Pilgrimage to Dollywood: A Country Music Road Trip through Tennessee by Helen Morales (review)

The travelogue Pilgrimage to Dollywood by Helen Morales is an enjoyable book for academics, intellectuals, and readers who love Dolly Parton, if they are able to overlook some unpleasantness that could offend a number of Southern readers. All of that may seem a strange combination, but for that niche audience who loves learning, Dolly Parton, and is willing to forgive judgmental tones at times, it is a pleasurable tale.

Pilgrimage to Dollywood opens with Morales at the annual “Dolly Homecoming Parade” in Pigeon Forge. While Morales, a classicist educated at Cambridge who teaches at the University of California-Santa Barbara, enjoys the parade, she laments that academics don’t think well of Dolly Parton or country music in general. She grew up listening to country music in England where her father had immigrated a teenager and became a fan of Parton’s songs. He worked in restaurants when Morales was a child, and whenever Parton came on the radio in the kitchens, he told her, “This is our music”—working class music.

Her trip to the Nashville Parthenon is so engaging and inspiring it makes the reader want to jump in the car and drive there immediately. Morales describes that when she viewed the statue of the goddess Athena, for whom her daughter is named, “the hairs on the back of my neck stood up; I almost wet myself; I was rooted to the spot and stood gape-mouthed.” It is the most real moment in the book, a place where she loses herself, becomes a tourist, and allows pure enjoyment. For her, the statue “surpasses any ancient description or extant image of a statue of Athena.” Morales writes that the ancient Greeks believed gods can inhabit such statues, and that Nashville’s Athena gave her an “understanding of this and of epiphany: the god manifest on earth.”

Despite her love for this place and statue, she mars the description by including that her husband said, “[t]here’ll be no twanging there,” which seems to indicate Southerners would neither understand nor appreciate something so grand, in spite of Nashville having been labeled the “Athens of the South.” This tone is present throughout the book, which makes it impossible to lose one’s self in the tale; by quoting her husband’s statement within the magnificent description of the Parthenon, Morales gives it weight, as if in tacit agreement with his assessment.

Similarly, the academic tone will alienate many travelogue and Dolly Parton fans. While Morales describes being in Pigeon Forge waiting for the evening parade, she takes the reader away from the moment to give historical facts about what a pilgrimage is. This sort of scholarly explanation appears throughout the book, which makes serious what might otherwise be a fun trip to Dollywood and other country music attractions.

When Morales goes to Graceland, she expects to enjoy it, but finds that “the stiffness of the costumes on the headless manikins could hardly contrast more strongly with the dynamism and energy” of Elvis. She’s disappointed by the sanitized and commercialized version of Presley because there aren’t pictures of his later years or anything regarding the problems that surrounded him. She writes that this idealized version of him takes much of the magic and power out of the man who was Elvis.

She has a much different view of Loretta Lynn’s Coal Miner’s Daughter Museum. She writes that it’s the “oddest” museum she has ever visited, noting that while some of the placards and labels are professionally done, others are handwritten in felt-tipped pin with homespun notes on them signed “LL” and “Loretta Lynn.” Although Morales states she is impressed by this, writing that it would an improvement if employed at the British Museum or New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, it is overshadowed when she points out that there are “elementary spelling errors” such as “to” for...