When you grow up as a girl in Sevier County, Tennessee—Dolly’s home county—you breathe Dolly just as you breathe the mountain air. Dolly is the atmosphere, is the mist rolling through the holler. You live in a log cabin in the foothills of the Smokies, on a farm along the French Broad River, as one of three children, not far from where Dolly grew up on a farm “in a little old shack,” as she described it, with her eleven brothers and sisters. Born ten years after Dolly’s album My Tennessee Mountain Home was released, you play with June bugs on a string and chase glowing fireflies when evening shadows fall, just exactly as Dolly describes life in the album’s title track. You haven’t the slightest idea at that time of what it means to have your little rural life reflected and mirrored back to you this way.
You aren’t exposed to any smart commentary about how Dolly “owns her power” as both a woman and an Appalachian, how she “refuses to make herself smaller” in a male-dominated industry, how she “takes ownership of her body, her roots, and her accent.” You are five years old, and you are swimming in Dolly. You watch her on the local TV station in the annual Sevier County Christmas parade and at the seasonal opening of Dollywood every year—neither of which your mother will ever drive you to, given that she doesn’t like changing out of her overalls and flannel and would rather stay home by the fire in winter, or be in the garden in spring, or riding horses, and you are swimming in your mother, too. You are swimming in eight generations of ancestors on the same stretch of river in the same county.
Like a fish in water, you don’t know what you’re swimming in. You are six years old, then seven, then eight, and you watch Dolly every Christmas as you grow up in A Smoky Mountain Christmas, with Dolly as Lorna, a famous country-western star who wants to get out of Hollywood. She comes home to the mountains, where Mountain Dan rambles around carrying the knowledge of the mountain folk, your ancestors; where seven orphans and Dolly take refuge together from the cruel and exhausting world in an old cabin and sing songs by the glowing fire.
Mountain magic, it’s pure and sweet and simple
Mountain magic, just as fresh as a mountain stream
Dolly is magic because the mountains she comes from—the mountains you come from—are magic. You are nine years old, and you are ten, eleven, twelve, and every year you grow more firmly rooted in the Southern Appalachians while you dream of the rest of the world. Your life is small but mythic. Rhythmic. It’s magic when these mountains come alive. Your childhood is painful but always has a little glimmer to it.
What you’ve learned by then for sure—a knowing that’s always humming in your bones and that you are still years from being able to articulate—is that you live in a place that is worthy of song.
I began my writing career at age nineteen, as a music journalist, a beat editor for my college newspaper’s arts and entertainment section. As Dolly had moved to Nashville to become a country star after high school, I moved to Knoxville to become a writer. I wore cowboy boots and wrote about the then-burgeoning alt-country scene. I went to shows five nights a week, scribbling notes in the flip-down spiral-bound reporter’s notebook I kept in the back pocket of my skin-tight jeans, typing them out the next afternoon in the newsroom after classes. Smell of cigarettes from the smoky bar still in my hair.
Label executives tried to make Dolly a pop star, but her heart was dead set on country. She was crystal-clear. My path was more muddled.
I interned at the national music magazine Paste in Atlanta just after graduating college. Then I up and moved to rural New Mexico on a whim, to teach environmental education. In that position, editing a tiny newsletter for the nonprofit I worked for, I began writing about ecology: tribal water issues, nuclear test sites, native fish populations. And the great horned owl I ritually listened to at dusk with my hound dog Banjo, who I brought with me from Tennessee; the sound of the wind through the pine needles on the ridge above the house we lived in. My ears were straining toward something faint.
I can listen back to the recording now and see that music wasn’t done with me. And of course, my Tennessee mountain home wasn’t either. In a few years, I would return, writing about mountaintop-removal coal mining and native medicinal plants, square dancing and ballad collectors and instrument makers. Then whippoorwills and country songs, crickets and punk rock. I was following a thread, finding my tune. I understand now that two currents were joining in my heart, music/sound and ecology.
Immersed these past five years in writing my forthcoming book This Resounding World: A Field Guide to Listening, I have come to understand that songs are an ancient technology that work to tether people to their places, bind them into shared belonging and knowledge of place. As Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares and Dana Lepofsky write in the Journal of Ethnobiology, in cultures the world over and throughout time, music has served as a “library of biocultural memory.” Songs are vessels, carrying ecological knowledge. People have always used them to cultivate “intimate relations with their local ecologies,” Fernández-Llamazares and Lepofsky write.
Songbirds singin’, wildflowers smelling sweetly
Where the fish jump and the heart is free to dream
I didn’t cry—not until I dug up a video of Dolly singing “Mountain Magic” in front of the Sevier County courthouse in the 1980s, just down the road from where my family lived, in those days when I was swimming. Those years we climbed those same courthouse steps to renew our license plates, or pay county taxes, or other adult business I was vaguely aware of, holding my mother’s hand. It looked like my whole community was there, clapping and stomping and singing along. I’m sure we watched it on the TV that night. This was the Dolly I knew. As the world grieves one Dolly, those of us from Sevier County, Tennessee, are grieving another one. She was the Dolly who, though she traveled the world with her music, came home and came home and came home to us, again and again. To tell us, in so many ways, that our place was worthy of song.
