One Sunday morning in the East Tennessee mountains, a young Dolly Parton and her three older siblings snuck into their father’s hidden whiskey stash before walking to church. Growing up in a small cabin of twelve children in Locust Ridge, the four oldest kids, Willadeene, David, Coy “Denver,” and Dolly, did nearly everything together. Their father, Robert Lee Parton, worked the tobacco fields from dawn until dark and kept a bottle tucked away at home, which the four of them found and carried down the dirt road toward Sunday school, passing it around for curious sips along the way. That bit of mischief carried real risk inside a strict Pentecostal church led by their grandfather, Preacher Jake Owens. Across Sevier County, the Parton kids were famous for singing out with everything they had during weekly services. That morning, however, all four of them sat side by side on the wooden bench without making a sound, keeping their lips pressed tightly shut so the adults would not smell the whiskey on their breath. Oldest sister Willadeene later recorded the story in her memoir, preserving one of the very few public glimpses of Dolly alongside her brother Denver. While Dolly’s voice eventually carried her to stages around the world, Denver chose a quiet life in East Tennessee and stayed out of the spotlight until the end of his days. With both Denver and David now gone, that memory of four kids keeping a secret in church carries a tenderness none of them could have foreseen at the time. Long before anyone outside the mountains knew the Parton name, their bond was already sealed in the quiet of a Sunday morning pew, sitting shoulder to shoulder and refusing to sing a single note.

In 1996, when oldest sister Willadeene Parton published her 230-page book *Smoky Mountain Memories: Stories from the Hearts of the Parton Family* through Nashville’s Rutledge Hill Press, she preserved the early Sevier County history of all twelve children born to Robert Lee Parton and Avie Lee Owens Parton.

Among the family recollections and vintage photographs gathered in that volume was one of the few published glimpses of her younger brother Coy “Denver” Parton, who passed away thirty years later in Sevierville, Tennessee, on July 23, 2026, at age eighty-two.

Long before their fourth sibling, Dolly, boarded a bus for Nashville in 1964, the first four children in the Parton cabin—Willadeene, born in 1940; David Wilburn, born March 30, 1942; Denver, born August 16, 1943; and Dolly Rebecca, born January 19, 1946—grew up as an inseparable unit along the Little Pigeon River in the Greenbrier and Locust Ridge communities of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Because eight more siblings followed behind them in the small mountain cabin without electricity or running water, the oldest four shared the earliest chores, walked the same dirt roads, and answered together to both their sharecropper father, Lee, and their mother’s father, Pentecostal preacher Jake Owens.

One Sunday morning recorded in Willadeene’s memoir, the four oldest children located the whiskey bottle their father kept tucked away after long weeks working the East Tennessee tobacco fields.

Carrying the bottle along the dirt road toward Sunday school, Willadeene, David, Denver, and young Dolly passed it between themselves for curious sips before stepping through the doors of their grandfather’s House of Prayer church.

Across Sevier County, Preacher Jake Owens’s services were known for loud acoustic music, and the Parton children were expected to sing out at full volume from the wooden benches every week.

Realizing that opening their mouths would let the smell of their father’s whiskey reach the adults in the nearby pews, all four siblings sat shoulder to shoulder through the entire morning service with their lips pressed tightly shut, refusing to sing a single note.

In the decades that followed those Sunday mornings in Locust Ridge, several of the twelve Parton children followed Dolly into entertainment and publishing: Stella, Freida, Randy, and Cassie pursued recording and stage careers, Floyd wrote songs including Dolly’s 1991 chart-topper “Rockin’ Years,” Rachel acted on network television in the 1980s, and Willadeene authored family books and cookbooks.

David and Denver, however, stayed rooted in the physical labor and landscape of East Tennessee, trading the spotlight for heavy construction and mountain farming.

Both brothers spent their working lives building highway infrastructure across the region: David worked for decades with Simpson Construction before retiring as a bridge-building superintendent on projects around Kingsport, Johnson City, and Knoxville, while Denver worked for years as a heavy crane operator building bridges across Tennessee.

When he was not operating cranes on bridge sites, Denver lived quietly in Sevierville as a homestead farmer and outdoorsman who worked his own land, hunted in the foothills, and raised his daughters, Chris and Jennifer, alongside his wife, Carolyn.

Even when Dolly released her multi-generational family album *Smoky Mountain DNA: Family, Faith and Fables* in November 2024 to celebrate the heritage they shared, Denver and David remained completely out of the media circuit.

On November 15, 2024, David died peacefully at his home in White Pine, Tennessee, at age eighty-two, followed twenty months later by Denver’s passing in Sevierville on July 23, 2026, also at age eighty-two, with private arrangements handled by Atchley Funeral Home. With both bridge-building brothers gone, only Willadeene’s 1996 pages still hold the four oldest Parton kids together on that East Tennessee church bench, sitting side by side in the quiet to keep each other’s secret.