Dolly Parton spent her life in conversation with an unseen entity.
That conversation started in an abandoned church in the lush hills of East Tennessee. Since her death on Tuesday, the basics of the story have been everywhere. Dolly’s family was so poor that her dad paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal. She grew up one of 12 kids in a one-room cabin, the granddaughter of a Pentecostal preacher. She learned young that her soul was real, and so was its damnation or salvation. God was alive in the Smoky Mountain mist, there to help her hardscrabble people farm an even harder-scrabble land.
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