His daughter took the news hard, so he went and found a wall.
Juan Velazquez saw how Dolly Parton’s death hit his daughter and decided he wanted to honor her. The Fort Worth muralist reached out to the owners of the Stagecoach Ballroom on East Belknap Street and asked whether he could paint Dolly on the side of their building. They told him it would be an honor.
Photographer Roman Pena spent two days documenting the work. Since Velazquez finished, people have been pulling into the parking lot to take pictures with it.
“You don’t know what tomorrow brings, and if tomorrow’s a promise or not, so be kind to people, help people, give something back to your community,” Velazquez said.
He Picked a Wall With More Dolly History Than He Probably Knew
The Stagecoach Ballroom has been standing since October 1961, when Ray Chaney opened the Stagecoach Inn near the Stockyards. It moved twice, burned down once in 1967, and landed in a former Safeway building on East Belknap, where it has been ever since.
Willie Nelson played that room. So did Bob Wills, Jim Reeves, and Bobby Bare. The Texas Historical Commission gave the venue an official marker in 2024, recognizing it as one of the oldest honky-tonks in the state.
Porter Wagoner played there, too.
That name matters more than the rest of them combined for this particular mural. Wagoner is the man who put Dolly Parton on television in 1967 and made her a star, and he is the man she wrote “I Will Always Love You” for when she left to go solo in 1973. Her face now looks out from a building her mentor once performed inside.
“It means a lot. I was kind of raised with Dolly Parton,” said Stagecoach co-owner Jean Tchaikowski-Desai.
His Daughter Has Been the Reason Behind His Art From the Beginning
Velazquez had quit drawing after his teenage years and did not pick it back up until a trip to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth with his daughter.
He watched her studying the paintings and asked what she was thinking. She told him she could not see herself in any of them. He started making art again so she would understand that it matters to see yourself in the work.
The pattern has held ever since. When she was three, she refused to go outside because she did not want to get darker, and told him darker would make her ugly. He wrote afterward that his art would show the beauty of his brown skin from then on.
For You
After the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde in 2022, he drove down and painted Alithia Ramirez, one of the children killed there. He explained why in one sentence.
“I couldn’t wrap my mind around, like, what if that was my daughter?”
The Ramirez family gave him a beaded bracelet that belonged to Alithia. It sits in his studio.
“I have done a lot of murals that have a sad story,” he has said. “Honestly, I just have a soft heart for tragedies.”
So when Dolly Parton died, and his daughter felt it, he did the only thing he has ever done about that feeling.
The Parking Lot Has Turned Into a Gathering Spot
Yvette Gonzalez drove out with her mother to see it, partly because she already owned a T-shirt with the same image of Dolly on it.
“I just always enjoyed watching, like, interviews that she did,” Gonzalez said. “She was just very funny, sweet, and kind.”
Miriam Astorga buys Dolly’s books for her grandchildren to get them reading. She sees the wall as something larger than a painting.
“It’s like community, because she’s one person that, as my daughter said, she’s impacted lives,” Astorga said.
Pena is now trying to figure out which spots in the lot make the best photos so he can mark them with footprints and keep the crowds moving.
Velazquez has painted more than a hundred murals around Dallas and Fort Worth. Some are commissions, and some he does for free. He turns down about 80 percent of the requests that come to him, and he has explained his filter simply. He only takes the ones that fit what he is trying to say.
A nine-year-old girl at an art museum told her father she could not see herself on the wall. Twenty-some murals later, a woman from East Tennessee is looking down at a Texas parking lot, and people keep pulling over to stand under her.
