Pilgrimage to Dollywood

A Country Music Road Trip through Tennessee

Helen Morales

Pilgrimage to Dollywood (High Resolution)

Helen Morales

Culture Trails: Adventures in Travel

Paper $18.00 ISBN: 9780226796680 Published April 2021

Cloth $22.50 ISBN: 9780226536521 Published May 2014

E-book $17.99 About E-books ISBN: 9780226123264 Published June 2014

A star par excellence, Dolly Parton is one of country music’s most likable personalities. Even a hard-rocking punk or orchestral aesthete can’t help cracking a smile or singing along with songs like “Jolene” and “9 to 5.” More than a mere singer or actress, Parton is a true cultural phenomenon, immediately recognizable and beloved for her talent, tinkling laugh, and steel magnolia spirit. She is also the only female star to have her own themed amusement park: Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Every year thousands of fans flock to Dollywood to celebrate the icon, and Helen Morales is one of those fans.

In Pilgrimage to Dollywood, Morales sets out to discover Parton’s Tennessee. Her travels begin at the top celebrity pilgrimage site of Elvis Presley’s Graceland, then take her to Loretta Lynn’s ranch in Hurricane Mills; the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville; to Sevierville, Gatlinburg, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park; and finally to Pigeon Forge, home of the “Dolly Homecoming Parade,” featuring the star herself as grand marshall. Morales’s adventure allows her to compare the imaginary Tennessee of Parton’s lyrics with the real Tennessee where the singer grew up, looking at essential connections between country music, the land, and a way of life. It’s also a personal pilgrimage for Morales. Accompanied by her partner, Tony, and their nine-year-old daughter, Athena (who respectively prefer Mozart and Miley Cyrus), Morales, a recent transplant from England, seeks to understand America and American values through the celebrity sites and attractions of Tennessee.

This celebration of Dolly and Americana is for anyone with an old country soul who relies on music to help understand the world, and it is guaranteed to make a Dolly Parton fan of anyone who has not yet fallen for her music or charisma.

Table of Contents

Contents
Review Quotes

Contents

1          Caviar and Fish Sticks
2          A Series of Cravings
            Graceland and Other Shrines, Memphis
3          Country Is as Country Does
            Loretta Lynn’s Ranch, Hurricane Mills
4          Music City, USA
            Nashville
5          Tennessee Mountain Homes
            Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg, Sevierville, and Locust Ridge
6          Color Me America
            Dixie Stampede, Pigeon Forge
7          Sifting Specks of Gold
            Dollywood Amusement Park, the Great Smoky Mountains
Doing the Pilgrimage
Further Reading
Acknowledgments

Review Quotes

Times Higher Education

“Part quirky travelogue, part study of celebrity culture, part autobiography, Pilgrimage to Dollywood is a witty and self-aware account of being transplanted into an alien culture and deciding to revel in its (and one’s own) otherness.”

Times Literary Supplement

“The heart of the book is Morales’s personal meditation on the Dollywood shrine itself, the theme park for feminism, Christianity, and the Old South, its mythical log-cabin home, its worshippers at the Dolly Dollar cash-tills, and the reputation of the whole (deserved or not: discuss) as ‘the redneck Disneyland.’ This is cultural criticism on holiday . . . frank, self-revelatory, comic and clever, revealing greater identification with the heroine than her day job traditionally allows.”

Times (UK)

“’This is not a book written from the Olympic heights of an objective observer,’ writes Morales in the introduction to her funny, engaging and erudite book. ‘I confess up front that I love Dolly Parton and her music.’”

Bust

“It’ll make you want to experience your own pilgrimage, with the windows down and ‘Jolene’ blaring.”

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