I got the news the way I imagine a lot of us did last night — a phone lighting up in the dark, a friend's text with no words at all, just her name and a broken heart. Dolly Parton is gone, and if you'd told twelve-year-old me, dancing round my bedroom to Jolene, that one day I'd be writing something like this, I don't think I'd have believed a word of it.

I've been a Dolly girl for as long as I can remember. Not the casual kind who likes 9 to 5 at a wedding disco, but the full, rhinestoned, unshakeable kind. In my house, WWDD — What Would Dolly Do — isn't a novelty tea towel, it's genuinely how I try to live: with kindness, with glitter, with a joke ready for every hard moment, and with the stubborn belief that you can be exactly who you are. Last Halloween I became her for the night — rhinestone cowboy hat, tasselled skirt — and this October, for Dollyween, I'll be doing it all over again. Some tributes you just keep making, every single year.

So when the news broke, my head didn't go to the headlines. It went straight back to December 2024, to a log cabin in the Smoky Mountains, to moonshine that tasted like Red Velvet cake, and to the moment I stood in front of her actual Coat of Many Colors and cried the happiest, silliest tears in the middle of a theme park. I want to take you back there with me today — not as a travel post, but as a love letter to the woman, the mountains, and the home she built for all of us.

My Tennessee Mountain Home

“Sittin' on the front porch on a summer afternoon…”

Dolly wrote that about Sevierville, and the second you arrive, you understand exactly why she never really left it behind, no matter how big the world got.

Tucked between Knoxville and Pigeon Forge, Sevierville is the quiet one — the mountain village that raised her, long before the lights and the theme park and the ten Grammys. We stayed in our own log cabin, tucked into the hills (there are gorgeous treehouse retreats too, if sleeping among the treetops is more your thing), and spent our days finding her fingerprints all over town: murals on the sides of buildings, a bronze statue of her sitting with her guitar outside the courthouse, looking every bit as warm in metal as she does in every interview I've ever watched.

We visited Shine Girl, the moonshine company started by her niece, Danielle Parton — a trained pilot turned distiller with the same twinkle in her eye as her aunt. I fell hopelessly for the Rosé and the Coconut, but it was the Red Velvet that had the whole group fighting over the last pour. And for dinner, there was only ever one choice: Appalachian, apparently Dolly's own favourite restaurant in town — proper Southern hospitality, on a porch, under a mountain sky, and it's not hard to see why she loved it.

She once sang that ‘wildflowers don't care where they grow,’ and watching Sevierville carry on its quiet, unbothered business while the rest of the world loses its mind over Dollywood ten minutes down the road, I understood exactly what she meant. She never needed the bright lights to feel like home. She just needed the mountains.

If Dollywood is her cathedral, Sevierville is her front porch. It's where ‘Tennessee Mountain Home’ stops being a lyric and starts being a real address, and it deserves every bit as much love as the theme park down the road. Go. Buy the moonshine. Find the statue. Say a quiet thank you.

Dollywood: Her Lasting Legacy

I'll admit it plainly: visiting Dollywood was a pilgrimage. I'd waited my whole life to get there, and in December 2024, I finally did.

We visited HeartSong, which felt like a mountain lodge built specifically to make you feel hugged (DreamMore is the one for the truly devoted, dripping in Dolly memorabilia from top to bottom). At Christmas, the whole park disappears under 2.5 million lights, and somewhere in the middle of all that glow is The Dolly Experience, where I stood in front of her actual ‘Coat of Many Colors’ — the real coat, the one her mama truly did stitch from a box of rags, the one she sang about as ‘my coat of many colors that my momma made for me’ — and understood, properly, for the first time, exactly how a girl from a one-room cabin became the whole world's favourite person.

People queue for that park like it's a religious experience, because for a lot of us, it is. I watched grown adults standing in line for Cinnamon Bread a full hour after closing time and thought: yes. That's exactly right. That's devotion.

Here's the thing about Dollywood, though — it was never just a theme park. It was a promise she made and kept: that Sevier County would always have jobs, that the mountains she grew up poor in would never be left behind by her success, that her home would share in every bit of it. Every light on that fence, every ticket sold, keeps that promise going. Dollywood isn't a memorial. It was always meant to outlive her — on purpose, by design, because she built it that way.

A Legacy Bigger Than the Mountains

And it never stopped at the park gates. In 1995, Dolly started the Imagination Library, mailing a free book to enrolled children every single month from birth to age five. By the time she passed, it had gifted more than 300 million books to children across the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and Ireland — including, I'd bet, a fair few little readers close to home for some of you reading this.

That's the real coat of many colours, isn't it? Every scrap of her success, stitched back into something for someone else. ‘It's gonna be a bright, bright, sunshiny day,’ she promised us once — and for every child who opens one of those books for the first time, I believe her.

WWDD Is Not Just a Motto

People laugh, a little, when I tell them WWDD genuinely guides how I try to treat people. I don't mind the laugh. Dolly never seemed to mind being underestimated either — she just went and built an empire, funded a vaccine, opened a theme park, gave away 300 million books, and never once let anyone dim the sparkle to make themselves more comfortable.

Here You Come Again

‘Here you come again, just when I'd begun to get myself together’ could have been written for exactly how I feel about heading back to Tennessee this December. I'm going back to pay my own tribute properly, and this time I'm adding Nashville to the itinerary. Dolly's brand new SongTeller Hotel opens its doors on Commerce Street this autumn, built as an entire love letter to her songbook, with a museum tracing every decade of her extraordinary life. I honestly can't think of anywhere better to raise a glass to her.

Just Because It's Over

“And I will always love you…”

That line has always been a song about letting go of someone with grace. I never thought I'd need it to mean quite this much.

So here's my ask: go to Sevierville. Buy the moonshine, find the statue, eat where she ate. Go to Dollywood, queue for the Cinnamon Bread, stand in front of that coat and let it get you too. Keep her Tennessee mountain home full of visitors and full of light, because that's the tribute that actually lasts — not just the wig I'll wear this Dollyween, but the mountains, the park, the new corner of Nashville she's just added to her own map, and the whole enormous, glittering legacy she left standing.

Thank you, Dolly. For the songs, the lessons, and for showing an awful lot of us exactly what to do.

WWDD, indeed.