On this day (April 2) in 1973, Dolly Parton released her eleventh solo studio album, My Tennessee Mountain Home. The concept album served as a musical autobiography. While the album didn’t produce massive hit singles, it allowed fans a closer look at the singer/songwriter’s life and career.
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While My Tennessee Mountain Home doesn’t tell Parton’s life story in chronological order, it does tell pull stories from multiple parts of her life. It opens with a recitation of the letter she wrote to her parents her first night in Nashville. More importantly, it delves into her relationships with her family and her upbringing in songs like “Daddy’s Working Boots” and “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad).”
[RELATED: Behind the Meaning of Dolly Parton’s “My Tennessee Mountain Home”]
Parton released My Tennessee Mountain Home a year before her breakthrough album Jolene hit record store shelves. Jolene helped establish herself as a star apart from her partnership with Porter Wagoner. However, one could argue that this album did more to help establish her identity as an artist than any of her early releases. This record revealed her Smoky Mountain roots ot the world. So, it is fitting that the title track has become the theme song of Dollywood, Parton’s theme park that sits just miles from the home featured on the album’s cover.
Dolly Parton on the Importance of My Tennessee Mountain Home
Dolly Parton partnered with Vinyl Me, Please in 2023 to re-release My Tennessee Mountain Home on vinyl. Ahead of the reissue, she spoke about what the album means to her.
“This album, I have to honestly say, is as personal to me as anything I have ever done,” she said. Parton went on to reveal that the album was years in the making.
“I was in Nashville when I wrote it just early on, and it took me years to record the whole thing,” she said. “I started writing songs when I’d get so homesick that I thought I would die when I was living in Nashville by myself,” Parton recalled. “I wrote every memory that I had that I was longing for. So, there’s some really wonderful songs about Mama and Daddy, my brothers, my sisters, just about the mountains and the mountain people. This album is very personal to me.”
Featured Image by John Dempsie/ANL/Shutterstock
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