Our theme verse calls us to love our neighbors by being joyful in hope, being patient in hardship, devoted to a life of praying for others, being generous with our time and resources to those who need it, and to be welcoming and hospitable to everyone.
Tonight, I want to share a true story about one person who lived a life that truly embodied all of these characteristic traits of what it means to love our neighbor no matter who they are. Our story begins a while ago in the center of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, also known as the Great Smoky Mountains, which is home to some of the tallest peaks in the entire Appalachia region. On one of these ridge lines in the Smoky Mountains, called Locust Ridge, lived a poor but proud family trying to make a living the best they could.
Back in this time period it was not uncommon for young folks to meet at an early age and get married. As our story would have it, a young 17-year-old mountain boy fell in love with a local 15-year-old mountain girl. They didn’t have much when they first started their life together. In fact, when these two got married they didn’t have a house of their own and they ended up sleeping in a barn loft owned by the groom’s parents on their wedding night.
Eventually, this young couple did finally get a small and very humble place of their own and started out with only the essentials: two knives, two forks, two spoons, a skillet, a butcher knife, and an old iron kettle. In Appalachia terms, they were dirt poor. But the couple found a way to survive by tending to animals and trying to raise crops. It wasn’t long before they began having kids of their own. They ended up having several children together and on one cold snowy night in January the local doctor was brought up to their small home by horseback to deliver their second daughter, Rebecca. In those days Appalachia folks didn’t have much or any money to pay for things, so they traded what they had for goods and services. In this instance, the agreed upon payment for the doctor delivering Rebecca was a sack of cornmeal.
Rebecca’s love for her neighbors was formed at an early age. Her dad worked as a tenant farmer. This is someone who lives on someone else’s land and works the land in order to pay rent for the house they lived in. Rebecca’s family rented their small home from a woman named Martha, who treated all the kids and family with kindness and care. As a four-year-old, Rebecca remembered how well she was cared for by Martha. She remembered going to visit Martha at her home in hopes of receiving some sweet treats of gingerbread and corn bread that were mixed together and cooked in a skillet. They were called hoecakes.
She would climb the steps to Martha’s house and call out, “Ain’t you got no gingerbread?” Martha would sing little songs to Rebecca and make her feel right at home. This was her earliest memory of a neighbor demonstrating love for a neighbor and would be the start of Rebecca’s love for others as was shown to her at a very young age. Growing up, Rebecca’s mom became the example of faith in God to all her kids. Rebecca was known for being a very expressive little girl and would get her brothers and sisters to act out stories they learned about from the Bible. They would find long robes, paint their feet to look like sandals, and carry tobacco stakes in order to play “disciple.” Rebecca and her brothers and sisters loved to pretend and be silly. One summer they played a “baptizing” game in the river they loved to swim in to see if they could get each other saved. At one point Rebecca was dunked at least 50 times. As the family continued to have more kids, they were finally able to save up enough money to buy their own home: a four-bedroom cabin that was insulated with newspapers and the Sunday comics that were pasted all over the inside walls. The house wasn’t much, but Rebecca could stand on the porch and see her new school from the second mountain over.
Life growing up in the mountains wasn’t easy. The kids would bathe in the nearby river in the summer. In the winter, they would get into a large dishpan full of hot water. Once a year their dad would measure the kids’ feet with a stick and then took those sticks into town to buy the kids their shoes. Because they were poor, Rebecca’s mom would make potholders out of worn-out overalls, fashioned dresses out of feed sacks and watered-down ketchup and mustard to make them last longer. The kids slept 3-4 to a bed at the time, and they all learned how to use a cross-cut saw, set tobacco fields, haul wood, hoe corn and stayed home from school when potato digging season arrived.
When Rebecca began going to school, she would walk to a point in the road with her brothers and sisters where their teacher, Mrs. McMahan, would be walking towards the schoolhouse with other kids from the holler. Mrs. McMahan soon recognized that Rebecca was an unusually bright child and full of get-up-and-go. She asked Rebecca to help lead the hymn singing in school at the start of each day because Rebecca knew all the songs by heart. Although Rebecca could memorize just about anything, she let her mind wander and daydreamed and was a very fidgety student. Mrs. McMahan didn’t give up on Rebecca and found ways to help her get through her classes. Once again, Rebecca was influenced by the kindness and attentive care of her teacher who helped to shape how she should treat others.
When Rebecca got into high school, things seemed to get a bit worse. Rebecca was no longer in a small mountain school where most of the kids were as poor as she was. High school was located in the nearby town, and the town kids had much better living situations. They could afford nicer clothes and lived in better homes. They saw kids like Rebecca as a backwoods, dirt poor, country bumpkin and took every opportunity to make fun of her and her kind. Rebecca, however, tried not to let that bother her and she was driven to help her parents bring in money to help out. She found some opportunities to make a little bit of money by singing some of the mountain songs she learned growing up on an outdoor stage in town that was set up as local music venue, but most of the high school kids ended up making fun of her and mocking her singing style. While the town kids could afford to eat hot lunches in the cafeteria the country kids, like Rebecca, brought their ham sandwiches and cornbread lunch and got made fun of for that too. It wasn’t easy for Rebecca, but somehow, she kept her positive attitude.
