The Most Beautiful Woman
The Atlantic · LC · trust 47/100
Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic* August 26, 2026, 12:30 PM ET Share Save Listen − 1.0 x + Seek 0:00 12:35 Growing up in Tennessee, I could hardly walk into a grocery store without hearing “Jolene” playing on the radio. My mom sang fragments of “9 to 5” as she cooked Hamburger Helper on school nights, after clocking out of work. At my babysitter’s house in the summer, where Country Music Television was our ambient noise, she’d shout, “Good golly, Miss Dolly!” every time a Dolly song came on (which was at least every 30 minutes). Dolly Parton was more of an institution than a star to Tennesseans. Her image was plastered on T-shirts and hung on walls, like Mother Mary would be in a Catholic home. We vacationed at her amusement park, Dollywood, every school break. No one ever used her last name—she was simply Dolly to us all, and she was living proof that tough odds were no match for a cup of ambition.
When Dolly’s death was announced yesterday afternoon, my phone lit up with texts from hometown friends. “It feels like a member of our family died in Tennessee today,” one friend said. My socialist sister said Tennessee’s poet laureate had left us. My Donald Trump–voting father cried. In Tennessee, whether you fly a MAGA flag or a Pride flag, one thing is for sure: You’re listening to Dolly.
Dolly mattered to southerners for so many reasons, but perhaps most of all for her origin story, which she called a “rags to rhinestones” tale. She grew up four hours east of me, in a one-room cabin with her 11 siblings, in the depths of Tennessee Appalachia. Unlike Nashville, which is so associated with Dolly today, the Appalachian region of Tennessee is riddled with evidence of isolation in its language, economy, and general sense of yearning. Appalachia has its own distinct dialect and a deep tradition of oral storytelling. Being able to captivate an audience served as capital, and she brought this generationally reinforced skill to songwriting and the stage.
Her upbringing was one of poverty and stripped-down performance. Like many other Tennessee families, the Parton family sang church hymns and mountain ballads on front-porch swings. In her hit song “Coat of Many Colors,” Dolly recalls a coat her mother made for her of donated scrap fabric. “Although we had no money, I was rich as I could be / In my coat of many colors my mama made for me.” She was proud of and honest about her roots, and for many poor southerners, it was the first time they saw their stories told publicly.
Dolly was first introduced on the Grand Ole Opry stage at age 13 by Johnny Cash, who called her “a little girl here from up in East Tennessee.” She would never shed that identity. A number of global superstars got their start in the South, including Taylor Swift and Dolly’s own goddaughter, Miley Cyrus. Most ditched their southern dialect and opted for a more conventional pop sound after reaching the height of their fame. But Dolly never evolved. Her famous mantra, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose,” explained the way she viewed the world. She was unapologetically southern, and at the same time, nobody’s fool. “Dolly’s accent, like her music, held the notes of her East Tennessee home, and she often spoke proudly of her choice to carry it,” Amy Clark, a linguist from Appalachia, told me. “She sounded just like many of us in the way she said ‘light’ or dropped ‘g’ off certain words.” Her refusal to abandon her southern way of speaking meant the world to people from such places. “If you were from Appalachia and couldn’t carry a note, you could still be proud because you sounded like Dolly,” Clark said.
John Seakwood / Disney / Getty Dolly Parton at Dollywood in 1987 Many stars who have left (or, in their view, escaped) the South speak of their upbringing as a past life rarely revisited. Dolly, conversely, spent her entire life giving back to her home state. “She understood that where you come from isn’t something you transcend,” Brooke Griffith, a jewelry-shop owner from East Tennessee, wrote on Instagram. “It’s something you can honor by creating opportunities for the people who come after you.” And Dolly did just that, most famously by opening Dollywood in 1986. It’s the largest employer in Sevier County, where she grew up. After Whitney Houston popularized her song “I Will Always Love You,” Dolly invested the royalties she earned into a big office complex and strip mall in a predominantly Black Nashville neighborhood. She called it “the house that Whitney built,” and mentioned it only when asked about it.
When Dolly’s identity didn’t match the plans pop culture had for her, she chose her roots, and was rewarded every time. Even her look was defiantly southern. A 1991 issue of Vanity Fair described Dolly as “every down-home virtue wrapped up in a sizzling blonde bombshell.” That’s the thing that drew me to Dolly all those years ago—she seemed to be the only woman in the South who could present as so sexy and be read as so wholesome. Most women who wore Daisy Dukes were whispered about in church pews and grocery lines, but Dolly wasn’t just loved in spite of it; she was lauded for it. Her self-described “Backwoods Barbie” persona, also the name of one of her songs, inspired generations of women who might be cast out as trailer trash to lean into their interpretation of beauty. “So read into it what you will, but see me as I am / The way I look is just a country girl’s idea of glam,” the song goes.
She drew her aesthetic inspiration from a woman she’d seen as a kid when her family went into town. “There was this woman that was the town-trash whore, they called her, but I thought she was beautiful,” Dolly told Ellen DeGeneres once. She described the woman’s look in a way that many would describe Dolly’s—blond hair piled on her head, red nails, tall heels. “I just thought she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. And I used to say to my mama, ‘Oh, she’s so pretty.’ Mama’d say, ‘Oh, she’s just trash.’…
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