The stretch of US 411 running east out of Sevierville carries Dolly Parton's name, and she came home in October 1979 for the naming, playing a show at Sevier County High School on the evening of the sixth. She had graduated from that school in 1964, at eighteen. By her own account the graduating class was asked in turn what each of them meant to do next, and when she said she was going to Nashville to be a star, the room laughed. She has said the laugh stayed with her and that she was mortified by it. She went the morning after graduation and wrote to her parents that she cried almost all the way to Nashville, which is the letter that opens her album My Tennessee Mountain Home nine years later. That departure is the hinge of the standard telling of her life. The detail everyone repeats, that she carried everything she owned in a matching set of luggage that was really paper bags or cardboard boxes, comes from her own retellings and has been printed several different ways. What is firmly established is the timing. She left in 1964, immediately after finishing school, and did not move back. She was not unknown when she left. She had been performing on Knoxville radio and television since she was ten, and at thirteen she recorded a single called Puppy Love, written with her uncle Bill Owens, for a small Louisiana label, and made her first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry.
Getting there
35.8636, -83.5294
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
