At 77 years old, Dolly Parton tottered on to the field at Neyland Stadium, arm in arm with Peyton Manning, the most beloved of all University of Tennessee quarterbacks. Wearing her trademark rhinestone-spangled take on the team’s orange and white, she shook hands with Smokey, the coonhound mascot, then thanked her escort with an impromptu burst of “Peyton Manning, I will always love you”. Having introduced the college choir and the Pride of the Southland marching band on hand to accompany her, she smiled broadly before launching into Rocky Top, equal parts state anthem and team fight song.
What happened next was shambolic. There were audio difficulties with her earpieces, the crowd of 102,000 sang over her, and the musicians sometimes drowned her out. None of that mattered a cacophonous jot. Her divine presence among those gathered at the secular cathedral in Knoxville was all that counted. The Volunteers were playing the University of Georgia on a glorious Saturday afternoon in November, and Tennessee’s favourite daughter had come to rally the faithful. Hillbilly laureate reciting with her people. Preacher with her flock.
Every voice in that same venue could be heard belting out an off-the-cuff rendition of I Will Always Love You in her honour during the season opener against the Furman Paladins earlier this month. Most of them were not born when Whitney Houston made it a global earworm. That she wrote that standard and Jolene in the same burst of creativity sums up why her recent passing has been such a big deal everywhere, but especially in her homeplace.
Earlier, the marching band had shaped itself into a formation spelling out “Dolly”. Then, the behemoths trundled out on to the gridiron, the backs of their helmets festooned with dainty decals of an orange butterfly with her autograph etched across it. Those players thundered into tackles that afternoon with a sticker showing the insect most associated with the theme park known as “Dollywood”. Worlds colliding.
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“All that she’s meant across the world, this country, and certainly the queen of East Tennessee,” said head coach Josh Heupel. “A lady that was extremely proud of her roots. You look at her impact, just her ability to give back ... She means a lot to people across this country, but certainly here inside the state of Tennessee, too.”
She never attended the University of Tennessee, growing up so famously dirt poor in a one-roomed log cabin in the Smoky Mountains that her father paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of grain. A spartan upbringing in an Appalachian holler where, she joked, “we had running water if we ran and got it”. For a teenager who used iodine purloined from the medicine cabinet as her first lipstick, university was never on the table.
Yet, like many denied the privilege of education, she somehow retained a deep affection for the local college. Across the southern states in particular, school teams inspire a curious loyalty and devotion in the natives, something akin to that shown in Ireland to the county footballers and hurlers. This is often because they are the only show in town, even for those who never get to walk through their gates.
At last count, five high-school football teams in her native county and one other college outfit are wearing some sort of badges acknowledging Parton for the rest of their seasons
The University of Tennessee long ago tapped into the Parton mystique. In 2009, she was conferred with an honorary doctorate of humane and musical letters – a worthy accolade for a woman who worked so hard to promote literacy, reading and schools, in a country where all three are under serious threat. When she turned up to receive her PhD, the media dubbed her “Doctor Dolly”, and she delivered a commencement speech to graduates that was a refreshing, down-home take on the usual tired old, cliche-ridden soliloquy.
Entertaining and direct, she was a little bit subversive and utterly authentic. Eschewing the cut-and-paste profundities from the musty ancients normally deployed on these occasions, she spoke instead of the outsized role “wigs, tight clothes, push-up bras, five-inch-high heel shoes” played in her success.
One minute she recounted drawing her fashion sense from the “town trollop” in her native Sevierville. The next, she namechecked Pat Summitt, the legendary coach who transformed the Tennessee women’s basketball team into a national powerhouse across four decades. Dolly knew her people as well as they knew her.
[ Dolly Parton was exploring an avatar show. Will we always love her as a hologram?Opens in new window ]
At last count, five high-school football teams in her native county and one other college outfit are wearing some sort of badges acknowledging Parton for the rest of their seasons. This recognition has very little to do with football. It is merely a way to acknowledge the breadth of what she did for her state.
In the fourth quarter of every Vols game from now on, Neyland Stadium will blast Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home
Parlaying her fame and donating a lot of her fortune, she built a children’s hospital, created incentive schemes to keep kids in school, and established a charity helping generations whose homes were destroyed by wildfires and hurricanes. We knew her as a writer and singer of renown who distributed books to kids. Tennesseans knew her as all that, and so much more.
In the fourth quarter of every Vols game from now on, Neyland Stadium will blast Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home, and the spectators will recite every word from folk memory.
“In my Tennessee mountain home
Life is as peaceful as a baby’s sigh
In my Tennessee mountain home
Crickets are singing in the fields near by ...”
Strange choice to rouse the crowd in the home straight. Perfect in its way.
