When Walters asked about her “hillbilly” background, Parton did not become defensive. Many of the people she grew up with had little formal education, she explained, but they were nevertheless very intelligent. They possessed good common sense—what they called “horse sense.”

Parton was not merely describing it; she was demonstrating it. She understood perfectly well that sophisticated America might laugh at her appearance, accent and background. Instead of trying to become more like those who judged her, she made those assumptions part of her strength. Behind the rhinestones was a woman who understood people, business and, perhaps most importantly, herself.

The Intelligence That Doesn't Always Look Like Intelligence

Horse sense sits somewhere between common sense, experience, intuition and judgment. It is less about knowing everything than recognizing what matters.

It is the mechanic who listens to an engine and hears what the customer cannot; the taxi driver who ignores the navigation system because he knows what happens around the stadium after a football match; the experienced waiter who notices a problem at a table before anyone complains; or the grandmother who meets someone's new partner, watches quietly through dinner and afterwards says simply, “I don't trust him.”

Such judgments are rarely produced by a formal calculation. They emerge from years of observing patterns, making mistakes and dealing with people. Sometimes the person cannot immediately explain how they know. They simply know that something does not sound, look or feel right.

But Why the Horse?

There is something wonderfully appropriate about the horse in “horse sense.” Horses are highly alert animals, remarkably sensitive to their surroundings and to subtle changes in the behaviour of other animals and human beings. As prey animals, their survival has depended on noticing movement, tension and possible danger quickly.

Experienced riders know how sensitively a horse can respond to small changes in posture, pressure and movement. A nervous or hesitant rider may communicate far more than intended without saying a word. There is nothing mystical about this, and horses can certainly misjudge situations too. But their attentiveness offers a fitting metaphor.

Long before the English expression “horse sense” appeared, the Hebrew Bible offered a striking observation about the relationship between humans and animals. Proverbs 12:10 begins, “Yodea tzaddik nefesh behemto” literally, “A righteous man knows the soul of his animal.” The Hebrew word nefesh can mean life, being or soul, giving the phrase a depth that goes beyond simply caring for an animal. To truly know an animal is to understand its temperament, needs, fears and the small signals that others may overlook. The verse is also about mercy: the righteous person does not merely possess or feed the animal, but pays such close attention that he understands what it needs and wants from within. There is something almost secret in this kind of knowledge the understanding that develops between living beings without words.

In this sense, horse sense runs in both directions: the horse reads the human, and the perceptive human learns to read the horse.

Horse sense is not about knowing everything. It is about noticing what matters, sensing when something is wrong and responding before the obvious becomes unavoidable.

When Experience Becomes Instinct

We often call this instinct, although much of what appears instinctive may actually be experience moving faster than conscious reasoning.

A bartender senses that two customers are heading toward a fight. A fisherman looks at the water and decides not to go out. A nurse sees a patient whose measurements appear acceptable but nevertheless feels that something is wrong. Asked to explain themselves immediately, they may initially answer, “I just knew.” Yet beneath that answer may lie hundreds of previous encounters with tiny changes in voice, posture, colour, sound or behaviour.

This is also why intuition must not be romanticized. A feeling can arise from genuine experience, but also from fear, habit or prejudice. Sometimes the instinct is right; sometimes the scientist, doctor or instrument knows better. Good judgment includes knowing the difference.

The Intelligence of Hands, Eyes and Ears

Modern societies tend to recognize intelligence most easily when it appears in examinations, qualifications and sophisticated language. Yet enormous amounts of human knowledge reside elsewhere.

An Italian tailor understands fabric through his fingers. An Indian mechanic recognizes an engine problem by sound. A Mediterranean farmer knows his particular soil and crops through seasons of observation. A Finnish fisherman reads familiar water and weather. A Kazakh or Kyrgyz herder understands animals, terrain and distance in ways that may be invisible to a highly educated visitor holding a smartphone.

In Central Asia, “horse sense” almost ceases to be a metaphor. In societies where horses were central to transport, work and survival, understanding the animal, the landscape and changing conditions was knowledge of the most practical kind. A university professor arriving from a distant city might possess considerably more formal learning and still be the least knowledgeable person on the steppe.

The point is not that traditional knowledge should replace science. It is that intelligence can also reside in hands, eyes and ears—and in experience repeated so often that knowledge becomes almost automatic.

The University of the Street

Cities have their own version of this intelligence: street smarts.

From Istanbul to Mumbai, Moscow to Beijing, Naples to Tashkent, the market is an informal school of human behaviour. The experienced trader knows when to negotiate and when to stop, which customer is serious, who may return tomorrow and when an attractive proposition sounds just a little too attractive.

The taxi driver knows the city differently from the urban planner. The restaurant owner knows which employee can be trusted when nobody is watching. The shopkeeper who has dealt with customers for thirty years may recognize deception before being able to explain exactly which word or gesture revealed it.

