How the legendary Dolly Parton's popularity surged in a pandemic

Fifty years into a legendary career, Dolly Parton's popularity surged even more as the world struggled in a pandemic

Sat, 19 Dec, 2020 - 08:13

Emily Lordi

IN JUNE OF 1967, Dolly Parton sat down for an interview with a Nashville writer named Everett Corbin.

Parton was 21, and had yet to release her first solo album, but the surviving audio recording reveals that she was already shaping her account of herself with the editorial finesse of a one-woman P.R. firm: “I was born — we’ll start with when I was born, OK? — I was born on January the 19th, in 1946, in Sevier County, in Sevierville, Tenn. It’s a little town between Knoxville, Tenn., and Gatlinburg, Tenn. And you might shorten it by saying, ‘the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.’”