combines two of my favorite things: hand-drawn art and meticulously reported journalism about everything from lost Fabergé eggs to New England hard cider.
Although The Cartoon Picayune is no longer in production, you can still snag some back copies here while they last!
One more thing
Another week, another episode of Primetime! Last week, Todd dug into the many fictional presidencies of Hilary Clinton. This was one of my favorite episodes, but also one of the toughest to research: It turns out, there just aren’t many women depicted as president on TV. Check out the episode here.
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