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Dolly Parton has collected Grammy awards and platinum records for decades, yet her proudest honor stands barefoot on the courthouse lawn in her Tennessee hometown. On May 3, 1987, neighbors in Sevierville gathered at the Sevier County Courthouse to unveil a bronze statue of a young Parton holding a guitar. Sculpted by local artist Jim Gray and funded by residents of the Great Smoky Mountains, the monument honored a girl who grew up poor in the county and stayed tied to her roots. Parton kept that bond alive by building Dollywood, bringing jobs to Sevier County, and supporting local families through her charities. Even with shelves of music and film awards, she has often said that being welcomed home on the courthouse green meant more to her than any trophy from Hollywood or Nashville. Nobody cared for that statue quite like her father, Lee Parton. A mountain working man who could neither read nor write, he had spent his life doing hard physical labor to feed twelve children and rarely paid attention to the glamour of the entertainment world. Parton later found out that her father would wait until nightfall, put a bucket of water and a cleaning rag into his truck, and drive to the courthouse by himself. With no one around to watch, he scrubbed the birds’ mess and road dust off the bronze statue by hand so his daughter would look her best in the morning light. Millions of travelers have stopped to take pictures beside that statue in Sevierville, though its truest measure of love was left there in the dark by a father and his bucket of water.

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When Dolly Parton told her father that their East Tennessee hometown was putting up a bronze statue of her on the courthouse lawn, Robert Lee Parton joked that she might be an idol to her fans, though to the pigeons she would be nothing more than another outhouse.

Behind that dry mountain humor was a father who attended the May 3, 1987 dedication at the Sevier County Courthouse in downtown Sevierville and spent the final years of his life quietly looking after the monument whenever the streets were empty.

The effort to build the statue started shortly after May 1986, when Parton partnered with the Herschend family to transform a small Pigeon Forge attraction into Dollywood. As the park quickly became the largest employer in Sevier County, local business leaders and neighbors began raising money to thank the singer who had grown up poor on a Locust Ridge farm and returned to invest in her community.

Organizers commissioned local Smoky Mountains artist Jim Gray, who submitted a ten-inch wax-over-metal model showing Parton as a barefoot young woman in a collared shirt and rolled-up jeans, perched on a boulder with an acoustic guitar in her lap. Once the committee approved the design, Parton traveled to Gray’s studio to pose in person on a stool with her guitar.

Gray spent more than two thousand hours on the project in his Knoxville studio, building an internal steel frame and shaping three hundred pounds of clay down to a tiny butterfly resting on the guitar’s headstock. To make sure the bronze figure would fit seamlessly onto the huge mountain rock chosen for the courthouse square, the sculptor made a plaster cast of the boulder’s top surface before sending the sculpture to the Wagner Foundry in Fredericksburg, Virginia, for casting.

Even though neighbors across East Tennessee offered to help carry clay or assist in the workshop, Gray insisted on completing the labor himself as a personal tribute.

On May 3, 1987, one year after Dollywood’s opening day, around five hundred residents gathered outside the 1895 red-brick courthouse at 125 Court Avenue for the unveiling. Parton stood before the crowd alongside Gray, her parents Lee and Avie Lee Parton, and Knoxville businessman Cas Walker, who had given a ten-year-old Dolly her first steady radio and television spots decades earlier.

Looking out at the neighbors who had known her family through their hardest years of sharecropping and raising twelve children, Parton told the crowd that the statue made her feel that her home county was proud of her, which was all she had ever wanted. She later reflected that a monument on a courthouse square was an honor usually reserved for presidents, placing it above her Grammy trophies and chart records.

Whenever she talked up the honor around her family, Lee Parton kept her grounded with his remark about the courthouse pigeons. A tobacco farmer and construction laborer who could neither read nor write, he had spent decades working with his hands in Sevier County and rarely paid much mind to Hollywood or Nashville fame.

Five years before his passing in November 2000 at age seventy-nine, he helped his daughter launch the Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library in Sevier County, mailing free books to local children so a new generation would not grow up without the written word.

It was only after Lee passed away that one of Dolly’s brothers told her what their father had been doing in downtown Sevierville after dark.

Without telling his daughter, Lee had been loading a broom and a large drum of soapy water into the bed of his pickup truck late at night and driving down to Court Avenue once the courthouse square was deserted. Standing alone under the streetlights, he scrubbed the pigeon droppings and road dust off the bronze statue by hand so she would be clean when visitors arrived the next morning.

Millions of travelers still stop by the courthouse lawn in Sevierville to take their pictures beside the barefoot girl on the rock, where a mountain father once parked his truck in the dark to wash the bronze clean with a broom and a bucket of soapy water.

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