08/25/2027
By Chris Moreland, Coolidge National Medal of Honor Heritage Center
Tennessee has a remarkable habit of producing people who make BIG stories out of their lives.
People like Dolly Parton and Captain Larry Taylor
They come from the mountains and small towns, from families with little money and communities far removed from the places where history is usually made. They become soldiers, musicians, teachers and leaders. And every so often, two of those lives cross before either person knows just how extraordinary the other will become.
That happened with Captain Larry Taylor and Dolly Parton.
In 2023, NewsChannel 9’s Josh Roe interviewed Captain Taylor shortly before he traveled to Washington to receive the Medal of Honor. During their conversation with Roe, Taylor recalled something that had nothing to do with helicopters, Vietnam or the battlefield action that would eventually make him a national hero.
He remembered singing with Dolly.
Captain Larry Taylor, far left, was a singer and performed on stage with Dolly Parton before her fame.
As a young man in East Tennessee, Taylor played in a five-piece band called the Bonnevilles. They wore red blazers and performed at fraternity and sorority dances around Knoxville. Occasionally, the band appeared live on WBIR-TV.
Dolly Parton was another young East Tennessee musician trying to make her way.
“She came up four times, ‘Can I sing a song with you?’” Taylor remembered. “And I said, ‘Well, hell yeah. What do you want to sing?’”
Taylor thought it might have been “Wildwood Flower.”
Long before “Jolene,” Dollywood, the awards and a career that would make her one of the most recognizable Tennesseans in the world, Dolly was simply a young woman with a remarkable voice who would walk up to a local band and ask if she could sing.
Taylor remembered more than her talent.
“She’d just come up and hug you,” he told Roe. “She’s country as a cow turd, but she’s the friendliest, friendliest person you’ve ever seen. Genuine. Absolutely genuine.”
It is difficult to imagine a more Larry Taylor description—or, perhaps, a more Tennessee compliment.
Their lives eventually carried them in very different directions.
Taylor became an Army aviator. On June 18, 1968, under intense enemy fire in Vietnam, he used his Cobra attack helicopter to rescue a four-man patrol surrounded by enemy forces, ultimately landing under fire and carrying the men to safety on the helicopter’s rocket-pod skids. More than half a century later, that extraordinary act of courage resulted in the Medal of Honor.
Dolly became Dolly.
Yet Taylor remembered that success never seemed to change the young woman he had known in Knoxville.
Years later, after returning from Germany and living in St. Elmo, Taylor was working around his house with the television playing in the background when he suddenly stopped.
“I heard this voice and said, ‘I’ve heard that voice before.’”
He looked at the television.
“Sure enough, it was Dolly Parton.”
They eventually reconnected. Taylor said she remembered him. They hugged, sat down and talked about where life had taken them.
“She hadn’t changed,” he recalled.
Perhaps that is the most meaningful part of the story.
Tennessee gave us two people whose lives would become larger than either could possibly have imagined during those early days in Knoxville. One would become an American military hero. The other would become an American cultural icon.
But Captain Taylor remembered Dolly not for her fame, wealth or celebrity. He remembered her heart.
“She grew up poor—I mean dirt poor—and she overcame all of it,” Taylor told Roe. “She’s the nicest and most sincere person you’d ever want to meet.”
Captain Taylor died in January 2024.
Today, as Tennessee mourns Dolly Parton, Josh Roe’s interview preserves something especially valuable: the memory of Dolly before the world knew her, told by another remarkable Tennessean before the world fully knew his story, too.
Two lives. Two very different journeys. The same hollers and hills. And, according to Captain Taylor, one very good song together.
I’d like to think Captain Taylor and Dolly are singing together again.
Dolly Parton Mural in Ringgold Georgia
