Why We Will Always Love Dolly Parton

By Rob Sheffield

Rob Sheffield

Dolly Parton knew how loved she was. It wasn’t an accident — it was always part of her plan. Even as a girl, growing up dirt-poor in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, she planned to grow up into a star everyone would know. The country queen wore the whole story of American music on her shoulders like a coat of many colors. That’s how she become the most universally beloved of American singers, a sequined superstar who also happened to be a ferociously original genius. “I was telling my own stories, speaking my own feelings,” Parton told Rolling Stone in 1975. “I’m a pretty bold person.”

That’s why the whole world is in shock at the news of her death on Aug. 25, at 80 — Dolly had been treating reports about her health with all her customary humor. She was cracking jokes about it just the day before. It’s hard to imagine a world without Dolly Parton. But thanks to her music, that’s not a world we’ll ever see.

People fell in love with her self-proclaimed “Backwoods Barbie” image and her larger-than-life personality. Yet behind the glitter, Dolly was the toughest, most soulful of songwriters, fighting to make her way as a woman in Nashville, pouring her heart into the tortured genius of songs like “Jolene” or “Down from Dover.” She’s like Aretha Franklin or Brian Wilson or Stevie Wonder — a visionary with an endless imagination for how far American music could reach. We’re grieving for Dolly now because she represents the best in us.

“I’m a workhorse that looks like a showhorse,” Parton told Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo in 1975, not yet 30. She refused to compromise her artistic voice, even when she was a young rookie with everything to lose. “I realized in my teenage years how seriously I was taking myself as a songwriter,” she said. “My songs are like my kids, and I expect them to support me when I’m old — and some of them are. I feel that way about it because when I write a song, I’ve left something in the world today that wasn’t there yesterday. It’s something that will live on.”

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No American songwriter ever wrote about poverty so bluntly, with so much detail. She zeroed in on details like the way her daddy’s hands bled after work, or how it sounds to a little kid when the wind blows snow through the cracks in the wall. She refused to water it down, in her tales of starvation, heartbreak, stillbirth, and over and over, wronged women who make the fatal mistake of trusting a man. The hard times in these songs are always harder on her female characters, and Dolly chose not to let the listener back away from that. 

That’s how she grew up, and she never sentimentalized the past she sang about, in still-shocking tales like “In The Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad).” She claimed her ground as a female singer-songwriter, in a Nashville where it was practically down to her and Loretta Lynn. “I didn’t want to be domestic,” she said in her 1977 Rolling Stone cover story. “I wanted to be free. I had my songs to sing, I had an ambition and it burned inside me. It was something I knew would take me out of the mountains. I knew I could see worlds beyond the Smoky Mountains.”

In the internet era, the world fell in love with the myth that Dolly wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” on the same day. Dolly used to demur politely and remind interviewers that she didn’t remember it that way. But eventually she shrugged it off and stopped correcting people — always the shrewdest of businesswomen, she treated it as an asset. (By 2017, she’d begun telling the tale this way herself. Hell, it was a good story.) But the fact that people were so eager to believe it, that says a lot about what we craved from Dolly. There was something so strong about the image of that smiling, always smiling, country queen who hid her rage and pain behind the sequins, crafting these deeply personal songs.

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No star has ever needed a comeback less than Dolly Parton. It isn’t even a case where young generations keep discovering her, because she’s always been out there in the open, with songs that the whole world knows and sings, but countless other buried treasures on her albums, songs that still only the hardcore fans know. As deep as you care to dig with Dolly, there’s always more.

“Jolene” is rightly her most famous song, where she begs another woman not to steal her man. It was a Number One country hit in 1973, yet it already felt like an ancient folk standard, one that had always been there in the air. (I first heard on that quintessential low-budget TV trainwreck, The Gong Show — but I was transfixed by the story and those high notes.) It’s painfully emotional, with a stoic sense of heartbreak that goes back to her tough Smoky Mountains childhood. “Jolene” has just gotten more and more iconic over the years, inspiring remakes by everyone from Beyoncé to Miley Cyrus to Zac Brown. I remember the shock of hearing Jack White sing it in 2000, in the White Stripes’ early bar-band days, just trying to live up to the song’s unflinching spirit.

Dolly summed up the kind of star who belongs to everybody. She was always visible her whole life, going back to her schooldays. “I had a lotta stories told on me, a lotta lies, just because I looked the way I did,” she recalled in 1977. “I always was big in the boobs, small in the waist and big in the butt. I just grew up that way and I had that foxy personality, too.” 

The mainstream media got hung up on her image, often seeing her as a lovable entertainer rather than a fiercely driven songwriter, or as she put it, “songteller.” But she never pretended she didn’t love the glitz — it was her artistic creation. “The flashy clothes and jewelry and all the gaudy appearance. I guess I did invent that part of me. I was always fascinated with fairytale images. Half of a show is the lighting and the shine and the sparkle. Stars are supposed to shine and maybe I just want to be a star.”

She took pride in that personality — but she always had a lonesome spirit at heart, and you can hear it in her voice. “I mean, I was real outgoin’, real friendly, I think it was scary to people. But I never felt I belonged. Never belonged in my whole life, even as a little kid. I was just different and so I never really found my place till I moved to Nashville and got in the music business. That was my real place, so I fit in. I was born restless, I really was.”

From the beginning, Dolly always wanted everyone to sing her songs, and everyone did, as fast as she could write them. Patti Smith did “Jolene” on the Horses tour, in between her Velvet Underground and Pete Townshend covers. Tina Turner did a scorching “There’ll Always Be Music” in 1974. Stevie Nicks covered her tunes in the early days of Buckingham Nicks. Merle Haggard always sang her songs with the nasty bite they deserved, especially his bitter remake of “In The Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad).”

