{"id":21437,"date":"2024-06-10T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-10T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=21437"},"modified":"2024-06-09T18:14:49","modified_gmt":"2024-06-09T17:14:49","slug":"the-dolly-parton-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2024\/06\/10\/the-dolly-parton-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"THE DOLLY PARTON EXPERIENCE"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

THE DOLLY PARTON EXPERIENCE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Norman Warwick<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paste on line\u00b4s excellent team of senior editors, writing staff and of course, Geoffrey Himes The Old Curmudgeon, all seem to be such well-rounded persons that it seems likely God created them using a pencil in a compass. The great thing about this is that they manage to create some unique viewpoints on which to write their stories. For instance, we all pretty much know Dolly Parton: through her music, through her books, through her films, through her social awareness and even through her philanthropy.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it was no surprise to read a piece by<\/em> Senior Editor Garrett Martin, who is also on X (was Twitter). As he writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and anything else that gets in his way, he recently experienced The Dolly Parton Experience and turned that visit into a new profile of the singer-songwriter<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s only one Dolly Parton, he suggests<\/em>,  but now everybody can get an idea of what her one-of-a-kind life has been like. The Dolly Parton Experience is a new museum-style attraction at Dollywood focused on Dolly\u2019s decades-long career, from her hardscrabble childhood as one of 12 children of a sharecropper and subsistence farmer, through her march to global superstardom. Dollywood has always understandably venerated its beloved co-owner and namesake, and The Dolly Parton Experience is a bigger, brighter expansion of the work done by the park\u2019s former Chasing Rainbows museum. If you like Dolly or have an interest in the history of pop culture, it\u2019s a must-do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Dollywood decided to modernize Chasing Rainbows, they realized a single building wouldn\u2019t do Dolly justice. The former museum has been replaced with three exhibits, one looking at Dolly\u2019s career, another at her iconic outfits, and then a theater that currently features live shows by members of Dolly\u2019s family as well as an almost half-hour video about the Parton clan. And Dolly\u2019s tour bus, which was often open to guests back when Chasing Rainbows was running, remains on display, giving The Dolly Parton Experience a total of four attractions to check out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The centerpiece of the Experience is Songteller, a new museum that summarizes Dolly\u2019s career through a series of digital-heavy installations and social media photo ops. Each of its chambers focuses on a distinct period of her career. It starts with a reverent portrait of her youth, as the most talented member of a large, musically-inclined family living in a one-bedroom cabin in Sevierville, Tenn. The next room uses audio and recreations of posters and ads to track her teen years, performing on local radio stations and making her Grand Ole Opry debut at 13. From these humble beginnings she hits it big in Nashville, joining The Porter Wagoner Show<\/em> in her early 20s and touring the country with Wagoner. This era is recapped with a video montage of TV appearances in the \u201860s inside a room modeled like the inside of a bus, capturing the speed and energy with which Dolly tackled the entertainment world. Next is a corridor about her final rise to superstardom, with a recreation of the swing she\u2019d enter the set of her \u201870s variety show on next to a TV showing various appearances she made on talk shows and variety shows from the \u201880s to today. Nearby is a desk styled after Dabney Coleman\u2019s character\u2019s from 9 to 5<\/em>, next to a screen showing scenes from her biggest movie roles; guests are encouraged to take photos of them sitting on the swing and at the desk. Throughout these first few rooms you\u2019ll find dresses, costumes, shoes and wigs that Dolly wore during these periods of her career, alongside photos, music, and video clips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The second half of Songteller is focused on two large audiovisual displays, with a small hallway devoted to her many musical collaborations connecting the two. The first of these rooms has a striking screen shaped like a large guitar hanging on one wall, with dozens of Dolly\u2019s gold and platinum records hanging nearby. Clips of Dolly performing some of her biggest songs appear on the guitar, with lighting effects making the room feel personalized to each performance. It shows us Dolly at the peak of her performing skills, when she was one of music\u2019s best songwriters and singers, and a massively popular mainstream superstar. This room is an audiovisual showstopper and the highlight of Songteller. From here guests enter into that hallway covered with photos and video clips of Dolly with various other musicians she\u2019s worked with over the decades, from fellow country stars like Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard, to larger-than-life figures like Pitbull and Miss Piggy. Of course Kenny Rogers takes center stage, with their stellar rendition of \u201cIslands in the Stream\u201d headlining the room\u2019s video clips. