When Dolly Parton was born in a Locust Ridge, Tennessee cabin in January 1946, her father paid the doctor with a sack of homegrown cornmeal because the family had no cash. She grew up as the fourth of twelve children born to Robert Lee Parton, a tenant farmer who could not read or write, and Avie Lee Owens. The fourteen of them shared a small Smoky Mountain cabin with no electricity and no running water, where winter snow often cut off their food supply completely. On days when the pantry was bare, Avie Lee refused to let her children sit in fear. Despite her own frail health after bearing twelve babies in twenty years, she never complained or showed panic in front of them. Instead, she turned an old folk tale into a real kitchen task by announcing they would make stone soup. She sent the children down to the creek to hunt for the cleanest, roundest pebble they could find for the boiling pot. Choosing the best stone gave the kids a job to do and protected their pride, making them feel like contributors to dinner rather than hungry children waiting for food that was not there. Back inside, Avie Lee dropped the river stones into water with a pinch of salt and whatever wild greens or single onion remained. While the pot simmered, she sang traditional Appalachian ballads and told old mountain stories. With warm broth in their stomachs and their mother’s voice filling the room, the twelve siblings crowded onto their straw mattresses and fell asleep before the hunger could return. Those nights by the stove became Dolly’s first music school and shaped the storytelling that later made her famous. Decades later, she built an exact replica of that cabin at Dollywood and launched the Imagination Library, gifting more than 200 million free books to children around the world so they could find the same shelter in stories that once carried her family through the winter.

When Dr. Robert F. Thomas delivered Dolly Parton in a one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, on January 19, 1946, her father paid the physician with a sack of homegrown cornmeal. That mountain cabin had no electricity, no running water, and fourteen people living inside it. Decades later, the songs and literacy programs that grew out of that room had reached tens of millions of homes across five countries.

Robert Lee Parton worked as a tenant farmer and construction laborer in the Great Smoky Mountains, while his wife, Avie Lee Owens, raised their twelve children. Before Dolly was old enough to read or write her own lyrics, she composed a childhood rhyme titled “Little Tiny Tasseltop” about a corncob doll, and her mother wrote the words down on paper to preserve them.

During harsh East Tennessee winters when deep snow cut the cabin off and left the pantry bare, Avie Lee kept order in the house by announcing that the family would cook stone soup. She sent the children down to the creek bed to search for the cleanest, roundest pebble they could find for the boiling pot.

Giving each child a specific task down at the water turned an empty kitchen into a household project. When they carried their chosen stones back inside, Avie Lee dropped the pebbles into simmering water alongside a pinch of salt and whatever wild greens, potatoes, or single onion remained.

While the pot boiled on the stove, Avie Lee sang traditional Scots-Irish ballads, church hymns, and old Appalachian stories passed down through her family. With warm broth in their stomachs and their mother’s voice filling the cabin, the siblings crowded onto their straw mattresses for the night.

Those evenings gave Parton the narrative structure that defined her early songwriting after she graduated from Sevier County High School in 1964 and moved to Nashville. Rather than hiding her mountain background behind standard studio formulas, she wrote directly about the people and objects from Locust Ridge.

In 1969, while riding on Porter Wagoner’s tour bus, Parton began composing “Coat of Many Colors,” a song about a patchwork coat her mother had sewn from a box of donated rags while telling a biblical story. Unable to find a blank sheet of paper on the bus, she wrote the lyrics on the back of a dry-cleaning receipt from one of Wagoner’s stage suits.

Recorded at RCA Studio B in April 1971, the track reached number four on the country charts and remained the song Parton called her personal favorite throughout her sixty-year career. Wagoner later had the original dry-cleaning receipt framed, and it was placed on display beside a replica coat sewed by Avie Lee at Dollywood.

Two years later, Parton expanded that autobiographical approach into her 1973 concept album, *My Tennessee Mountain Home*. The record featured a photograph of the family’s old wooden house on the cover and included a tribute track named after Dr. Robert F. Thomas, the mountain doctor who had accepted her father’s sack of cornmeal twenty-seven years earlier.

While her mother’s ballads shaped her songwriting, her father’s experience in the mountains led directly to her largest philanthropic work. Having left school as a boy to work the fields, Robert Lee Parton never learned to read or write.

In 1995, Parton approached her father with a plan to mail one free book every month to every child in Sevier County from birth until age five, regardless of family income. She involved him in launching the project, and every newly enrolled child received *The Little Engine That Could* as their first delivery.

Before Robert Lee Parton died in 2000 at age 79—the same year the program expanded across the United States—he told his daughter that the Imagination Library was the most important thing she had ever done. In 2018, when the program marked its 100 millionth book at the Library of Congress, Parton dedicated an illustrated children’s edition of *Coat of Many Colors* to the national collection.

By the time of Parton’s death in August 2026 at age 80, the Imagination Library had expanded across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland, mailing more than 300 million free books to children. At Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, visitors still walk up the wooden steps of a full-scale replica of the Locust Ridge cabin, while a few miles away at the park’s resort kitchen, a vegetable broth called Stone Soup remains on the daily menu.