I have never been a Dolly Parton fan. Musically, particularly. 9-to-5 was a good enough movie (back in the early days of cable TV it was on at least one of the movie channels at least 10 times a day every day for decades) so I guess I was okay with her as an actress. Country music makes my brain hurt though… a lot. I mean… a lot. I just hate it. It makes my skin crawl. It’s physically painful for me. So no, I was not a fan of her from a music perspective. Sorry.

I do recognize a total bad ass force of nature when I see one though and she was one. Not just a force but a positive force. Super heroes aren’t real, but she was and that was close enough.

Rest in peace, Dolly Parton. The grim reaper totally took the wrong 80 year old. 

In an attempt to make this even more about me, I never went to her theme park, Dollywood (which I believe is the number two theme park in the US behind Disney World? Is that right? I think it is), but I almost went once and I was really close to it another time. 

In my senior year of high school the music department was trying to plan a trip and the music director wanted to take us to Dollywood. He gave two reasons. First, while no one in Massachusetts in the late 80’s gave two shits about country music (we were the last market in the country without a country themed radio station and I was epically proud of that), it was one of only two really truly American forms of music. Our music director said the other was jazz, which is true to a point but I believe the correct answer is blues given that jazz and rock and roll and all of its derivatives evolved from blues. Whatever. The second reason was, obviously, that whole awesome-amuesment-park thing. We didn’t end up going. We went to Richmond, VA instead. There was a high school music competition/festival/thing there at the time and our concert and jazz bands played as well as all of our chorus groups. If I remember correctly, the jazz band (with a certain red head soloing on tenor saxophone) kicked some serious ass that week. Also, there was the Kings Dominon amusement park near Richmond and they had like three water flume rides and a stand up roller coaster with a full loop that kicked 30000 flavors of ass.

The time I was really close was earlier this year on The Great American Road Trip I took with my beloved wife. We were in the same town as Dollywood. I don’t think we ever got close enough to see any of it, but we were close enough to see a bunch of road signs telling us we were almost there.