What Dolly Parton’s Mother Did to Keep Her Kids Calm During a Dangerous Tornado
Dolly Parton’s mother, Avie Lee Owens, did a good job of keeping her family safe without scaring her 12 children. There was a decent amount of danger in the mountains of East Tennessee. For example, if a big tornado blew through, it could wipe the Partons’ little cabin clean off the ground.
Dolly Parton’s mother made tornado safety protocol into a game
One time, when Parton was a child and her father was out of town, she remembers the sky turning yellow. A big storm was coming.
“I know Mama was worried, but she wouldn’t let us know it,” Parton wrote in her first memoir, Dolly Parton: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “She gathered us all in the house and said that we’d play a new game.”
Avie Lee had the kids turn the furniture upside down and put everything against the wall.
“The boys especially liked this part of the game because they got to do something they would have gotten their butts beat for under normal conditions,” wrote Parton.
When the storm approached the cabin, Parton’s mother said: “Let’s all pretend that there’s a big storm coming, and let’s crawl up under the couch to take cover.”
Of course, it was easy to pretend because a big storm was indeed passing through. But Avie Lee made it feel like a game to keep everyone from getting too scared.
The Partons prayed that their house wouldn’t blow away
The storm raged on.
“The wind blew like mad, and we could hear tree limbs snapping and things blowing by the house,” wrote Parton. “Our house was between two mountains, so tornadoes hardly ever came through our little valley. But this one had managed to touch down in our little holler like some kind of angry giant sticking out a dark black tongue.”
When it got really bad, Avie Lee said: “Now, let’s all pray that the storm will pass over us and leave us unharmed.”
So all the kids who were old enough “prayed like we’d never prayed in our lives.”
While the family prayed, they could hear a “horrifying” noise outside — “It sounded like a train was running over our house.”
But eventually it got quiet.
Everyone went outside to inspect the damage. Trees had been uprooted, crops were ruined, fences were blown down. But the cabin appeared to be untouched.
“If praying really did help, I always thought it must have been Mama’s prayers that were actually answered,” wrote Parton.
The animals didn’t make it
While the “Coat of Many Colors” singer, her siblings, and mother were safe, the family’s animals weren’t so lucky.
“As glad as we were to be alive, we were sad to find that all of our little animals had been killed, all of our chickens and ducks and things,” she wrote. “All of us kids were heartbroken.”
So they held a funeral for all the animals they’d lost in the storm.
“Sometimes it makes you feel a little better just doing something, so we made a little graveyard and buried them all,” she wrote. “If the truth were known, that’s probably the real reason behind human funerals too.”