Older generations often carry another version of the same practical memory. A Russian or Eastern European grandmother who keeps something useful in reserve may be remembering shortages and uncertainty. An Italian nonna who dislikes waste is carrying the memory of another economic world. An Indian grandmother may read the atmosphere around a family table with an accuracy no questionnaire could reproduce, while a Chinese elder may need only one question about an investment promising effortless riches: “If it is so easy, why are they offering it to you?”

Different countries, different histories, remarkably similar Horse Sense.

Horse Sense Against Snobbery

This is where horse sense becomes more interesting than the polite expression practical wisdom. It contains a quiet rebellion against snobbery.

We are easily impressed by the external signals of intelligence: the prestigious university, professional title, sophisticated vocabulary, expensive suit, metropolitan accent or familiarity with the correct social codes. Words such as educated, cultured, sophisticated, refined and intelligent begin to blur into one another, although they describe very different things.

A person can be highly educated and possess terrible judgment. Someone can speak beautifully and understand people badly. A person can know the correct wine and make disastrous financial decisions. Another can speak in dialect, have little formal education and possess an extraordinary ability to judge character.

That is what makes Dolly Parton's 1977 interview more than an entertaining piece of television history. Her appearance and accent invited a particular kind of social judgment, and she knew it. The assumption that the metropolitan interviewer represented sophistication while the Tennessee country singer represented simplicity was itself part of the game.

Horse sense asks us to be careful about confusing the appearance of intelligence with intelligence itself.

But the argument should never be reversed. The grandmother does not replace the doctor, the farmer does not replace the meteorologist, and the mechanic does not replace the engineer. Romanticizing ignorance would merely create snobbery in the opposite direction.

Credentials tell us something important about what a person has learned, but they do not tell us everything about what a person understands.

When Cleverness Becomes Foolishness

Horse sense also recognizes the moment when being clever stops being intelligent.

We drive fifteen kilometres to save two euros on petrol, spend three hours searching for a flight ten euros cheaper, or buy hundreds of euros' worth of tools to avoid paying someone fifty euros for a repair. We install elaborate technology to save ourselves from walking across the room to switch off a light and then spend Saturday afternoon trying to reconnect it to the Wi-Fi.

Organizations can do the same on a grander scale. Procedures multiply, consultants arrive, presentations become longer and new terminology appears, while the receptionist, technician, driver or employee actually doing the work may have understood the underlying problem from the beginning.

Sometimes intelligence solves complexity. Sometimes it manufactures it.

Horse sense asks a wonderfully unsophisticated question:

What are we actually trying to accomplish?

Lessons Learned the Expensive Way

Every culture has found ways of passing practical experience from one generation to the next. “Measure twice, cut once.” “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” “Don't put all your eggs in one basket.” Similar lessons appear in countless forms across languages and continents.

They are not scientific laws, and they occasionally contradict one another. Their value is that they represent experience compressed into a sentence. Somewhere, somebody learned the lesson the expensive way and passed it on so that someone else might avoid repeating the mistake.

Perhaps this is why horse sense so often travels through families, workshops, farms, markets and neighbourhoods rather than institutions. Much of it is not formally taught. It is watched, absorbed and occasionally delivered in one devastating sentence by someone older who has seen the same mistake before.

Horse Sense in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence gives the old Tennessee expression an unexpected new relevance. We now have machines capable of processing quantities of information beyond anything an individual human being could master. They can analyse documents, translate languages, compare arguments and recognize patterns across enormous bodies of knowledge.

The interesting question is not simply whether AI is intelligent. It is whether ever greater access to information necessarily produces better judgment.

The computer may know the map; the taxi driver knows there is a football match tonight. The system may process years of weather data; the fisherman knows his particular stretch of water. The algorithm may analyse consumer behaviour; the shopkeeper notices something about the person standing in front of him.

AI will undoubtedly become better at context and pattern recognition too. It would therefore be foolish to declare that horse sense belongs permanently and exclusively to human beings. But AI does force us to reconsider what we once admired as intelligence. If machines can remember more, calculate faster and process more information than we can, perhaps qualities such as judgment, timing, restraint, experience and self-knowledge become more important rather than less.

Back to Dolly

And so we return to the television studio in 1977.

Barbara Walters was intelligent, accomplished and exceptionally well prepared. Dolly Parton possessed intelligence of her own, including something much easier to underestimate. She understood where she came from, how others perceived her and that she did not need to adopt somebody else's definition of sophistication in order to succeed.

The woman in the rhinestones knew exactly what she was doing.

Nearly fifty years later, we carry more information in our pockets than Dolly's Tennessee community could have imagined. We consult satellites to find the next street, algorithms to decide what to watch and artificial intelligence to help us think.

We have never had more knowledge immediately available to us.

Whether we have acquired any more horse sense is another question.