Rebecca never earned any special recognition or superlatives in high school. Most of her teachers disregarded her and she never really stood out with great grades or ambition. The only teacher who seemed to pay her any attention was the band teacher, Mr. Rutherford, who gave her a chance to play the snare drum in marching band. Mr. Rutherford thought Rebecca had some talent and that there was something special about her. He liked her ambition, grit, and good attitude and the fact she could keep a rhythm. He ended up letting her come into the band room with a friend during the school day to escape the other students to play the piano and write some songs down. His kindness towards this backwoods mountain girl also helped to shape neighborly thoughtfulness and kindness in Rebecca’s life.
Rebecca’s desire to write and sing songs only grew stronger towards the end of high school. At the end of her graduation ceremony each graduate was given the chance to stand in front of the audience and say what they would be doing next. Some said they were going off to college. Some said they were enlisting in the military. Some said they were going to work for the family business. She told everyone she was going to Nashville to become a singer and songwriter. All she heard was laughter from those in the audience and most of her graduating class. Although the pain of that moment lingered for a long time, she resolutely packed up her belongings in some fruit boxes she grabbed from the local grocery store and headed off on a bus towards the big city. The first few years were extremely difficult for her. In moments of desperation, she would walk through hotel hallways looking for scraps of food from room-service trays. Rebecca did eventually find better food and some new neighbors who turned out to be just as good as family one day when she met Norman and Viola at Couser’s Restaurant.
Norman and Viola were good old country folks that had also come from a small town to the big city just like Rebecca, and they gave her a place to work and eat. They weren’t just her boss. They genuinely got to know Rebecca and cared for what was going on in her life. Their love for neighbor ran deep and they too ended up making an impression on Rebecca, giving her hope and encouragement in a difficult time in her life. In the meantime, she kept working with one of her uncles who helped her try to achieve her dream by driving her around and dropping off demo tapes Rebecca had made and trying to talk with music executives. No one was interested in Rebecca’s work with one executive telling her she sounded like a “screech owl.” After just about every executive in Nashville said “no” to the small-town girl from East Tennessee, one finally said yes. Fred Foster of Monument Records liked what he saw and what he heard from the young mountain town girl.
Fred was known to find unusual and unglamorous talent and give them a chance. Fred thought he could turn this small-town country girl into the next pop star. Although Rebecca wanted to sing songs she wrote about living in the mountains, he thought she should sing pop songs. He tried every song and latest pop style they had on her and all of them fell flat on their face. Fred even passed Rebecca off to another producer and it seemed like that producer kept trying to drown out her voice with the accompanying drums and brass instruments. One day, Rebecca had a chance to co-record a country song she helped to write at another record label while she was trying to figure out the future of her pop music with Fred. The song she recorded became a hit and even ended up earning her a songwriting award. Fred Foster decided to switch gears with Rebecca and have her start singing country songs, like she wanted to in the first place. Fred found a friend who had written lyrics to a song called “Dumb Blonde” and had Rebecca sing it. It shot to number 24 on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles and remained on the charts for months.
Rebecca’s dreams of making it big were about to come true.
Dolly “Rebecca” Parton would go on to become one of the most iconic musicians and storytellers in history. She would leverage that Appalachia rags to Nashville riches story to become one of the most well-known examples of what it means to love your neighbor. “From singing barefoot on the front porch of her Tennessee Mountain Home to commanding the stage in six-inch heels, Dolly Rebecca Parton became a larger-than-life living legend with a heart to love others as big as her dreams.”
Over the years, Dolly Parton’s love for neighbor has been demonstrated through working with charitable organizations in support of numerous causes, and in 1996, she established her own Dollywood Foundation. With the goal of improving literacy among young children, she created Dolly’s Imagination Library, a program that donates more than 10 million books to children annually. “They call me the Book Lady. That’s what the little kids say when they get their books in the mail,” she told The Washington Post in 2006. “They think I bring them and put them in the mailbox myself, like Peter Rabbit or something.”
Though many of her charitable contributions are anonymous, Parton has used her success to give back to her community by providing scholarships for children, donating thousands to hospitals, and providing technology and supplies for classrooms.
After the town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and other towns near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park were devastated by wildfires in 2016, Parton helped raise $12.5 million to support the victims and helped rebuild the area. Earlier this year (2026), East Tennessee Children’s Hospital announced it is officially becoming the Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital, marking a powerful new collaboration designed to elevate children’s healthcare across East Tennessee and beyond. “Being fortunate to have grown up in the mountains of East Tennessee, I learned early on what it means to take care of one another,” said Dolly Parton. “Every child deserves world-class care, wrapped in kindness and love. I’m so honored to stand alongside this hospital and do my part to help bring more hope, more comfort and more healing to children and families.”
Dolly Rebecca Parton’s life is a reflection of how to love our neighbors. The positive examples of the neighbors in her life helped to shape the example she has become of loving our neighbors no matter who they are. She once said, “I just love everybody. I try to find the God-light in people and I try to play to that. I try not to be judgmental…and I think we should just love each other and try not to judge and find the good in us and pray for the bad and just accept people the way they are.”
Romans 12:12–13 calls us to be joyful in our hope, patient in enduring difficult things, faithful in praying for others, and to display radical hospitality. Dolly Rebecca Parton’s early life embodies this kind of neighborly love. Growing up in the hardship of poverty in rural Tennessee Dolly consistently showed generosity, kindness, and dignity toward others.
Story by Shawn Winburn, Spiritual Programs Coordinator, Appalachia Service Project
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