Dolly Parton: head of the country class

The mountains spoke to Dolly Parton. Growing up in the deep green forests and dark hollers of East Tennessee, she listened to the rhythmic song of the whippoorwill, the steady rise and fall of her father’s ax as he chopped wood, and the hushed rustling of the wind through the red maple leaves. In those sounds, she heard songs. “Everything was music to me,” she said. “Even the katydids, or if somebody was hammering on the other side of the hill at a sawmill, I’d start writing a song with that rhythm.… Everything is a song to me.” Dolly, who left her family’s two-room log cabin on Locust Ridge to pursue a career in songwriting in Nashville the day after her high school graduation, shared the sounds of the Appalachian mountains with the world. “I’m the only person that ever left the Smoky Mou