A song for the Smoky Mountains and the foothills beyond
August 26, 2026
An Appalachian singer with Upstate South Carolina roots taught the world to sing, to give and to love without conditions.
Dolly Parton, the songwriter and entertainer whose family roots reach into the Upstate, died Tuesday at 80. Her family said she died at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville after a brief battle with cancer.
For communities along the Blue Ridge foothills, her death lands close to home. Parton never separated her mountain beginnings from her global reach, and her ties to South Carolina were family ties. Her mother, Avie Lee Owens, was born in 1923 in Lockhart, the small Union County town where the Owens family lived before moving to Tennessee. Parton often said she still had relatives scattered across the Upstate.
She backed those words with money. In February 2025, Parton donated $100,000 for a healing garden at Union Medical Center, in the same county where her mother was born. In a video message played at the hospital’s ribbon-cutting, she said Union held a special place in her heart because her mother had been born right there in Lockhart.
That affection was on display in the Upstate this week. A tribute billboard along Interstate 85 between Spartanburg and Greenville carried her portrait above a single line: “We will always love you.”
Books in Laurens County mailboxes
Parton’s most direct mark on Laurens County arrives every month in the mail.
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library sends a free, age-appropriate book each month to children from birth through age 5, delivered to the child’s home and addressed to the child. There is no cost to families and no income requirement. The first book most children receive is “The Little Engine That Could.”
The program runs locally through Laurens County First Steps, a nonprofit partner of South Carolina First Steps. For years, only children living in the Laurens County School District 55 attendance zone could enroll. In 2023, First Steps partnered with the Dollywood Foundation to extend the program into the District 56 attendance area, making every child in the county from birth to age 5 eligible.
Parton built the program around a simple idea: that a parent reading aloud at the kitchen table is a child’s first and most important teacher, and that a family should not have to buy books to do it. What began in her home county in East Tennessee in 1995 now reaches millions of children worldwide.
Families in Laurens County can enroll a child through Laurens County First Steps at laurensfirststeps.org, or check availability by ZIP code at imaginationlibrary.com. Toni Able serves as executive director of Laurens County First Steps.
The heart she left behind
Parton spent six decades proving that a performer could reach the world’s largest stages without losing her humility, and she remained one of the few public figures capable of drawing every generation and background into the same room.
Her catalog, from “Coat of Many Colors” to “I Will Always Love You,” gave dignity to humble beginnings and everyday heartbreak. Her giving, whether disaster relief in Appalachia or funding for medical research, tended to go where the need was greatest and to arrive without much noise.
One more song waiting in the mountains
Parton also left behind something the world has not heard. A chestnut wood box built by her uncle and early musical mentor, Bill Owens, sits on display at Dollywood’s DreamMore Resort in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Owens, who taught her to play guitar, spent years working to preserve the American chestnut.
Inside the box is a recording of a song she wrote in 2015 called “My Place in History,” along with a copy of her book “Dream More” and a piece of wood from the front porch of her childhood home. Only Parton knew the melody and the words. Accounts differ on when the box is to be opened. Some point to 2045, the resort’s 30th anniversary, and others to what would have been her 100th birthday, Jan. 19, 2046. Parton gave both dates over the years, and she admitted more than once that leaving the song locked away nettled her.
Parton often told audiences that if they saw someone without a smile, they should give that person one of theirs. Across porches, town squares and neighborhood streets in Laurens County, the fitting tribute is the one she modeled: plain kindness, quiet resilience and steady care for a neighbor.