Jerry Garcia idolized her from the start — the Grateful Dead used to play her minor 1969 hit “Tomorrow Is Forever,” keeping it in the first-set rotation for years. In a 1970 interview with Playboy, the reporter is surprised when Garcia raves about her as “my favorite girl singer.” But he insists on playing the skeptical interviewer a Dolly record — The Fairest of Them All, from 1970, a downcast album even by her standards, with “Daddy Come and Get Me.” By Side Two, Garcia, Robert Hunter, and the reporter are all sitting in Jerry’s living room, every one of them in tears. (That final triptych — “Mammie,” “Down from Dover,” “Robert” — would melt a stone.)

“Coat of Many Colors” was the song she called her favorite, about a mama who sews a coat out of rags. She wrote it on Porter Wagoner’s tour bus, scrawling it on the only paper available, the boss’ dry-cleaning receipt. (Wagoner had the receipt framed.) Dolly gave the world many long-suffering mamas, but they’re not all saints. In “Travelin’ Man,” on the same album, she plans to run away with that handsome salesman — but he runs off with her mama instead. The punch line: “The travelin’ man was a two-time lover — he took my love and he took my mother!”

“I Will Always Love You” was an oft-covered standard before Whitney Houston discovered it, via a Linda Ronstadt record. (Check out Alex Chilton’s version.) But once Whitney got hold of it, it was hers, body and soul. In The Bodyguard, she hears it in a country bar on the jukebox with Kevin Costner, as sung by John Doe of the L.A. punk band X. It’s a perfect Dolly paradox that she could bring all these strains of American music together.

She was always current, in every era. In the Eighties, she was fond of sharing makeup tips with Boy George. “I love the way he does his eyes,” she told Rolling Stone. “And he loves how I do mine.” She sang sultry duets with her longtime friend Kenny Rogers, purring “Islands in the Stream” like a pair of sassy seniors in a post-coital glow. They kept singing to the end, as in their 2013 duet “You Can’t Make Old Friends.” They were never a real-life couple, but as Kenny told Rolling Stone in 2014, “We just flirted with each other and loved every minute of it.”

She scored one of her most famous hits in 1980 with “9 to 5,” ubiquitous since the week it came out. But she parlayed it into a deeply weird (and underrated) album, 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs—her concept album about class struggle and fighting capitalism. She covers Woody Guthrie for “Deportee” (on immigrant workers), Merle Travis for “Dark as a Dungeon” (coal miners), Mel Tillis for “Detroit City” (the assembly line). She tops it off with a feminist rendition of “House of the Rising Sun,” to remind everyone that this song has always been about poor girls and the evil that men do. It’s practically Dolly’s Sandinista!, yet she serves it all up with a smile.

In the Nineties, she got back to her rustic roots, peaking in her excellent 2001 bluegrass album Little Sparrow. But her best hit of the era was her sleaziest and funniest: “Romeo,” a 1993 line-dance hit with Billy Ray Cyrus (he plays Romeo) and Nashville stars Pam Tillis, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kathy Mattea, and Tanya Tucker. In real life, Dolly was godmama to Billy Ray’s just-born baby Miley, but that didn’t stop her in “Romeo.” The ladies all spend the song catcalling Billy Ray — Dolly growls, “I’m old enough to be that boy’s lover!” 

At the end of the video, she walks off arm in arm with Billy Ray. “I am so flattered that you would choose me over all these young beautiful girls,” she says. Then she adds, “But after all, it’s only right — I am paying for this video.” 

She also built Dollywood, a uniquely American shrine to herself and the dreams she made come true. Dollywood, where I once spent a week for a family vacation, remains — bizarrely or not — one of the happiest places I’ve ever been. She’d bought up the territory in the Smoky Mountains, the land where she’d grown up in desperate poverty, and turned it into an amusement park commemorating her life. Every inch of the place was Dolly-themed. The big thrill ride was Thunder Road, based on the 1950s Robert Mitchum thriller, just because it was the first movie she got to see as a little girl. 

The piped-in music was all Dolly, all the time: It’s where I heard her then-new version of “In the Pines,” a song I’d just learned from Kurt Cobain. The Parton Family Singers took turns on the stages, near a re-creation of her childhood shack. A museum displays the actual coat of many colors. (Or a clever replica.) The whole town was a monument to the hometown girl made good. The local park had a plaque saying that Dolly built it for the kids to play. The radio station was WDLY; guess what they played. From another star, this might have seemed egotistical, but with Parton, it all glowed with her limitless warmth and benevolence.

Dollywood was the exact opposite of Graceland, down the road apiece in Memphis. It’s like she took a look at Elvis’ mansion, with its aura of tragedy and death, and decided to create her own version — but a winner’s version, built to celebrate her life, with her own money, while she was still around. It’s a palace built by a woman who came from nothing but got everything she wanted, inviting visitors to come celebrate everything she escaped, everything she achieved, everything she grew up to be. There’s no other place like it.

On your way out of the Dollywood parking lot, you drive under an arch with the farewell inscription: “I Will Always Love You. – Dolly.” I suspect that nobody has ever driven under that arch without believing it.

She was never far from the public eye, whether she was doing an album of rock classics (nice “Stairway to Heaven”) or dueting with Miley at the Grammys, with BTS in the audience dancing to “Jolene.” A quintessential Dolly moment, from the 2006 Oscar ceremony: She was nominated for Best Song, “Travelin’ Through,” from the pioneering trans documentary Transamerica. What I’ll never forget is how she cheered and smiled when Three Six Mafia won instead of her, for “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.” She sent them a note congratulating them on winning it for Tennessee.

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