The building at the corner of Joy Street and Court Avenue in downtown Sevierville went up in 1928 as the Watson Motor Company, a car dealership built by J. B. Waters Senior. When civilian car and truck production stopped for the war in 1942, Waters closed the dealership and turned the showroom into a picture house. It opened in 1944 as Sevierville's first movie theater, seating around seven hundred, and it ran westerns in the daytime and live entertainment at night. The live nights brought Roy Acuff, Chet Atkins, Archie Campbell, June Carter Cash and the Carter Family onto its stage. Myrtle Paine Waters ran it, and for the rest of the 1940s and most of the 1950s it was where the county went out. A ten-year-old Dolly Parton played the Pines in 1956, in what the town has always described as her first paid engagement in front of an audience. No fee was ever recorded, and the story survives in the retelling rather than in any document. It sits alongside something firmer, though: that same year she began appearing on Cas Walker's Farm and Home Hour out of Knoxville, the grocer's radio and television programme that gave her a regular audience before she was in her teens. The theater closed in the late 1950s. The building came back in the 2020s as The Pines Downtown, with duckpin bowling and a bar, and a mural painted on the Court Avenue wall in September 2022 by Seth Bishop put Acuff, Campbell, June Carter Cash, Atkins and a young Parton back on the building.
Getting there
35.8662, -83.5661
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