Dolly Parton was 29 years old, in a sequined black pantsuit and platinum curls, when she stood on a stage at the Canaan Fair in August 1975 and watched kids in the mud trying to get as close as they could. Gov. Meldrim Thomson liked the show so much he had his son present her with honorary New Hampshire citizenship on the spot.
Donna Dunkerton was somewhere in that crowd. Fifty-one years later, the details of the night have mostly worn away.
“I went to see Dolly, but I don’t remember the songs that she sang,” said Dunkerton, a Canaan historian.
What hasn’t worn away is her sense of the fair itself — the version of it that once drew crowds of 15,000 to 20,000 people, before its run came to an end.
“It’s like everything else — it just fizzled out,” Dunkerton said. “It got to be so expensive to have everybody come.”
A fairground with deep roots
The Canaan Fairgrounds date back further than most people realize. Dunkerton said the property was once the Mascoma Valley Trotting Park, with horse racing there as early as 1868 and the first Canaan Fair a year later. After going dark around 1900, the Canaan Fair Association revived it and ran it for decades.
In its mid-century heyday, it opened with a parade and was anchored by horse pulling, harness and jalopy racing and midway rides.
“The horse racing really was a big deal for many years,” Dunkerton said.
Growing up near the fairgrounds in the 1960s, she and other kids without ticket money would wait by the bridge, hoping someone they knew would toss them a spare or wave them onto a ride.
“But those days are gone forever,” she said.
Through the 1970s, the fair drew national country acts — Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell and Lorrie Morgan, Dunkerton said, alongside Parton. An October 1976 rock concert on the same grounds was another matter, overrunning the town for days and leaving shopping carts of looted food rolling up Parker Street, Dunkerton said.
By the 1980s the fair was smaller, “almost a circus,” Dunkerton said. Its last ad in the Valley News ran in July 1988 — a four-day “Canaan Country Fair” with a midway, horse pulls, cloggers and a monster truck named Godzilla. The last trace of it is a 1989 letter to the editor from Mary Ann Kelly Guaraldi of Grafton, who asked why the paper had skipped “a nice country fair struggling to make a comeback.” She signed off: “Maybe next year.”
There doesn’t appear to have been one. The fairgrounds are privately owned today and used for small-car racing.
Dolly Parton’s night in NH
When Parton came to Canaan in 1975, she was already a Nashville star but not yet a household name beyond country radio. Born in 1946 in Sevier County, Tennessee, one of 12 children in a farming family, she’d left for Nashville the day after high school graduation and gotten her break in 1967 on “The Porter Wagoner Show.” She’d gone solo the year before the Canaan show and had just written the songs that would outlast everything, like “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You.”
She played the Canaan Fair with her brother Randy in her backing “Traveling Family Band,” and told the crowd stories about growing up in the mountains between songs, the Valley News reported at the time. At a press conference between shows, when asked why a star like her bothered with a fair in Canaan, she said that’s where the country fans are — in the smaller towns, among families who couldn’t afford to drive 100 miles to a city show.
Two years later came the pop crossover, then “9 to 5,” Dollywood and a film career. By the end of her life, she’d sold more than 100 million records.
Parton died Aug. 25, 2026, at 80, following what her family described as a brief battle with cancer. Her death capped a seven-decade career and a philanthropic legacy that reached far beyond Nashville — including into New Hampshire and Vermont.
A legacy in books
That legacy is alive on both sides of the river. Three state senators, including Suzanne Prentiss, D-Lebanon, plan to file bipartisan legislation this month to bring Parton’s Imagination Library — which mails a free book each month to children from birth to age 5 — to every family in New Hampshire. The program would cost the state about $750,000 a year once fully rolled out.
Right now, access depends on where a family lives, with a patchwork of local nonprofits running the program in both states. Addison County Readers alone has given out more than 150,000 books in Vermont. And interest has only grown since Parton’s death: one Nashua program enrolled 300 new NH children in the week afterward, the Concord Monitor reported.
Fifty-one years after she stood on a stage in Canaan, Dolly Parton’s presence in the Upper Valley hasn’t faded — it’s just changed shape.
Below is an exact reprint of the story published in the Monday, Aug. 11, 1975 issue of the Valley News
Miss Dolly Wows Mel and Canaan Fairgoers
By JOHANNA SELTZ
CANAAN — The children loved her and stood in the mud with their noses pressed to the stage.
