Dolly Parton Birthplace Cabin — Locust Ridge, Tennessee

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born on January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin in the Locust Ridge community of Sevier County, Tennessee — in the Great Smoky Mountains, the fourth of twelve children born to Robert Lee Parton and Avie Lee Owens. The family was extremely poor by any measure: her father paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal. The mountainous landscape of Sevier County, the poverty, the twelve siblings, the Pentecostal church, and a grandmother who called her a gift from God all fed directly into the most personal and enduring threads of her songwriting.

Parton moved to Nashville the day after her high school graduation in 1964 and built one of the most remarkable careers in the history of country music — and eventually, of American popular culture broadly. Songs like "Jolene," "I Will Always Love You," "Coat of Many Colors" (about an actual coat her mother made from rags), "9 to 5," and "My Tennessee Mountain Home" drew directly on her Sevier County childhood. She has spoken often about the mountains and the poverty as the wellspring of everything she's done.

The original cabin no longer stands, but the Sevier County area — encompassing Dollywood theme park in Pigeon Forge, which Parton co-owns — has become one of the most visited music heritage destinations in America. A replica of the two-room cabin is displayed at Dollywood. Historical markers indicate the Locust Ridge community. Parton has invested substantially in her home region, funding literacy programmes, a COVID vaccine research donation, and local businesses, maintaining an unusually deep civic commitment to the place she came from.