Dolly Parton didn’t just sing about her Tennessee mountain home. She helped transform it. Her deep devotion to rural Sevier County inspired her music and sparked a tourism boom.

Dolly Parton was all-American. Born into the dirt-poor Tennessee hills of the Great Smokey Mountains, her upbringing reflected the indigent nature of country life in the South,…

Tennessee was home to Dolly Parton for most of her life, from her humble beginnings in a tiny, one-room log cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee to the vast…