Freida Parton

Biography

By the time Freida Parton was a teenager and ready to make her own music, her big sister Dolly’s career was well underway, not to mention the musical careers of many other family members. “The mountains are in me, in my blood and my whole being,” Freida says. “But I’ve always written and performed both rock and country songs. That’s why my first album was called Two-Faced, I have both types of music in me.”

Recorded at the famed Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, New York, and featuring several prominent rock players including Paul Butterfield (The Paul Butterfield Blues Band) and Rick Danko (The Band), Freida’s 1984 debut album was a slab of hard rock excitement that garnered MTV play, but with the opening of Dollywood in 1986, she relished an opportunity to get back to her roots.

“Dolly told me she needed another family member for the park show and asked me to come back to Tennessee,” Freida says. “So I decided to come back with new songs — songs about the mountains, my family, how it was for us growing up, how I saw daddy, and what momma meant to me — everything about the Smoky Mountains.”

For the new songs, Freida drew from both personal experiences and the stories she heard from family members growing up. As she began to perform the songs at Dollywood, requests rolled in from fans to release an album, and she turned to her first cousin, Richie Owens, for help.

Richie’s studio, “The Refuge” was a small studio in a former 40-foot refrigerated semi-trailer that Richie had built in Nashville and used for recording a number of Nashville’s punk and alternative rock bands in the mid-1980s. When Richie relocated to Sevierville in 1987, he brought his studio with him.

“It was a lot of fun,” Freida says. ”We weren’t trying to cut a number one. I just wanted to give the fans a piece of the mountains — what it was like to grow up there in our family. I wanted them to always be able to have us in the car with them.”

The resulting cassette-only release transcended a mere musical souvenir to become a breathtaking fusion of traditional mountain ballad themes with modern pop and rock sensibilities. In many ways, it was a harbinger of the sound that would soon be called “Americana,” but fueled by an authentic sense of time and place and crafted with a family musical legacy stretching back for decades. Exclusively sold at Dollywood for only a short time, the album became a beloved classic known to only a handful of select fans.

One of those fans was Freida’s sister Dolly, who chose the song, “The Crops Came In” for her 2024 family album, Smoky Mountain DNA: Family, Faith & Fables, also produced by Richie Owens. In addition to adding Dolly’s backing vocals, Richie took the opportunity to remix the track and expand the sonic landscape of the song with newly recorded backing tracks.

The positive response to the track soon led to the decision to remix and give the rest of the album its first proper release by Van-Par Productions and Owepar Records. The new version finally shines the spotlight on this lost classic of great Americana music, and led to Freida Parton’s desire to share more of her music with the world.