Dolly's Greatest Gifts

Fifty years since her first album was released, the country icon continues to inspire the world with her powerful music, rich spirit, and generosity to her Tennessee mountain home.

- Krissy Tiglias

FOR DOLLY PARTON, THE HOLIDAYS ARE A CELEBRATION OF faith and family—two things that were just as important to her as a Tennessee farm girl growing up in the 1950s as they are to her as a country music legend today. “We were poor, but we had one another,” she says of those childhood Christmases in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. ¶ Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean is the fourth of twelve children born to Robert Lee Parton, a Sevierville, Tennessee, farmer, and his wife, Avie Lee Parton, the daughter of a preacher from South Carolina. Dolly’s parents raised their family in a two-bedroom log cabin that had no electricity. The actual area was known as Mountain View. Some referred to it as Locust Ridge; Dolly’s family just called it “over in the holler.”

“Christmas for us was homemade,” she remembers. “We would go into the woods with Daddy, searching for just the right tree and fighting over who would get to carry the ax. Then we would drag our tree back home and decorate it with strings of popcorn, buttons, and foil eggs— anything we could find.”