When Dolly Parton’s Welsh and English ancestors landed on American shores more than a century ago, settling in the Appalachian mountain regions of Tennessee and North Carolina, they could scarcely have imagined that generations later one of their descendants would become one of the most successful songwriters of all time. But, as it turns out, music and entertaining have always been integral to the Parton family’s genetic makeup. Smoky Mountain DNA: Family, Faith and Fables, a new 30-track collection, celebrates that gift.
Spanning five generations and including songwriting and vocal contributions from Dolly herself and an assemblage of family members — siblings, cousins, nephews, nieces, and ancestors who have passed on since their recordings were committed to tape — Smoky Mountain DNA is a family scrapbook and musical history lesson. It includes country and gospel, to be sure, but also old-timey mountain music, pop, and even hip-hop.
Produced by Richie Owens, Dolly’s first cousin, the set traces the Parton and Owens family trees back to their beginnings. Archival recordings of late family members are particularly fascinating: among them are Dolly’s grandfather, Reverend Jake Owens; his daughter (and Dolly’s mother), Avie Lee Owens Parton; and her uncles Bill and Louis Owens, who were both heavily involved in the singer’s career as she left Sevierville, Tennessee, to settle in Nashville in the early Sixties.
A pioneer of the Nashville rock music scene as a singer-songwriter, Owens has been a longtime archivist of his family’s artistic output. He says the brood’s musicianship was especially strong with his great grandfather, James Robert Owens, born in Jonathan’s Creek, North Carolina, in 1877.
“He was very well-known up in the mountains for his clawhammer banjo style and his singing,” Owens tells Rolling Stone. “People would get on their old-time windup telephone and wind it up so it would ring, then everyone would know by the number of rings that he was going to perform for them. The song he was noted for was ‘Sourwood Mountain.’ We joke that he was probably the first streamer, because he got everybody on their phone.”
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Owens’ grandfather (who is also Dolly’s grandfather), Rev. Jacob Robert “Jake” Owens, was a college-educated preacher and music teacher who was keen on his family’s musical lineage. “He was coming up in the era of radio and knew his family had that kind of talent,” Owens says, “so he started getting his daughters and sons on the radio as family groups. As they got older, after World War II, they went out and started getting opportunities on their own in Knoxville and eventually made their way in the late Fifties into Nashville.”
Dolly’s late brother, Floyd Parton, his twin sister, Freida, and Dolly’s youngest sibling, Rachel, also appear on Smoky Mountain DNA. Danielle Parton, the daughter of Dolly’s brother, Bobby, performs a duet on Dolly’s “The Man” with her aunt, and Freida Parton’s daughter, Jada Star, sings with Dolly on a song she wrote herself.
The project moves seamlessly through the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with recent generations of the family contributing tracks ranging from contemporary country to vibrant rock & roll. Cementing its foothold in the here and now is “Holy Water,” which, like Beyoncé’s recent cover of “Jolene,” fuses a Parton country classic, “The Seeker,” with hip-hop elements, courtesy of Parton’s nephew Sabyn Mayfield.
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For Owens, helping his superstar cousin introduce fans to a larger swath of Parton (and Owens) musical history is a calling. It is, after all, in his DNA too.
“My mother’s side of the family was musical. That’s how my dad met my mother. Her uncles played music and my grandfather knew them. They’d get together and play,” he says. “That’s how it becomes generational.”