The Butterfly and the Bulldozer

Lyrics

[Intro]
(machinery starting up on a mountain, and a fiddle deciding to allow it)

[Verse 1]
In 1986 she bought into a failing amusement park in Pigeon Forge
in the county she had been poor in, and she put her name on it,
and everybody in Nashville thought it was vanity and said so out loud,
and she said no, it is jobs, and it turned out she meant jobs.

[Chorus]
Dollywood. Dollywood.
Four thousand people work there. It is the largest employer in Sevier County.
Three million visitors a year come to a place that mainly exists
because a woman decided the money was going back into the ground it came out of.

[Verse 2]
And she paid for the college fees. And she started a scholarship.
And she ran a programme that cut the high-school dropout rate in that county
from over a third down to under ten percent, by paying students to finish,
which is not a song lyric, that is a line out of an evaluation report.

[Chorus]
Dollywood. And in 2016 the wildfires came down off the mountain
and took fourteen lives and two and a half thousand buildings,
and she stood up inside a week and said: a thousand dollars a month,
to every family that lost a home, for six months. Nine hundred families. No forms.

[Bridge]
And at the end of the six months she gave them each five thousand more,
because she had money left over and she was not going to keep it.
People who study disaster relief still write about it, because of the speed —
because the cheques arrived while the professionals were still holding meetings.

[Outro]
(the engine keeps running)
Dollywood.
The largest employer in the county she was born poor in.
No forms.