📍Sevierville, Tennessee, USA
1946 – 1964“I was the fourth of twelve children, born in a one-room log cabin on Locust Ridge in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Sevier County, Tennessee. There was no electricity and no running water, and Daddy paid the doctor who delivered me with a sack of cornmeal. Daddy farmed and later sharecropped; Mama, Avie Lee, raised all of us, sang the old mountain ballads and stitched together whatever we needed. My grandpa, the Reverend Jake Owens, was a Pentecostal preacher, and I sang in his church from the age of six. I was writing songs before I could write them down, and I made my first guitar out of an old mandolin and a couple of strings. My song Coat of Many Colors tells about the patchwork coat Mama sewed me from rags, and the children who laughed at it. By ten I was singing on Knoxville radio and television, and the day after I graduated from high school I caught the bus to Nashville. I never stopped being that mountain girl. My family built a replica of our cabin at Dollywood, so folks can see where I came from.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: thesmokies.com hmdb.org npr.org