Wildflowers Don’t Care Where They Grow

Another Dolly eulogy

I’ve never been to Dollywood.

I’ve never been to the East Tennessee Smokies.

I’ve been close. Spent my 46th birthday soaking in a hot spring in the middle of nowhere about an hour outside of Asheville, North Carolina, and made a couple of trips to Nashville for Wilco shows at the Ryman (including my 42nd birthday with Darren), and Mark Lanegan with K.

Turning 42 at Third Man Records with Darren. October 22, 2014. Nashville, Tennessee.

Smooching Jake, the Guardian of the Goats on the farm where I spent my 46th birthday. October 24, 2018. Weaverville, North Carolina.

My high ass. K meeting Mark Lanegan. May 5, 2019. Nashville, Tennessee.

Most of my adventuring has been on the other side of Tennessee.

But I’m no stranger to Dolly’s world. I was raised in it.

Aunt Helen and Granny Viv. Somewhere in Missouri. Sometime in the 1980s.

Since news of Dolly’s death, some people have noted how lucky we were to have been alive at the same time as her. I couldn’t agree more. But I’ll say that I’m luckier than most, because I was born in 1972, just in time to have her early post-Porter Wagoner career provide the soundtrack to my childhood. Just in time to have my non-singing mother sing “Love is Like a Butterfly” to me as a little bitty one.

Mom and me, sometime in winter in our country girl glam, 1974 or 1975. Sedalia, Missouri.

I also came from a family of women who understood what Dolly was saying. We weren’t from Appalachia, but the Ozark. While the hills were smaller and the region less vast, the Ozarks had abject poverty in common with Dolly’s home turf. I’ve heard so many family stories about the hardships and trauma that came from that world. Suffice it to say that it’s only been in the last fifty or so years that my family hasn’t been impoverished.

Since he wasn’t eligible for military duty because it was thought he only had one working lung, Grandpa Chuck found work as a truck driver. Granny Viv worked an assortment of jobs and I can’t remember all of them now other than a factory worker in the Levi’s factory in my hometown, and an upholsterer. She was skilled in just about everything through intelligence and tenacity.

Granny Viv and Grandpa Chuck during their engagement. Around 1946. Somewhere in Laclede County, Missouri.

Grandpa Chuck loved country music and watched all of the country TV shows. Hee-Haw was his favorite, which is how I found myself sobbing in a TV set cornfield at the Country Music Hall of Fame during my first Nashville trip. I also remember watching The Porter Wagoner Show at their house when Grandpa wasn’t on the road. Dolly left the show, and wrote “I Will Always Love You” as an apology to Wagoner, when I was a toddler, so I don’t have any memory of seeing her on the show, but I’m certain I must have.

Granny Viv wasn’t a fan of TV. It was too loud for her taste, but she sure liked Dolly. She didn’t wear makeup or dress trashy because she was a God-fearing Pentecostal lady, but she had the loophole of “the higher the hair, the closer to God” on her side. And boy, she stayed close to her lord and savior.

I thought she was the most beautiful person in the world. No one looked like her. She was special. I was correct.

My infancy with Granny Viv's bouffant. 1972-1973. Sedalia, Missouri

I don’t remember who gave me the 8x10 photo of Dolly that wasn’t framed, that I loved and carried until the paper wore out. I don’t remember who handed me a big blonde wig and encouraged me to stuff a couple of oranges up my shirt so I’d look like a mini Dolly at age four. I don’t remember who had the 1975 Dolly album with “Here You Come Again” and my favorite, “Two Doors Down,” which I had no business singing at my age. But I sure am glad they did.

Dolly, her songs, her style, and her principles were just there all the time, under the surface of the women in my matriarchal line. Dolly was both as familiar as family, and other-worldly, one of my first inklings that the world didn’t end at my front door. That’s where the world began.

I do remember this: the hot smell of Granny Viv’s sewing machine when she really got going. For the first years of my life, she and my mom made a great deal of my wardrobe. She made quilts for everyone. Some of them intricate patterns like Sunbonnet Sue. Others simple double-knit polyester scraps quilted with hand-tied yarn.

I remember hearing Dolly sing “Coat of Many Colors” and knowing that song was about clothes like the patchwork scrap quilts Granny made and gave to everyone. She made me a scrappy patchwork stuffed puppy with lots of seafoam green. The same bag of scraps supplied the pieces for Granny’s own coat of many colors, made several years after Dolly released the song in 1971.

“Perhaps this coat will bring you good luck and happiness.” Granny Viv, that wonderful hair, her coat of many colors, and a llama named Jolene (She really liked Grandpa Chuck). 1975. Somewhere in Texas.

I’ve never been able to listen to Coat of Many Colors without sobbing. Even when I was little. That might be the song that first channeled my feelings into tears. I’ve listened to it repeatedly these two days, and I’ve looked at this photo over and over. We were on a family vacation to Texas when I was two, and I have faint, smudged memories of it. I wish I could pull them into the present and look at that trip, recall what it taught my little toddler mind.

I have plenty of other trips to pull memories from, though. In so many of them, waking up in a camper on chilly Rocky Mountain or muggy Ozark mornings with Granny Viv frying potatoes and onions for breakfast. Not over the fire, but in the electric skillet she plugged into the campsite’s hookups, not a hair out of place.

But they didn't understand it
And I tried to make them see
That one is only poor
If they choose to be.
Now I know we had no money
But I was rich as I could be
In my coat of many colors
That my mama made for me.

As I’ve listened to this song, looked at that photo, and considered my childhood and who I am now that I’m around the same age as Granny Viv when she made that coat, now living in a world without the thread of Dolly connecting her to me, I’ve tried to suss out the meaning, if there is any. And this is what struck me:

Granny Viv, like Dolly, was vocal about how she loved everyone. They practiced what they preached, too. When I eulogized Granny Viv at her funeral in the Pentecostal church that had the same royal blue carpet it had when I’d go there with her as a child just to hear the band, that was my point: she loved everyone. Not just in her home or in that church, either. That country girl saw America, finally, from its highways, in the passenger seat of Grandpa Chuck’s 18-wheeler. A world where there were even more people to love.

She gave that world to her children and her grandchildren.

But when it came to making a coat of many colors? She did that for herself.

And she more than deserved it and everything it stood for.

Because of the way Granny Viv lived her life, “Coat of Many Colors” didn’t have to be my song. No, my Dolly song is “Wildflowers”:

So I uprooted myself
from my home ground and left.
Took my dreams and I took to the road.
When a flower grows wild
it can always survive.
Wildflowers don't care where they grow. 

I hope that somewhere, I don’t know where, Granny Viv and Dolly had coffee together and compared their beautiful coats today.