Dolly Parton's new theme park - Hello, Dollywood

Dolly Parton's life has been an all-singing, all-acting rollercoaster experience – and now you can join the ride
at her multi-million-dollar Smoky Mountain theme park

DOLLY PARTON likes to get her retaliation in first, with a joke about her appearance. "It took a lot of money to look this cheap," she often says. The same might be said about her theme park, Dollywood. Since it opened, 162 million has been invested in the park, most recently in the Mystery Mine rollercoaster (17.5m) and the River Battle water adventure (5m). That is, by anyone's standards, a high price for cheap thrills.

But the truth is, Dollywood comes as something of a relief after the horrors of the nearest town, Pigeon Forge, which charmlessly mixes malls, go-karts and pawn shops as it tries to distract visitors on their way to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Dollywood is unashamedly brash but, like its patron, upfront about its charms. It is a place dedicated to thrills and consumption.

You can ride the wooden rollercoaster and experience double G-force; a sensation akin to an explosion of sherbet in the brain, which is eased only by the knowledge that you are about to be decapitated. Or you can eat funnel cake, a deep-fried confection so unhealthy it's a wonder it wasn't invented in Scotland. You can feel nostalgic: a section of the park is dedicated to a re-creation of 1950s America, and the air is heavy with syrup and rock'n'roll.

In Craftmen's Valley, men in dungarees whittle as if The Waltons never ended. A modest horse-drawn wagon can be had for under 3,000, while the Brakeman Station serves shaved ice and frosted nuts (a mix that is best ordered sober). There are demonstrations of sheep-shearing and wheat-weaving, and dachshunds made of tin. For those in search of a novelty porch decoration, this is heaven. There are also T-shirts pledging allegiance to God, John Deere and Turtletown, Tennessee.

Of course, not all of this is down to Parton. The park has existed at the gateway to the Smokies since 1961, when it was called Railroad Junction and consisted of a steam train, a general store, a saloon and a blacksmith's. Parton's involvement – a matter of investment, marketing and rebranding – occurred in 1986, when she bought into the business. Back then, the notion of a country singer becoming a tourist attraction was almost normal. On the outskirts of Nashville, Johnny Cash's House of Cash allowed visitors a glimpse of his extensive collection of antique bedsteads, while Conway Twitty's Twitty City offered all the fun of the fair, and the promise of proximity to the big-haired man who sang 'It's Only Make Believe'.

Unlike Twitty, Parton doesn't live on the premises, but visits Dollywood once or twice a year, playing charity shows and announcing her presence with a regal procession through the park. Happily, my visit coincided with one of Parton's, so I took a position behind the plastic tape that marked her route.

The crowd wasn't quite a full cross-section of the American South – I counted only two black people and one transvestite – but there was a broad spectrum, from bikers and Christians and extended clans of mullet-wearing parents with chubby children to wiry senior citizens and a great many women of a certain age. As we waited, this grand coalition of cola-drinking humanity, a scarecrow walked past holding a flower. A woman called Tracey – she wore a name-tag – flitted by in an old-fashioned floral dress. Banjo music wafted from inside a fibreglass rock. A train whistle blew nearby.

Finally, the singer appeared, waving gaily from the red banquette of a vintage car. Parton has often said that her look was a country girl's idea of glamour, and up close she seemed pretty, but tough; and cartoonish, like a Hanna-Barbera version of a forces sweetheart. She would look good painted on the nose cone of a B-17 bomber.

I cornered Parton in the corridors of the Celebrity Theatre, where she was sound-checking for an evening performance. By now she was dressed more formally, in expensive rags. It wasn't the hair that caught the eye, or even the famous bosom. It was the legs. They were the legs of an 18-year-old. Parton is 62.

"Where I was born and raised is probably not more than ten miles from here," she said, crossing those disconcerting legs for emphasis. "Country miles! Ten to 15 country miles!" She uncrossed the legs, then coiled them together again. "That's like sayin' 'wider than the mountains'. It seems like you're in another world, but it's very close."

She talked breathlessly, saying that she loved the area. "To me the Smoky Mountains is just the most beautiful place in the world. It's natural for people to feel that way about their home, but I really do, and I've been all over the world.

"I love the fact that I came from a great place where there are great people. And then to see what Dollywood has become, to see how it has added so much to the area, and to know that I had some small part in that, does make me feel good."

She added – not, perhaps, for the first time – that if she hadn't been a singer she would still have pursued a career in the people business. "I would have been a prostitute or a missionary. But if I'd been a prostitute, I would have got in the missionary position!"

With that though racing guiltily through my mind, I went in search of the reproduction of Parton's Tennessee mountain home. The music legend was raised in good-natured poverty on Locust Ridge, in the Smoky Mountains, where her sharecropper father tended a tobacco patch in order to provide for his growing family. Eventually, there were 12 offspring. The cabin is life-sized, but tiny, crammed with beds and patchwork quilts, and lacking the romance evoked by Parton in the song 'My Tennessee Mountain Home'. But then Parton has always been a romantic.

Over in Craftmen's Village, I met up with Dollywood's master carver, Lee Warren, a self-assured former stuntman from Biloxi, Mississippi. Fist-fights, knife-fights, adaptations of Carson McCullers, he had done them all. Dollywood, he said, is different. "Other theme parks don't tend to think of dad. It's mainly the children or mom, doing rides or shows or getting something to eat. Dollywood is unique in that the crafts are something for dad to do. He can look at wood-carving, wagon-making, blacksmithing, and it can interest the kids as well."

Dollywood does have fairground rides, with river rafts and abandoned mines. And by next year it will also have Adventure Mountain, with a waterfall, a gorge, mountain trails and canoes. There is music, often by Parton's relatives, if not by the star herself. But the place is memorable more for the way it seems to exist in an uncertain time and place. It is a patchwork quilt of a theme park, in which the only coherent idea is of nostalgia for a kinder, gentler, more countrified America.

This is no accident. In fact, it's almost a matter of faith. There's a sign in the craft village in which the manifesto is spelled out – "To recapture the experience of a simpler time, when working with the hands was a way of life which provided the necessities of life and the pride in their creation."

You can quibble. Or you can shave your ice, frost your nuts and get on with it.

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North America Travel Service (0131 225 4155, www.northamericatravelservice.co.uk) charges from £699 per person for a package that includes flights with KLM (www.klm.com) from Glasgow to Knoxville, Tennessee, a week's car rental and day passes for Dollywood.

Visit www.dollywood.com for more details about the theme park, including festivals, events and podcasts. And log on to the official tourism sites www.tennessee.gov/tourdev and www.tnvacation.com for things to do in the area, such as wildlife tours and nature walks.