This was Dolly Parton’s theater, in Dolly Parton’s amusement park, in Dolly Parton’s east Tennessee town. But while she stood onstage, sound-checking, things weren’t working out at all.
Soon, a gaggle of reporters and other interested folks would be there to hear her perform in an event meant to announce the 2018 Dollywood season lineup. Yet the sound was “just a mess. It was horrible … just horrendous,” longtime Roanoke resident Bruce Houghton remembered.
Houghton was there representing the band Orleans, of “Still the One” pop smash fame. Parton liked the song and wanted to perform it at the gathering, so in typical Dolly fashion, she hired the band that originally recorded it, flew them in, paid them well and accommodated their families for a couple of extra days, just for the group to back her on that song and a few others.
Houghton figured it was the house sound technician on the job, so he was surprised at what he was hearing.
“The monitors were bad,” Houghton said. “The front end was bad, and she was infinitely patient and trying to get him to get it right.”
Most stars will say something from the stage, maybe even in a diplomatic tone, if the sound tech is lucky. Some might yell, scream, curse and deeply humiliate the person behind the public address system controls. Houghton saw all variables in his 35 years of booking acts, including Solomon Burke, Foghat and Johnny Winter.
Not Dolly.
“At some point she just very quietly walked off the stage, down the stairs to the soundboard,” Houghton said. “I was standing next to the sound guy, so I got to hear it. She very quietly said, ‘Honey, you are a beautiful young man, but this isn’t really working for me, so can I let Orleans’ sound man do the mix?’”
About 20 seconds later, the room sounded right.
“She felt the need to go the extra mile, so no one heard it but him, and I just happened to be standing there,” he said. “You know, it’s a tiny little thing, but it really stuck with me how gracious she was.”
The word “gracious” threaded through several Roanoke area residents’ recollections of Parton, who died on Tuesday at 80.
Tom Kennedy, a former general manager at the erstwhile FM radio station 101.5 The Music Place, spent years in country radio and said he met her at least three times at various radio industry conferences and conventions.
“She was everything you ever read about her,” Kennedy said in a text message exchange. “She was gracious and sparkly and had an infectious laugh and voice.
“The thing that I always marveled at is I would see her for five or fifteen minutes once or twice a year, and she would always remember my name without having a handler whispering it to her. She always made me feel more important than I was.”
Gary Jackson, general manager at The Coves at Smith Mountain Lake, worked for decades in promotion and production in the Washington, D.C., area before moving southwest, where he ran venues including Harvester Performance Center and The Spot on Kirk. One of his gigs was at the Rocky Gap Country Music Festival, at the Cumberland, Maryland, site of what is now DelFest.
Jackson worked with Parton multiple times there and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s. One Rocky Gap show, which concertarchives.org says was in 1993, he and his crew “had to scramble for carpet and [tape] everything down” to keep her upright on a stage that had spots where her spiked heels could get caught, he said.
He remembered “lovely conversations” on her bus.
“She gave me a signed top from her wardrobe once,” he said in a text message exchange. “I didn’t ask for it, but she went to a closet and spread it out on the table and wrote a sweet message and signed it.”
He added: “Special human, now gone.”
Guitarist Redd Volkaert, based in Galax, spent several years in Merle Haggard’s band, a run that included a TV show appearance with Parton about 1996 on the old TNN. Parton was “super professional, cordial, friendly and seemed to remember everyone’s name,” Volkaert said by text.
Then she would open her mouth to sing.
“Her voice was really and truly angelic,” Volkaert said, “and her presence walking on a TV set was like someone switching on a spotlight.”
