‘I Wish You Love’

On the day after she graduated high school, in 1964, Dolly Parton left her hometown of Locust Ridge, Tennessee, to head for Nashville, just over two hundred miles west and a world apart. Six years later she returned to her alma mater, Sevier County High School, to give a concert, which was recorded as her first live album, A Real Live Dolly. The event was also a fundraiser, inaugurating the Dolly Parton Scholarship Foundation, which was to fund local students’ college tuition and purchase musical equipment for the school’s band.By then, at twenty-four, Parton had released five solo albums and four albums recorded with the country music impresario Porter Wagoner. She’d joined his nationally televised variety show in 1967, and they’d become one of the most popular country-singing duos in the US. By the standards of the music and television business, she wasn’t exactly rich (for the seven years she worked on Wagoner’s weekly television show, her salary was around $60,000 a year), but compared to the extreme poverty of her childhood, she was a huge success. She’d come home to spread the wealth. “The foundation is a project for which she has great plans,” the album’s liner notes promise...