Why Dolly Parton got choked up at Dollywood

She doesn't dodge it. "I get real emotional just seeing all the wonderful things," she says. Up there she has to read dates off the prompter, and she would much rather just talk to the crowd. Then they brought up her mom and dad, and she "kind of got touched and emotional."

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Dollywood is also marking 50 years of "I Will Always Love You," and Dolly admits she does not keep track of dates. When Dollywood said they wanted to celebrate the 50 years, her first thought was, "Has it been that long?" She's proud of all her songs, but that one is special because so many people relate to it. For years, even when Whitney had her big hit with it, people insisted it was Whitney's song. "That's worked out well," Dolly says.

Her festival celebrates songwriters too. Most people assume whoever sings a song also wrote it, she says, and the writers rarely get their due. "You don't have a hit star unless you've got a song," she says. "Everything begins with the song."

Her own writing keeps no set hours. A line might hit her while she makes her morning coffee, or she might wake in the middle of the night dreaming a song and decide she had better write it down before it slips away. She's writing her own life story for Broadway and just wrote music for someone else's play. "It's just like breathing and eating to me," she says, and she always calls it "my joy and my job."

Josh came here as a kid, before there was any park, and he asks what it is like for her to come home and see the place now. It makes her proud, she says, proud for her people. Someone had asked her that morning if her mom and dad would be proud of her. "They were proud of me before they left this world," she says.

"This is my home," she says. "These are my people." When Dollywood started, she knew it would bring a lot of jobs to a very poor area like the one she grew up in, and it has. That's what hit her on stage that morning: here she is at home, thinking of her mom and dad in their "little Tennessee Mountain Home," and that dreams do come true.

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Then the mood lifts. Josh points out that she'll not be riding the roller coaster, which she has made very clear. She's proud of the new resort on the way, though, where she'll have her own suite, and she cannot decide which of her resorts to stay at. "I'll just alternate, I guess."

When he wishes her a happy 38th season, that number gets her too. "It just seems such a short time," she says. She hopes the park will keep bringing families together for a long time to come, and then she counts her blessings. "There's been a lot of good things happening in my life," she says, "and I'm just really thankful to so many people for that."