It doesn’t take a lot to get Dolly Parton within the Christmas spirit and he or she likes to deliver buddies and family alongside for the celebration, so when the “9 to 5” and “Jolene” singer was introduced with the thought of constructing a brand new particular for the vacation, she got here up with the thought of making a present inside a present, which grew to become Dolly Parton’s Mountain Magic Christmas, filmed within the Great Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee at Dollywood.
“I always love working from home and Dollywood is like a movie set,” the country music legend instructed Parade in a 1:1 interview. “We’ve got some of everything on the park as far as my old home place, replicas of the church, and some of that stuff is for real, so we thought it would be a great idea to just do it from home, uplift people, and have a lot of my own family and friends involved.”
Invited alongside for the vacation particular have been her musical buddies Jimmy Fallon, Willie Nelson, Miley Cyrus, Billy Ray Cyrus, Jimmie Allen and Zach Williams, every of whom performs a quantity with Parton within the modern-day film musical concerning the making of a community TV particular.
Dolly Parton’s Mountain Magic Christmas takes viewers behind the scenes as Parton’s need to uplift an exhausted world’s spirits takes her on a non-public journey into her previous, guided by the mysterious appearances of her private Three Wise Men.
“The idea of doing a show within a show was to make it a little more interesting because I think people like to know what it’s like to put a show together,” she added. “They don’t know really and that added for some comedy and some fun. It’s really interesting to let people see what really can go on and what can go wrong behind the scenes, so we just thought it was a fun idea.”
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It was additionally an opportunity for Parton to share the distinctive “mountain magic” she has at all times present in and round Dollywood at Christmas—despite the fact that the particular was filmed in August on the theme park.
Photo by: Katherine Bomboy/NBC
“Years ago, I had written a song about mountain people being as sweet as mountain honey and you can feel the mountain magic in your soul,” Parton defined. “Mountain magic is just that feeling you get when you’re happy where you are and proud of who you are, so there’s a lot of that magic mountain that flows through all of this. The goodwill, the spirit of Christmas, the stories, the songs, and the relationships with all the great guests we have. I think that that magic creates its own kind of feeling—magic is a feeling— and so I think it came across that we were having fun and we did a good show.”
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Several of Parton’s traditional songs are featured, like “I Will Always Love You” and “9 to 5,” however the Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter additionally wrote a couple of new songs for the event.
“There’s actually several songs that I had on an album a couple years ago with some of the guests, but we didn’t get to do a special then, so I brought them back on to do the special,” Parton mentioned. “But the last song that we do in the show is called ‘When Life is Good Again,’ and it’s about hoping what I hope for the New Year and what I was trying to have with the mountain magic, which is to lift people up. It’s talking about when all the shadows and darkness fades.”
The lyrics seize the sensation:
“When life is good again
I’ll be a better friend
A bigger person when
Life is good again
More thoughtful than I’ve been
I’ll be so different then
More in the moment when
Life is good again…”
Photo by: Katherine Bomboy/NBC
Then, Parton additionally included a brand new track known as ‘Be That,’ which is all about inclusivity: “Whoever you are be that, whatever you do, do that, because anything else is just an act, so whoever you are be that,” is how the track goes.
“There’s a lot of songs that have a meaning, have inspiration, and get all the different types of people involved in singing it,” Parton mentioned of the musical alternatives for the particular. “But then we did a lot of great old classic songs and a lot of things that I had written that are meaningful that I look into the camera and talk to the audience telling them how I feel about certain things and my heart. We had the singalong with the children, which is always fun, so there’s something in the show for everybody. Hopefully, you’ll go away feeling better after you’ve seen it than you did before you started.”
Dolly Parton’s Mountain Magic Christmas premieres on Thursday, Dec. 1 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on NBC and encores on Dec. 21.
Next, 50 of Dolly Parton’s Best Quotes About Fame, Love and Womanhood!