Their parents, especially the fathers, like her, too.
And Gov. Meldrim Thomson enjoyed the Dolly Parton show so much he rushed a decree of honorary citizenship of New Hampshire to the pert country music star Saturday night at the Canaan Fair.
The wordy, official-sounding award was presented with a kiss by Thomson’s eldest son. Miss Parton accepted it with a promise to try to be a good citizen, not guaranteeing anything, she added.
Then she went back to the serious business of entertaining the evening crowd.
Pure Country
In a reedy child-like voice contrasting sharply with her tight, spider-web-sequinned black pants suit and platinum curls under a silver scarf, Miss Parton sang of her childhood in the East Tennessee mountains and traded corny jokes with her brother Randy, a member of her back-up “Traveling Family Band.”
Throughout the concert she kept a constant conversation with the audience, chattering about her country origins and her tunes.
Dolly Parton is pure country and proud of it. Her songs — she’s written thousands since she was five years old and had about 600 produced — chronicle real and imagined stories. And though she hates to listen to them afterward, she is still moved when she sings them.
The “Applejack” of her song who played the banjo while she sang was a real Smokey Mountains’ man, her great-uncle, in fact. And the “Coat of Many Colors,” which her mother stitched with love from rags was a real coat that she treasured even though the neighbor children mocked it.
“Jolene,” the bewitching woman in her lyrics who could easily “steal her man,” was inspired by a freckle-faced Girl Scout who came for an autograph after a show one night. The name fascinated her and the song was her response.
“I could write a song in a minute, if I had a minute,” she quipped Saturday.
Born 29 years ago in Sevierville, Tenn., Dolly Rebecca Parton was one of 12 children in a poor farming family.
“We might have been poor, but we didn’t know what it meant,” she said Saturday afternoon at a between-concerts press conference. “We had love and a lot of each other and we learned to share and to appreciate what we got.”
Sought Stardom
Miss Parton has lots now — she’s half owner of a publishing and producing company with her former singing partner Porter Wagoner — and she works hard to “keep that money rolling in.”
Miss Parton’s sole ambition was to be a star, so the day after she graduated from high school she boarded a bus for Nashville.
Her uncle had arrived the week before with similar aspirations. She stayed with him and together they walked the streets looking for fame and recognition.
In 1967 the “biggest break” of her career came when Porter Wagoner called her.
Since she was a songwriter as well as singer she would send tapes to all the big name stars hoping they would hear a song they’d want to record. Miss Parton assumed Wagoner was calling about a song. But when she got to the meeting he offered her a spot on the Porter Wagoner Show.
She sang with him until July 1974 when “for business reasons” they split up. She formed the “Traveling Band” with a cousin, brother and other musicians, and went on the road solo.
In the past two years Dolly Parton has had four number one tunes and her present hit, “The Seeker,” is number two.
How much has Porter Wagoner had to do with her success?
“I don’t like to think Porter has made me a star,” she said. “I like to think he helped me become one.
“I work so hard and so constantly,” she explained. “Anytime you devote so much time you’re bound to have some success.”
Small Town Fans
Asked why a star like Dolly Parton travels all the way to Canaan, N.H., to do a show, she answered, “Because that’s where the country music fans are — in the smaller towns and areas.
“You want to go out and see them, you almost feel like you know them. And many of them are poorer families who can’t afford to go 100 miles to a city to see the shows.”
Miss Parton figures she spends 100 to 125 days on the road each year and she thinks, “Lord willing,” she’ll be on the road another 10-12 years. After that she plans to indulge her writing with short stories, plays and children’s stories.
“Kids are my greatest fans,” she added. “I can communicate with kids much better than with anyone else.
“They can relate to my name Dolly because they all have had a doll. My voice is high and keen like a kid’s. And they like the hairdos and glittery clothes,” she continued. “I can talk grown up when I have to, but I’d rather be a kid.”
For all her youthful appeal and manner, however, Miss Parton is obviously a shrewd business woman who refuses to participate in Nashville “politics.” As she got up to leave the conference she plugged her pending album, “Dolly,” which will be out in October. And she predicted that in the next few years there’d be a lot more Parton stars.
“Music has always been a part of our family,” she said. “All Mama’s and Daddy’s people pick and sing… You’ll be surprised,” she said. “I’m just the first Parton to make it big.”