Appalachia is a place apart.

History can be observed in its rocks: a place where continents collided and subsided, then collided again. The result is rolling, verdant hills of symmetry, with vegetation rich in volatile organic compounds which, when emitted, shroud those mountains in a world of blue light.

Into this mythic place Dolly Parton was born.

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My first encounter with the music of Parton was as a child, though I did not see her face nor hear her voice.

A cover of her song ‘Love is Like a Butterfly’ became the signature tune of Butterflies (1978-1983), a BBC sitcom vehicle for comedienne Wendy Craig.

By way of daily trudge, Craig’s Ria Parkinson seeks to keep food on the table, herself in the marital bed and her young adult sons out of trouble. Parton’s opening lyrics seemed perfectly to balance the show’s exploration of middle-class veneer, undercut by longing.

‘Love is like a butterfly as soft and gentle as a sigh
The multicoloured moods of love are like its satin wings’

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Dolly Parton’s music was in the country tradition: simple major and minor chords, allied to soulful words. These were delivered with a pretty smile to the outside world, all the better to occlude their depth of meaning.

The songwriter was also a stellar interpreter of others’ songs.

Parton, a mainstay of America’s late night television circuit, delivered a diamond in that format’s ebbing years. On The Late Show with David Letterman (1999), Dolly – supported by country giants Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt – sang an exquisitely delicate interpretation of Neil Young’s ‘After The Gold Rush’.

The live performance sees Parton, in canary yellow, taking the melody. Emmylou is the silver ghost to her right; Linda, a songbird in winter plumage, stands to her left. Parton sings the achingly beautiful third verse alone. Her titanium sweetness trills in the air.

‘Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships lying
In the yellow haze of the sun
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones’

The online video has accumulated ten million views. One viewer’s comment seems to summarise the feeling of a legion.

‘If heaven doesn’t sound like this, I’m not sure I even want to go there.’

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Parton was a polymath whose disposition was artfully to do many things at once.

Her famously, buxomly platinum presentation laid the first trap, inviting judgment as a ditzy escapee from the place where Redneck Road meets Hillbilly Avenue. This was a tactic of attention, from which the proper consideration of regular people might grow.

In interview, one is quickly disabused of any notion that she is superficial.

Hers was the keenest intelligence, wrapped with a humility which meant she never left-hooked the host who might seek to trivialise her talent, her costumes or her dreams.

Parton thought big, acted broadly, and all the time wrote songs to process her experience.

In her book Dream More (2012), she makes important distinction between wishes and dreams. The former are passive aspirations; the latter an invitation to lean in, to sacrifice and to extract the learning if it doesn’t quite work out.

From this spirit came vast philanthropic work, collaboration with a failing amusement park family business which became Dollywood, community work in her native Sevier County, a movie career, songwriting, touring and a beautiful smile, gifted to the regular folk she might meet.

‘Oh I’m not always happy’, she explained. ‘That’s Botox’.

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Dolly Parton was an artist who expressed life through fresh angles. She wrote of the lover tempted to stray, the rival woman, the doomed love, the constancy of platonic love, and the destruction wrought by loving.

Often she addressed social issues which might have created shame in the Smoky Mountains, and beyond.

One such ballad, The Bridge (1968), tells the story of a kiss above the river followed by consummation in the fields.

Alas, the young protagonist’s life quickly unravels. She ends up unwed, pregnant and abandoned – standing on the bridge where first she kissed the man who quit her.

In a twist to the simple folk tune, the woman makes a decision; the music cuts out – abandoned mid-phrase.

“Here is where I’ll start it
And here is where I’ll end it”

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Dolly Parton died in her native Tennessee at the age of eighty. She came down from those smoky blue mountains and sang a new song. Appalachia will long remember the rich seam of her talent.