Photo By ASHTRONOT
10 Quotes on Home, Hospitality and the Smokies
The South gets explained to itself constantly, mostly by people passing through, and the explanations tend to flatten into a postcard or a punchline depending on who’s holding the pen. What actually holds the place together doesn’t fit on either one.
Dolly Parton described all of it from the inside for the better part of seven decades, and she never once softened it for company. She passed away on August 25, and these are her quotes we keep going back to.
On Where She Came From
“I’m proud of my hillbilly, white trash background. To me that keeps you humble; that keeps you good. And it doesn’t matter how hard you try to outrun it—if that’s who you are, that’s who you are. It’ll show up once in a while.”
Many people who leave a small town spend the rest of their lives trying to limit how much it shows, softening the vowels in a job interview, and learning which family stories not to tell at dinner. Dolly went the other direction and made where she came from her whole act.
On What Southern Hospitality Actually Is
“People feel like they’ve known me so long because I’ve been around a long time. I’m really like an aunt or a cousin or a person you’ve grown up with—like somebody in the family. So I think they feel comfortable with me. I really think that is Southern hospitality.”
This is the most useful definition anybody has offered, and there’s not a porch swing or a glass of sweet tea in it. Hospitality in the South is a collapse of distance. Being treated like family is a compliment that comes with obligations, and it means you also get told when your hair looks bad.
On Losing to Gravy
“Every single diet I ever fell off of was because of potatoes and gravy of some sort.”
Notice how she says “of some sort,” which widens this from one dish to an entire category of surrender: the tomato gravy, the sawmill gravy, country gravy. The South does not have a single gravy. It has a portfolio.
On the Smokies
“We got the most radiant flowers, the biggest assortment of trees. The Smokies have a heart of their own. It’s the way the water flows, the way it sounds, and the way it feels when you get in it. I don’t know if it’s just because it’s my home—but I really don’t think so. I think it’s just one of those special places that God put here for us to enjoy.”
No photograph of the Smokies will introduce the place better than listening to Dolly’s “My Tennessee Mountain Home.” She can make you fall in love with a place that you’ve never been, although if you haven’t been to the Smokies, you should definitely plan a trip.
On Having Enough
“If you’re lucky enough to have more than you need, then you’re lucky enough to give.”
She backed this one up with a receipt drawer you could never reach the bottom of: the Imagination Library mailing books to children, money into Sevier County after the 2016 wildfires, and again after Helene. She rarely made her giving a headline, which is the part of her generosity worth copying.
On Minding Your Own Business
“I love people… It ain’t my place to judge anybody. And it’s nobody else’s place to do it, either.”
Plenty of people will say they love others and consider the matter closed. What made Dolly different is she showed it. To everyone.
On Taking Care of Home
“We should pay more attention. We’re just mistreating Mother Nature—that’s like being ugly to your mama. We need to take better care of the things that God gave us freely.”
Dolly’s lyrics are full of descriptions of the nature she grew up in, and if she has it her way, kids five generations from now will get to experience the same exact thing.
On Country Music
“If you talk bad about country music, it’s like saying bad things about my momma. Them’s fightin’ words.”
Most southern folks have experienced being condescended to because of where you’re from, what you sound like, or what you listen to. Well Dolly won’t stand for that!
On Who Gets to Tell the Story
“It’s something I want to take pride in, to preserve the Smoky Mountain heritage rather than have Hollywood portray us as they often do.”
She built a theme park about it, which sounds like an odd tool for cultural preservation until you see the craftspeople working the shops and the mountain music playing where four million people a year visit. She got the microphone and handed it back to the people the movies kept getting wrong.
On the Essentials
“Never ignore your roots, your home, or your hair.”
Two of those are metaphors. One of them is not, and she was serious about it.
If there’s one thing we learned from Dolly, it’s that the South can describe itself, out loud, without apologizing for the accent it does it in.
