The Snare Drummer From Sevier County
In 2013 a high school band director named Nathan Hickman took his students to play a concert at Dollywood, and one of them asked whether he knew Dolly Parton.
He said yes. He said they’d been friends for years.
He had never met her.
She overheard it. And when she walked out on stage she said, “Hey Nathan! I’m so glad you are at Sevier County now!” and hugged him in front of his entire band.
He found out later this was a whole apparatus — somebody standing offstage feeding her the names of people she was about to meet. He says it’s still one of his favorite memories.
I keep turning that over, because the machinery doesn’t cheapen it. It’s the opposite. Somebody built a system whose entire purpose was making other people feel known. That takes staff, and planning, and a decision about what your fame is for.
Sevier County High School is about forty-five minutes from my office. Dolly graduated in 1964 and left for Nashville the next day. Before she left, she played snare drum in the marching band.
She funded that program for decades afterward. The band wears small butterflies on their purple uniforms because of her. She was also an anonymous donor to hundreds of school districts across the South, most of them primarily Black, plus food banks and literacy programs she never put her name on.
She died on August 25th, at 80.
Tomorrow night the Sevier County band plays “I Will Always Love You” at halftime alongside the Jefferson County band, and the alumni are coming back to play it with them.
Here’s what I can’t get past, teaching percussion in the same corner of this state.
Snare drum is the least glamorous job in a marching band. You’re the timekeeper. No melody, no solo, and if you’re doing it perfectly nobody notices you at all. Every drum line I’ve taught has one kid who understands that the section works because somebody is willing to be the floor.
She was that kid. Then she got the biggest voice in American music and spent fifty years quietly being the floor under everybody else’s band program.
Hickman said it better than I can. He said she was a tiny giant.