I have been trying to think through my tears about what that means and why it’s important. There’s a load I could say about Appalachia and rural America here, but I will try to keep it simple, which was one of the brilliant things about Dolly’s songwriting.
I will have to use a few fancy words, though. In coming home again and again and again, Dolly refused the global capitalist conditioning that to become successful in the marketplace one must shed their bioregional identity and leave home forever (if one is not from a major center of global commerce, that is). In proudly saying she was from the Smoky Mountains in practically every talk-show interview she ever gave, Dolly relentlessly worked to upbraid the shame that is laid upon rural people. In this, she embodied and exemplified what the ecofeminist scholar Donna Haraway has called “situated knowledge”—a direct reproach to the “leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere” that drives ecocidal extraction and hypercapitalism.
And she did this with persistent intentionality as she ascended to become the global icon she always dreamed of being. I can see this now, as I’ve watched hours of interview footage these past several days. On the Johnny Carson show in 1986 (when I was three years old), she waves into the audience at her aunt Dorothy Jo and cousins Debbie Jo and Rena Kay, who, she tells Johnny, are visiting her from the Smoky Mountains. She picks up her “git-tar” to play a song. “I’ll do this one for my folks. And for those back home,” she says emphatically—almost defiantly. “No matter where I wander in this world, I keep dreamin’ of a cabin in my Smoky Mountain home,” she sings to the national television audience.
We live in what many ecologists call the Homogocene, from the word homogenous, where every place becomes increasingly like every other, both culturally and ecologically, as global trade and development erases accents and butterfly species alike. The expanding field of biocultural conservation recognizes that biological diversity and diversity of local cultures aren’t separate—in fact, the loss of cultural diversity, of stories and songs, parallels the loss of locally biodiverse ecosystems.
Dolly grew up in the most biodiverse temperate rainforest in North America. In Tennessee alone, there are more than 325 species of native fish, for example, 99 aquatic snails, and more than 120 freshwater mussels in those mountain streams she sang of. More than 2,000 wildflowers and 130 butterflies. To know a place is worthy of song is also to know it is a place worth listening to. And to sing songs of its streams is one way of keeping those streams clear and protected. As Fernández-Llamazares and Lepofsky write, “[human] music is recognized as an essential constituent of the diversity of life on Earth.” Music can be a nurturing force for our places, a mode of listening to and sounding the threads of the life-web.
A connection to the land was the secret chord that got strummed when I listened to country music as a kid. And I was steeped in country. Dolly was, of course, part of a deep wellspring of song. To bring Dolly into focus is to background the thousands of musical threads that wove through our place, a rich ecosystem of music. At its very best, I think, intimacy with place is what country is about—and what the name of the genre celebrates. The presence of rivers, mountains, birds, creeks, fields, and trees seemed palpable in the songs. Scott Knickerbocker, banjo-player and former professor of environmental studies, writes of country music (using its original genre label) that, “Old-time music exudes a sense of place, long considered an important starting point in thinking and behaving ecologically. Indeed, perhaps the most environmentally powerful aspect of roots music in general is its uncanny ability to plant one in a place.”
Music-industry executives conflated and confused place and time, though, in their initial labels for the genre, “old-time” and “old-fashioned singin’.” Country—the places less easily reached by mass media and advertising—has since the birth of Western philosophy been cast as backward, existing in the past. The genre, then, was called old-fashioned, even though it was a living and evolving tradition that coexisted alongside all the other music of the time.
To consign something to the past is already to entrench it in a narrative of inevitable loss and extinction, to imbue time with a sense of a predestined acceleration toward “modernity.” But as Johannes Fabian writes in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, the term “modern” frames relationships of power and wealth (exploitation, oppression, and extraction) deceptively as forces of natural time.
As I’ve immersed myself in Dolly’s career, dived back into the waters I used to swim in, this time with my eyes open to look beneath the surface, this is another thing that strikes me. By refusing to be whisked by the industry into pop, when industry execs told her she could become more famous that way, she was saying country is not extinct. She was saying we will not roll over and die. She was saying we will not go gently. She was saying, again and again, our mountains are alive—now, today.
This is what made her such a force to all of us from the mountains. She was a living figure, carrying us forward into modern time.
And by defying the gender norms of her own place’s culture, she also exemplified the crucially vital ingredient for keeping tradition alive rather than dead in the archives or history museums. That is: she both refused to abandon her region and infused it with bold new vision. By modeling her style after the “town tramp,” as she has said in so many interviews, she surfaced a submerged shame attached to women’s sexuality in our region, a way our grandmothers had of making themselves plain and invisible, lest they be judged as too sensual.
