Did ‘Gone With the Wind’ Inspire Dolly Parton to Give Her Home This Name?
Country superstar Dolly Parton has been around long enough to have faced a few rumors about herself. For instance, in the early ’80s there was a story about the Tennessee home she shared with husband, Carl Dean. Specifically, people thought she’d named the house Tara after a fictional plantation in the movie Gone With the Wind.
Parton was eventually asked about the story and gladly answered while being interviewed by Andy Warhol. So, did she have a home named Tara? And what else is known about the house and how it got its name?
Dolly Parton and ‘Gone With the Wind’
While chatting with Warhol for Interview magazine in 1984, Parton debunked the rumor that she’d named her home Tara after a plantation in Gone With the Wind. Notably, she listed the movie among her favorites at the time. But she said she didn’t know where the story about her house came from.
“No, I don’t know how that ever got started,” she told Warhol. “They say that in all the magazines, but we don’t call it anything. It’s just a big old house with 23 rooms that we’re about to sell. We built it, but it’s just too big for us.”
“Back when I had the kids, my brothers and sisters, it made more sense, but it’s just too much for us now. It’s got 65 acres and me and Carl [Dean] are both at the age where we don’t want to be tied down to it, so we’re going to find a smaller place in Nashville,” she explained.
But she seemingly still had the home as of 2003, as it was again mentioned in a Rolling Stone article. Notably, it’s claimed that Tara was on her mind when she designed it.
“They live in a house outside Nashville that Parton had built thirty years ago to look like Tara from Gone With the Wind,” they write. “Because, she has said, when you grow up poor, that’s what you think rich Southern folks would do.”
‘Tara’ in the New York Times
As Parton mentioned, despite that she hadn’t personally named her home Tara, a New York Times interview with her also called it that in 1979. She’d recently purchased an apartment in New York and the article was a profile of her “city place.”
Since Dean remained in Tennessee, the article noted, “Her husband was home at Tara, as their 100‐acre farm outside Nashville is called. Not much is known about Tara since Dolly Parton declines to open the door of the 23‐room mansion to almost anyone except kinfolk.”
At the time, she shared the city apartment with her manager, Sandy Gallin. He added to the conversation that he hadn’t even been invited in Parton’s Tennessee house. She replied by telling him, “You got no business in my house.”
Dolly Parton’s at home on the road
As part of a long and lucrative music career, Parton also loves to be out on the road. So, her tour bus is yet another place that she calls home.
The iconic singer-songwriter likes to travel and that seemingly makes her time at home in Tennessee with her so-called homebody husband all the more meaningful. She even told Warhol in 1984, “We don’t like to be together all the time. Nobody likes somebody to be stuck in their face all the time.”
In the end, no matter what names Parton or the press give to any of her houses, it seems home for her is where she comes back to Dean — for a time, at least.
