Dolly Parton was celebrated by hundreds of fans in her hometown of Sevierville, Tennessee on the night of Tuesday, August 25, after her death was announced earlier that day. The touching scene was captured in TikTok video posted by the user @michaelmaddentalks.
Police cars were on standby as admirers, photographers, and news reporters filled the town square of the small 19,000-person town. The extremely rural Locust Ridge cabin where Dolly and her 11 siblings were raised stands 5 miles outside of the city limits.
It was sight to behold as Dolly’s monument, a bronze statue of the star, was surrounded by dozens of brilliantly colored flower bouquets. One sign right next to the foot of the statue read, “Fly high, Dolly.” Picture frames, stuffed animals, and balloons, including many butterfly-shaped ones, were also scattered respectfully across the ground.
In a full-circle moment, Dolly’s final message to her fans was a speech delivered via video recording to a crowd at her Dollywood theme park, which is located approximately 12 miles from the cabin.
In that speech, she told fans her butterfly wings were “getting kind of tired” before mentioning that she was suffering from dehydration, but assured them that the “medical-everything” was going well.
According to a report by TMZ on Wednesday, sources revealed that no one expected the icon to pass so suddenly, but her health took a sharp decline over the weekend after her hospital admission on Thursday which prompted her team to frantically arrange travel for her loved ones to be at her side.
Dolly Parton Reflected on Her Nostalgic Childhood Home in 2020 Book
In her book “Songteller: My Life in Lyrics,” which was released in November 2020, the music legend reminisced about life in the small cabin that inspired her hit “My Tennessee Mountain Home.”
She wrote, “I love being a mountain girl, a country girl” before listing some of her favorite memories from those simple times. They included playing music on the back porch with her extended family, singing in church, enjoying the lightning bugs, and spending peaceful evenings after dinner with her parents.
She cited “Life’s as peaceful as a baby’s sigh” as one of her favorite lines in the song, because according to her, ‘We always had plenty of babies, and there’s nothing like holding a little baby after he’s bawled his head off and finally gone to sleep.”
Dolly Released a Statement the Day After She Entered the Hospital
Dolly entered the hospital for the final time on Thursday, August 20, but nobody outside of those close to her knew it at the time. The next day, People revealed in an exclusive piece that they’d been told, “I am dealing with some health issues that I just didn’t pay attention to when I was watching over Carl.”
However, she indicated that she planned to continue working, saying, “It’s not like I haven’t been through hard times with my health. But I think because we live in a 24/7 world with social media, everything gets magnified in ways it wasn’t years ago. I used to joke that I was the Queen of the Tabloids, but now I guess I can say I’m the Queen of Social Media AI! Seriously, though, even though I’m still healin’, I’m still workin.”
