As the world mourned Dolly Parton’s death this week, a 60-year-old concert poster came to mind.
Parton centers the poster, head tilted slightly left as she peers over her right shoulder and smiles her iconic smile — forever 20 years old.
She was a few years from international fame but just a month or so away from her first hit single, “Dumb Blonde,” including the line “This dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.”
The Knoxville, Tennessee-area hometown celebrity was returning from Nashville, where she’d been working to become rich and famous since she’d graduated high school two years before.
Among names at the bottom of the bill for the Sept. 30, 1966, show at Knoxville’s Oak Grove Night Club was Tommy Dickens.
In 1966, Dickens was a young husband and father, with a new job in Kingsport, Tennessee. He had put himself through the University of Tennessee in Knoxville with part-time newspaper work and gigs as a singer and bass guitarist.
After graduating, he and his wife, Jan, had moved to Kingsport with the first of their two children, yours truly. So from here on out, I’m calling him Pop, and his dearly departed wife is Ma.
Pop had played and sung plenty in the house band at the Oak Grove, on Knoxville’s Asheville Highway. He had recently put out his own 45 rpm single, the self-penned “Living On A Shoestring.”
They remembered him at the Oak Grove, and when they booked a young Dolly Parton to headline there, they called him to help open the show. After the musicians had set up the stage, they retreated to their table before the show started. Soon a full house of fans, including friends and classmates from her alma mater, Sevierville High School, would be there.
“A few people were coming in, and she sat with us, and her uncle Bill [Owens] maybe sat with us too,” Pop said, going on 60 years later. “She talked with us, just like anybody else, and just kind of hung out for a little while. I called her Molly. I guess I thought I was being funny [A son’s note: This tracks], and she acted like that was OK, she liked that. … I was just messing, you know. I knew she was Dolly.”
It didn’t stop her from autographing his copy of the poster.
“After people started coming in, she excused herself and said, ‘I really need to go spend some time with some of my classmates that have come in,’ so she got up and went to hang out with her old friends from high school. She was very personable, very, very at ease with everything and everybody.”
Pop, one of two opening acts, played maybe two or three songs.
“They didn’t throw me out,” he said, assessing his set fronting the house band. “They knew there was better stuff to come.”
Parton played about a half-hour before the house band took over for a dance party at the Oak Grove.
“She was great,” Pop said.
Driving back to Kingsport after the show, he and Ma talked about what they had seen and heard.
“She said, ‘Do you think she’ll make it?’ And my reaction was, ‘I really don’t know.’ I said, ‘She’s certainly good enough and she’s pretty enough.’
“But the thing that I don’t think anybody, probably even people in Nashville, had a clue at that time was what kind of potential she had as a songwriter.”
“I Will Always Love You,” “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “9 to 5” and “Wildflowers” are among thousands that Parton penned herself. Pop saw her act a few more times in the years to come, including a Kingsport show, when he helped her uncle, Louis Owens (who had been part of the Oak Grove house band before Parton’s career began to take off) move some equipment after the show.
“Dolly was nowhere around, and I asked him, I said, ‘Where’s Dolly?’ He said, ‘Oh, she’s out in the station wagon, writing a song,’” Pop remembered. “Immediately after she comes off stage, she’s found her place. She can sit down and write a song, and at that time they were traveling in the station wagon and pulling the trailer. I think she wrote all the time.”
At another Kingsport show, he watched as a crowd of children, unprompted, headed from wherever they had been to the front of the stage as she started singing.
“I’ve never seen that happen with anybody else,” he said.
Pop thought that maybe her first name, Dolly, and her ability to shift into a childlike cadence for songs such as “Apple Jack” were what attracted the kids, most of whom were elementary school-age, to draw closer.
Though Parton didn’t have children, her extensive philanthropy included the Imagination Library book program for kids. She donated money to Nashville’s Vanderbilt University that helped fund the development of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccination. She almost single-handedly saved Sevier County amusement park Silver Dollar City, renaming it Dollywood in the process, and she did much more in her home county to help the economy and student graduation rates.
“It blows my mind that she was able to develop the career that she did in entertainment and in business, and she is so loved and respected throughout the state of Tennessee,” Pop said. “I believe she could have been elected governor if she’d wanted to.
“She’s an incredible example of how a person can become successful and contribute to society over the years. And she continued right up ‘til her death.”
MORE: ‘Special human, now gone’: Southwest Virginians remember Dolly Parton
