Gone Dollywood: Dolly Parton's Mountain Dream

by Graham Hoppe

Overview

Dolly Parton isn’t just a country music superstar. She has built an empire. At the heart of that empire is Dollywood, a 150-acre fantasy land that hosts three million people a year. Parton’s prodigious talent and incredible celebrity have allowed her to turn her hometown into one of the most popular tourist destinations in America. The crux of Dollywood’s allure is its precisely calibrated Appalachian image, itself drawn from Parton’s very real hardscrabble childhood in the mountains of east Tennessee.

What does Dollywood have to offer besides entertainment? What do we find if we take this remarkable place seriously? How does it both confirm and subvert outsiders’ expectations of Appalachia? What does it tell us about the modern South, and in turn what does that tell us about America at large? How is regional identity molded in service of commerce, and what is the interplay of race, gender, and class when that happens?

In Gone Dollywood, Graham Hoppe blends tourism studies, celebrity studies, cultural analysis, folklore, and the acute observations and personal reflections of longform journalism into an unforgettable interrogation of Southern and American identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821423233
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2018
Series:	New Approaches to Appalachian Studies
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Graham Hoppe writes about culture and history with a focus on food and music. He is a graduate of the folklore program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gone Dollywood is his first book. Raised in Indianapolis, Graham currently lives and works in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Table of Contents

Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1 Mountains, Parks, and Nothing Less Than Great 5

2 Rebels, Tourists, and a Tennessee Mountain Home 21

3 Daisy Mae, Dreams, and Dolly 51

4 Pancakes, Paula Deen, and the Pigeon Forge Parkway 71

5 Okra, Chicken Livers, and a Break for Dinner 83

6 Biography, Persona, and Reality 99

7 Artifice, Celebrity, and Learning Something from Dollywood 117

A Note about Sources 129

Notes 131

Bibliography 145

Index 151