She helped you understand that you could expand your region’s identities to include your own individual expression—you who are both of your place and of the stars, the cosmos, what Dolly called God. She never shied from her message that everyone should be themselves. Exaggerating her femininity with her rhinestones and glittery dresses, adorning herself with bright colors and flowers, she also widened the confines of country music and brought drag queens and the LGBTQ+ community into the tent with her. God wants us to be who we want to be, she said. “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”
She morphed into an endemic species, like no other the world over, as so many species did in the mountains that offer such diversity of habitat. Love is like a butterfly…the multicolored moods of love are like its satin wings… a rare and gentle thing.
I lied earlier: it wasn’t eight generations on that stretch of river, where my ancestors were millers and farmers and carpenters. There was a break, a dam in the current. My granddad, one of ten children who grew up hardscrabble on the farm, rode his horse into Knoxville, forty miles away, and never moved back. That’s where my mother grew up, then, with her mother and two sisters, as her father traveled the world on business. She went back to her father’s origins in Sevier County to marry and raise children, down the road from where her uncle Francis taught her how to grow food for our family.
We got our vegetables from the dirt, but we got our music from machines: a record player in the ’80s, then a radio and cassette deck, and later a six-disc CD changer. We didn’t sing the old songs together like Dolly did with her mama and daddy and eleven brothers and sisters, who chorused “In the pines, in the piii-iines, where the suuuuun never shiiines” in their living room in the evenings.
Summer mornings during high school, I drove the winding back roads from our farm, curve after curve along the river, past hayfields and through tall trees, and was spit out, finally, into the blinking carnival atmosphere of Pigeon Forge, where I went to work as a cashier at a pizza buffet and video-game arcade, then as a lifeguard at a water park, then serving tables at a catfish restaurant. Half of my home county was the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site that protects and conserves some of the richest biodiversity on the planet—and the other half was this, tourism.
Though I never worked at Dollywood, it was the booming beating heart of it. As the summers ticked by, I witnessed the steady development, the old farms turned into more attractions, the wild trees paved into more vacation cabins. I listened to Joni Mitchell in those days, they paved paradise, put up a parking lot, and I don’t remember thinking about Dolly who was still the air I breathed, except that to my mind her theme park was in no small way responsible for the traffic, the exhaust from cars that gathered in the clouds and lifted to our highest peaks then fell as acid rain.
Those peaks, I would learn many years later when I returned home again to study as a Southern Appalachian naturalist, are home to globally rare spruce-fir forests, where more than 280 species of moss grow. Where the endemic pygmy salamander climbs the trees at night, slurping up tiny bugs, and flying squirrels sail among the branches of the spruces, chittering. The creatures here are fragile and threatened. A theme park in the valley below that draws nearly 4 million visitors a year has an impact. Like all ecologies, the ecology of Dolly is complicated.
But looking back now, I understand that our tourism industry reflected the larger patterns of development around national parks, the complexities of habitat conservation within a cash economy. If Dollywood wasn’t there, it would have been something else. Her theme park celebrated the culture and music of Southern Appalachia. Every year, there were free days for all Sevier County residents, and we poured in through the turnstiles. My friends and I sat on wooden benches and watched local family bands warbling out songs, playing fiddle and banjo on the small stages and replica porches, little girls in big skirts clogging up a storm. Behind them, the sound of water pouring over the spinning grist-mill wheel, the blacksmith’s hammer striking iron, the creaking and clatter of wooden rides, and children’s screams. When the bands weren’t playing, Dolly’s songs came over the loudspeakers.
Mountain people are as sweet as mountain honey
I can feel the mountain magic in my soul
Mountain magic, I can feel it all around me
Mountain magic, just as pure as a mountain stream
There, we were one big family, remembering the songs we might have lost otherwise. Remembering that our home was worthy of songs. That we were worthy. That it was songs that tied us together and rooted us here. When you grow up as a girl in Sevier County, Tennessee, breathing Dolly’s air, this is what you will always remember.
Holly Haworth's writing explores the intersections of ecology, spirituality, technology, history, and culture. Her work has been included in Best American Science and Nature Writing and listed as notable in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Orion, Emergence, Oxford American, Sierra, Lapham's Quarterly, Terrain.org, Creative Nonfiction, The Bitter Southerner, and at the On Being radio program blog. She is a certified Southern Appalachian naturalist with a deep love for native plants and trees. She is a recipient of the Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism. Her first nonfiction book, This Resounding World: A Field Guide to Listening, has received the Robert B. Silvers Foundation Grant for Works in Progress and is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. You can sign up for her Substack newsletter EarthSpells at earthspells.substack.com