Once we got to Dollywood it turned out to be a large collection of theaters, each doing a show every half hour or so. We just picked the closest one. They were about to do a show called "Smokey Mountain Christmas."

  

  

A half hour later it was over. A nice show. I decided to check out the Southern Gospel Music Hall of Fame. The kids went off to check out the rides and who knows what else.

  

The Hall of Fame did have a big wall of gold record type things, but what made it interesting was all the stuff that gave the records context. The first exhibit was this church full of wax singers. The plaque explained that professional gospel music grew out of an old tradition of singing the praises of the lord on Sundays.

  

The recording studio seemed like nothing much. Maybe that's really what they were like back then.

  

The white school bus was the first gospel touring bus. Before that bands had to tour in cars, which gave them very little space for equipment and inventory (records and souvenirs to sell at shows). Also, the touring bus gives musicians a relatively cheap place to sleep on the way to the next gig. Once the Blackwood Brothers proved the concept it spread rapidly throughout the music industry.

Dolly Parton's tour bus was the natural descendant of that tradition. They let us tour it in small batches. The wait to get in wasn't that long. After that I found the chasing rainbows museum. It was basically a tour through Dolly Parton's attic. She has quite an attic.

  

I looked at the picture of Dolly with Jimmy Carter and remembered voting for him in '76. That was the first Presidential election I was old enough to participate in. He is still the only Presidential candidate I voted for who actually won the seat. I remember him declaring "the moral equivalent of war" on the energy issue. That still seems like the right approach. To my way of thinking, in a war the first casualty is truth. Is it like that in "the moral equivalent of war"? How do you know? Anyhow, I shook Jimmy Carter's hand many years after this picture was taken.

I remember one time a few years ago I was listening to the radio. Somebody was interviewing Dolly Parton. She said "I'm going to give people the best show I can." After I heard that I thought again about how I could make my website a better place to visit. If you like this site, you to have been touched by Dolly Parton's ideas.

  

I barely remember when gas stations were giving out S & H Green Stamps. You'd get stamps equivalent to what you paid for gas, and stick them in these books. I filled a book or two, and then found out at the redemption center they didn't get me much. I lost interest then. It wasn't long after that they went away. Maybe it was because they were yet another strategy to get people to want to buy more gas. That kind of thing stopped happening not long after we went from being an oil exporting nation to an oil importing nation. Anyhow, I've not seen that kind of premium at a gas station since the Arab oil embargo of '73ish.