Part 1
Stop One: The Shoes That Couldn't Sing Without Shine
First, look at the shoes. Not the song. Not the hair. The shoes. Backstage at Good Morning America, some producer — probably wearing sensible flats and a headset — worked up the nerve to ask Dolly Parton about her footwear. "All the ladies backstage insisted that I ask you about those shoes," the host said. Dolly didn't blink. "Everybody's loving my shoes. These are my road shoes, but everybody says, 'Ain't you a little overdressed for morning?' I said, 'No. I got to — I can't sing without my shine.'"
Read that again. She can't sing without her shine. Not won't. Can't. The sequins aren't decoration. They're equipment. They're the tuning fork. They're the thing she reaches for the same way a carpenter reaches for a hammer. And if you think that's just a cute line from a woman who has spent six decades being underestimated, you haven't been paying attention to what Dolly Parton has been telling us on morning television since 1980.
So here's the tour. We're walking through the GMA archive — nearly half a century of appearances on ABC's morning show, a friendship that started when Jimmy Carter was in the White House and Ronald Reagan was still a California governor. Dolly's first GMA visit came in 1980, and she showed up to promote a little movie called 9 to 5. You may have heard of it. Directed by Colin Higgins, co-starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, 109 minutes of workplace revenge fantasy that turned into one of the highest-grossing comedies of 1980. Dolly wasn't just in it — she wrote the theme song, and on that morning she gave America an acoustic sampling of it right there on set.
Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living. Barely getting by. It's all taking and no giving. They just use your mind and they never give you credit. It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it. That song became a working-class anthem, a picket-line staple, a karaoke standard, and a Broadway musical. But on that 1980 morning, it was just Dolly, a guitar, and a lyric that understood something about American office life that most Hollywood movies still don't. The transcript's own framing says it best: "She doesn't need sequins to shine, but has plenty of them anyway." That's the whole thesis of this tour in one sentence. She doesn't need them. She brings them anyway. Because they're not for us. They're for her.
Now fast-forward two years. 1982. Dolly sits down with Joan Lunden, who was co-anchoring GMA alongside David Hartman in those years, and the conversation turns to childhood. Not the glossy version. The real one. Extreme poverty in the mountains of East Tennessee. Sevierville, to be exact, one of twelve children in a one-room cabin. And Lunden asks the kind of question that usually gets a polished, PR-approved answer. Dolly gives her the truth instead.
"Well, we didn't know we was poor till some smart alec told us," she says. "We grew up just as part of nature and I think that's one of the reasons that I have such a strong personality and a lot of confidence, 'cause we grew up on just loving the land, loving God, loving one another. But thinking back on it now, I guess it was probably one of the best parts of my whole life."
Sit with that. She's not saying the poverty was good. She's saying the childhood was. The land, the faith, the family — that's the foundation. The lack of money was just weather. And here's the thing that matters for this tour: Dolly's confidence, in her own telling, comes from that childhood. Not despite it. Because of it. The woman who couldn't afford shoes that shined grew up to tell Good Morning America that she can't sing without shine. That's not irony. That's alchemy.
And this is where the shoe bit stops being a shoe bit. Because the same woman who told Lunden she grew up "as part of nature" is the same woman who, years later on GMA, got asked when she finds time to smell the flowers. Her answer: "Well, I actually smell the flowers as I go because I plant the flowers as I go." Plant them and smell them. Both. Simultaneously. That's not a metaphor she stumbled into. That's a life strategy. The flowers are the songs. The flowers are the sequins. The flowers are the Dollywood park she announced to David Hartman in the early '80s — a "mountain fantasy" in East Tennessee, near the Great Smoky Mountains, the most visited national park in the United States. She told GMA she wanted to build something like Disneyland with a mountain theme. And then she actually did it.
The park opened in 1986 in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. It's still there. It's still hers. And when GMA got an all-access pass over the years, Dolly kept saying the same thing in different ways: "I'm proud of my people who've always been proud of me, and it just gives me a good feeling to take something back home." Take something back home. That's the through-line. The shoes, the songs, the park, the cookbook with her sister Rachel in 2024 — it's all the same impulse. Make something beautiful. Bring it back to the people who made you. And wear something ridiculous while you do it.
