Dolly Parton statue

A life-size bronze statue of Dolly Parton sits on the grounds of the Sevier County Courthouse on Court Avenue in Sevierville, Tennessee -- the county seat of the region where Parton was born and raised, about twelve miles north of Dollywood. The statue, sculpted by Jim Gray and unveiled in 1987, depicts Parton seated on a rock with a guitar across her lap, looking down Court Avenue toward the mountains she grew up watching. It has become one of the most photographed public artworks in Tennessee, a combination of genuine local pride and the particular American phenomenon of celebrating artists who left and came back famous.

Parton was born in a one-room cabin on the Little Pigeon River in Locust Ridge, a hollow in the mountains of Sevier County, the fourth of twelve children of Robert Lee Parton, a tobacco farmer and construction worker. She grew up in the kind of poverty that she has never tried to romanticise or deny -- the coat of many colours was made from rags, as the song says. She left for Nashville the day after she graduated from high school in 1964 and never looked back, except in her songs.

The courthouse square in Sevierville is a pleasant small-town public space and the statue is freely accessible. Sevierville has grown considerably as a tourist destination in the shadow of Dollywood's success, and the downtown area now has a predictable density of tourist shops and restaurants. But the statue itself is a genuine civic monument, placed there by a community that understood what it had produced before the rest of the world caught up.