Description
Book SynopsisA 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
Trade Review“Morales has made a moving, provocative pilgrimage through the complex culture—mainly southern—that produces country music and some of its outsized performers. I found her very readable.” -- Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove
“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 Higher Education *
“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 Literary Supplement *
“’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.’” * Times (UK) *
“It’ll make you want to experience your own pilgrimage, with the windows down and ‘Jolene’ blaring.” * Bust *
Table of Contents1 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