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That hallway serves as something of a waiting room for Songteller\u2019s final experience. The last room is a large, standing-only theater with floor-to-ceiling screens on all four walls. An immersive short film that once again looks at Dolly\u2019s career trajectory from Smokey Mountain girl to world-conquering multi-hyphenate surrounds guests, combining photos, computer graphics, and video into a multisensory spectacle. It\u2019s a fitting and high-tech end to The Dolly Parton Experience\u2019s main act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Even more crucial to Dolly\u2019s success than her clothes is her family, and they take center stage in the Precious Memories exhibit at the DreamSong theater. Don\u2019t miss this multimedia show\u2014it\u2019s situated in the entryway to the theater, and is easy to walk by without even realizing it\u2019s a relatively long and detailed video. Screens set amid an assortment of family photos introduce us to Dolly\u2019s family members and show us the impact they had upon her as a person and a musician, including TV footage from the \u201880s of Dolly, her parents, siblings, and cousins performing together at Dollywood. It\u2019s the most poignant part of The Dolly Parton Experience, and it\u2019s almost like a hidden little treat. Inside the theater you can currently see Dolly\u2019s niece Heidi Parton leading the Heidi Parton\u2019s Kin & Friends show, featuring a plethora of Dolly\u2019s family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, Dolly\u2019s tour bus remains parked in this part of the theme park<\/a>. Open for short tours by a handful of guests at a time, the bus offers a glimpse of what Dolly\u2019s day-to-day life was like when she was touring heavily in the \u201880s and \u201890s. It has a set of bunk beds, a TV with attached VCR, a small kitchenette, two bathrooms, a standalone shower, and a private bedroom for Dolly herself. It\u2019s luxurious but at the same time stifling\u2014which is kind of what the life of a massively popular musician can feel like. This might be the most candid snapshot of Dolly offered by The Dolly Parton Experience, and I\u2019m glad to see it\u2019s still on display at Dollywood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Dolly Parton Experience is a larger and more focused exhibit than Dollywood\u2019s old Chasing Rainbows museum. If you ever visited that, you might remember how it basically just felt like a lot of stuff put on display without too much rhyme or reason. It was wonderful for what it was, but it was a little hectic and a little old-fashioned, without much of the interactive, immersive flourishes that actual museums have pioneered over the last few decades. The Dolly Parton Experience, and Songteller especially, are much more digitally oriented than Chasing Rainbows, and less interested in showing off Dolly artifacts in glass cases than in giving guests memorable, large-scale moments. Both approaches are valid\u2014and I do wish the new experience had a bit more actual Dollyana on display, and spotlighted concrete milestones and moments of Dolly\u2019s career instead of serving as a broad overview\u2014but The Dolly Parton Experience\u2019s emphasis on arresting visual presentations and social media-friendly photo ops should make it resonate more with the typical Dollywood guest than the old museum did. If there is a flaw to The Dolly Parton Experience, it\u2019s one that reflects Dolly herself\u2014her public persona is so well-crafted and fastidiously curated that you don\u2019t get much sense of who Dolly is as an actual person. That\u2019s been true for most of her career\u2014Dolly Parton is her real name, but the Dolly we see is a carefully maintained character. It\u2019s amazing that she\u2019s been able to keep the public at arm\u2019s length for so long, and that must play a huge part in how she\u2019s become perhaps the most universally beloved person in America. Dolly Parton gives everything of herself in her performances, public appearances, charity work, and literacy campaigns while holding the real Dolly back for herself and her family; that\u2019s deeply impressive and admirable, especially at a time when so many celebrities seem desperate to broadcast their private lives. It does make a museum like The Dolly Parton Experience feel a little like advertising and brand-building instead of a thorough examination of her life and accomplishments. Still, it\u2019s a touching tribute to an unparalleled pillar of American culture, and another great reason to visit this world-class theme park.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Dollywood decided to modernize Chasing Rainbows, they realized a single building wouldn\u2019t do Dolly justice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75,77,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cinema","category-education","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21437"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21571,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21437\/revisions\/21571"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}