Dolly Parton childhood home

Dolly Parton was born on January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin on the Little Pigeon River in Locust Ridge -- a mountain hollow in Sevier County, Tennessee, deep in the Smoky Mountain foothills. She was the fourth of twelve children born to Robert Lee Parton, a tobacco and bean farmer, and Avie Lee Owens. The family was genuinely poor, living without electricity or running water; her mother famously sewed a coat for her from colourful rags, the specific garment that became the subject of one of Parton's most celebrated songs. The cabin itself is gone, but the Locust Ridge community remains essentially rural mountain country.

The landscape of Locust Ridge -- the mountains, the creeks, the ridge farms, the small wooden churches -- runs through the texture of Parton's music as a kind of permanent emotional home. Songs like 'My Tennessee Mountain Home', 'Coat of Many Colors', 'In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)', and 'I Will Always Love You' are all in some way anchored in this particular corner of East Tennessee. She has never claimed to have had an idyllic childhood -- the poverty was real and the hardships were real -- but she has also never been anything but affectionate about the place and the people.

The Locust Ridge area is in the mountains between Sevierville and Cosby, along the edge of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. There is no official memorial at the specific cabin site, as the original structure no longer exists. Dolly Parton's Tennessee Mountain Home, a recreation of the cabin, can be seen at Dollywood, about twelve miles south. The landscape of Locust Ridge itself is accessible via Locust Ridge Road, a narrow mountain road that gives a strong sense of the world that produced her.