Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry, and my search for home
Two huge voices who understood the meaning of home.
Growing up, in my extremely transient life, Dolly Parton was a caricature to me. She had the wigs, the over-the-top makeup, the popular movies in the 80s, the whole larger-than-life persona.
My dad was an Air Force pilot, so when I was younger I really did live a lot of that song “I’ve Been Everywhere,” later recorded by Hank Snow and Johnny Cash.
When we moved from Cairo, Egypt to Mississippi, I was not real happy with the move, and for some reason I started listening to country music. There was no grand reason for it. I simply discovered that I liked a lot of it. Maybe I thought that living in Mississippi meant listening to country music. Plus, I needed something beyond wearing out Simon and Garfunkel records. I was continually drawn to a lot of things I felt were authentic, although I probably couldn’t fully articulate why at the time.
I still dismissed Dolly because I knew the pop-culture version of her, not the songwriter. When I went to college at Ole Miss I took a class called “Southern Studies.” It was one of those options one could take to fulfill another liberal arts requirement. Mostly, we talked a lot about racism and read some really strange Southern Gothic fiction that I appreciate more now than I did then.
But we had a professor, not our professor, come in to class one day and play “My Tennessee Mountain Home” by Dolly Parton. He was from East Tennessee and offered up a lecture about his home but all I kept thinking about was the song. Why was it so beautiful, pure, and authentic? Isn’t she more pop-culture and pop-country? Isn’t she more of a cartoonish performer for attention and money? I knew she was funny but why is she so deep?
Around the same time, Dolly Parton released a new album titled “Hungry Again,” which she recorded at her home and it was the start of a long string of albums that was a very deliberate return to her traditional sound and roots oriented music. So I took a deep dive into Dolly’s music and it made me quite emotional. Could I ever experience home and belonging like this? I had moved so much that I wondered if I was from anywhere at all.
And amazingly, I had taken a Southern Studies class and knew so little about Wendell Berry until I moved to Kentucky for seminary and heard professors talking about “creation care.” I’m far from a Berry expert but I appreciated his words that helped to further awaken in me a longing for home and authenticity. I probably appreciate him more now than when I lived in Kentucky because I no longer fit as neatly into a political box and strive to think more locally, as hard as it can be at times given my life experiences. And even if I rolled my eyes a little at some of Berry’s ideas or writing, I knew I wanted to be so much more than serial a consumer. As Christian, Berry helps to me remind us the good and beauty in creation. It’s all over Scripture.
…Because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air, and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances, will hardly balk at the fuming of water into wine—which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is fumed into grapes.
— Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation”
It’s interesting (though not surprising) that figures like Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn grew up so poor but wrote so lovingly about home. They were willing to leave but home never left them. Obviously, family is so vital here. Dolly wrote a great song called “Smoky Mountain Memories” that really romanticizes family and a sense of place. And maybe we should be doing more of that. Some of the greatest art uplifts the sense of place. I doubt there is a more beautiful state song that Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home.”
I don’t have a Tennessee mountain home to sing about but I recently realized that I’ve lived in North Carolina longer than anywhere else on this earth. All three of my boys were born here. I joke with them that I wish I was a native like them. We have one of the best state mottos, Esse Quam Videri, “to be rather than to seem.”
Sometimes I feel a little angst or nervous energy because I haven’t moved in a while. I’m still learning how to live a life without passing through. Succeeding a little and failing some. Maybe that is enough for me right now. And maybe, by staying, I’m giving my boys a real sense of home and belonging, something that still feels a little elusive to me even though I’ve always longed for it.
—Ray Nothstine
— The Federalism Beat