Dolly Parton Tackles Inclusivity in a Way Only She Can in Holiday Special 'Dolly Parton's Mountain Magic Christmas'

Dolly Parton continues her tradition of holiday movies and celebrating diversity and inclusion in new Christmas movie.

It doesn’t take much to get Dolly Parton in the Christmas spirit and she likes to bring friends and family along for the celebration, so when the “9 to 5” and “Jolene” singer was presented with the idea of making a new special for the holiday, she came up with the idea of creating a show within a show, which became Dolly Parton’s Mountain Magic Christmas, filmed in 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 told 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 along for the holiday special were her musical friends Jimmy Fallon, Willie Nelson, Miley Cyrus, Billy Ray Cyrus, Jimmie Allen and Zach Williams, each of whom performs a number with Parton in the modern-day movie musical about the making of a network TV special.

Dolly Parton’s Mountain Magic Christmas takes viewers behind the scenes as Parton’s desire to uplift an exhausted world’s spirits takes her on a private journey into her past, guided by the mysterious appearances of her personal 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.”

Related: Everything You Need To Know About Dolly Parton's Fun and Festive New Christmas Movie Musical

It was also a chance for Parton to share the unique “mountain magic” she has always found in and around Dollywood at Christmas—even though the special was filmed in August at the theme park.

“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 explained. “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.”

Related: Dolly Parton Shares the Heartwarming Stories Behind 10 of Her Favorite Songs

Several of Parton’s classic songs are featured, like “I Will Always Love You” and “9 to 5,” but the Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter also wrote a few new songs for the occasion.

“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 said. “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 capture the feeling:

"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..."

Then, Parton also included a new song called '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 song 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 said of the musical selections for the special. “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!