The great Dolly Parton has died. One of the last living major figures from 1960s country, Parton transcended anything any other country musician has ever done in the world of popular culture, becoming not only a living legend for her music, but an icon of love and hope. I don’t think Parton is above critique, both musically and politically, but for the most part, this is a person who made the world better because she lived in it. She was also one of the smartest American capitalists who ever lived and if you don’t think this is as central to her legacy as her music, you don’t know Dolly.
Born in 1946 in Pittman Center, Tennessee, Parton grew up real poor. This was the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains and the poverty in this region was still intense, even with the Tennessee Valley Authority having done a lot of work to pull it into the 20th century. How poor were they? Her father paid the person who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal. She was always interested in music and her family pushed her in this direction too. Couldn’t be worse than the sharecropping her father did, though he managed to eventually get his own land and grew a little tobacco. Her mother was the singer in the family and Dolly always credited her mother with creating her interest in music.
Dolly sang in church from the time she was a small child and people recognized her talent. She began to sing on the radio at the age of 10, on the Cas Walker Show in Knoxville, which was an important regional country show back in the days when regional country music scenes existed. She first performed on the Grand Ole Opry at the age of 13, when she also recorded a single. Now, she could have just been a kid who liked music and had a brief moment of recognition. There’s a million of those over the century of commercial country music. But Parton was ambitious. Crazy ambitious. She wrote constantly and started selling her songs by the time she was in her late teens. By 1966, she had written two Top 10 hits, one for Bill Phillips and one for Skeeter Davis. Not bad for a woman this young!
At first, Dolly’s producers tried to steer her from country. When she first signed with Monument Records in 1965, they tried to make her a bubblegum pop singer. She was young and blonde I guess, but lord that makes no sense at all, not with her voice. Luckily, she defeated them and not many young women could do that. But Dolly was always a force of nature.
Dolly’s first album, Hello I’m Dolly, from 1967 is an incredibly solid and promising country album. “Dumb Blonde” was always a piss take with her — as she would say, she was neither dumb nor blonde. It was written by Curly Putnam and not with the irony Dolly would bring to it. She was so obviously hyper-intelligent and could play this look and stereotype for her own purposes that she put the song over and it was her first hit, peaking at No. 24 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart.
Dolly’s brilliance as a performer was clear enough by her third album, 1968’s Just Because I’m a Woman. Three songs here sum up her brilliant vision. First, there’s the excellent title track, which was a shot at men treating women like trash after sex even though men did this to her and are just as “guilty” as women are.
She was hardly the first female country singer to touch on this topic — Kitty Wells’s 1952 response to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life,” titled “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” was a direct answer song that took on men’s dismissive thinking about sexually active women — but Dolly built on the changes of the late ‘60s and discussed sex more directly than previous women. This was her own composition. She co-wrote “I’ll Oil Wells Love You,” perhaps the best gold digging woman song ever written and one that gets at the power of a woman like herself. Then there’s another song of hers, “The Bridge,” about a pregnant woman about to throw herself off said bridge because her boyfriend got her pregnant and has now abandoned her. The whole album is quite good but these three songs do much to sum up Dolly’s amazing power as a songwriter and singer in a country music world that was fearful of political change in the late ‘60s.
Everyone who saw Dolly thought that a star was in the making. Porter Wagoner started bringing her onto his TV show as a guest in 1967. It wasn’t easy as she moved into being the co-star of the show. Now, the thing was that any guy needed to have a girl singer but the girl singers were never allowed to upstage the guy, no matter how good they were. Porter’s girl singer (and I use this term because that’s how they were so often called at the time) was Norma Jean, who was by no means any kind of slouch herself. She left after getting married and so Dolly replaced her. The fans weren’t happy, often chanting for Norma Jean while she sang. That stopped pretty fast after they heard her voice.
Wagoner became Dolly’s mentor and it was mostly a good relationship. It took awhile for her to really get big on the charts. “Just Because I’m a Woman” only reached No. 17 on the country charts, which frustrated both of them. It took until 1970 for her to really become a big chart topper. Oddly, it was a recording of “Mule Skinner Blues” that proved to be her first real hit. Country audiences wanted to hear an old chestnut once more (really, country music before the rise of douche country in the early ‘90s recycled old songs all the time) and Dolly hit No. 3 with it. That led to her first No. 1 hit, the excellent “Joshua,” in February 1971. She became a stone cold hitmaker right away. “Coat of Many Colors” went to No. 4. “My Tennessee Mountain Home” and “Travelin’ Man,” both great songs, did pretty well too. So did a few more duets with Porter. These are great songs.
But Porter was starting to hold her back. She didn’t need the mentorship of a very good if not great but most definitely patriarchal male country star anymore. He was older and he was stuck in his style and Dolly wasn’t going to fulfill her destiny if she stayed with him. So she broke up with him in the best way she knew how. She wrote him a song. “I Will Always Love You” is not in fact my favorite country song, but the audiences loved it and it was a heartfelt message to the man who had done more for her career than anyone else. Porter knew it was a great song, but he was also devastated by the end of his partnership with Dolly and it took him years to really get over it (there’s a great Drunk History bit on this).
Dolly made no errors in going solo. In fact, the first release off that album was her biggest hit yet — “Jolene” is one of the all-time great songs. “I Will Always Love You” kicked off the second side of the record. So really, she did what she needed to do.
But …
Dolly’s ambitions also started getting in the way of the music’s quality only a couple of years after she went solo. The mid-’70s saw some pretty solid albums still in Love is Like a Butterfly and The Bargain Store. But things started getting cheesy pretty quickly. Country music was moving into its urban cowboy phase and a girl from east Tennessee was going to have to change her approach a bit. The glitz and glam went very well with the Parton persona but the music became pretty synth heavy and just not very interesting. She relied on her great voice, but the quality of the songs declined. By the late ‘70s, very few people talked about the latest Dolly album and for all the well-deserved love she gets, even today no one really talks about these albums. Some singles, sure. But as a body of work? It gets to be a mixed bag very quickly.
Dolly made sure that what mattered most in her music was embracing the current popular sounds in a way that made sense for her country and crossover pop audiences. Dolly consistently changed her style to stay popular. I will argue that this had a negative impact on her overall art — so much of her music sounds dated. But Dolly wanted to bring pleasure to people while also making a lot of money. She was tremendously good at both. Parton started working with pop stars such as Olivia Newton-John, often making amiable but disposable albums. People liked it well enough to buy the singles, if not always the album. She stayed relevant when a lot of her peers did not.
By the ‘80s, Parton also did a lot of movies. She was such a huge personality that just by being herself, she could be an effective actor in the right role. She was one of the stars of 1980’s 9 to 5, which played on the 9to5 movement of women’s workers and made it a comedy about women reacting to their horrible misogynist boss. She had her biggest and most enduring hit in years with the title track to the soundtrack, which topped not only the country but the pop and adult contemporary charts. She starred with Burt Reynolds in the 1982 film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, running said whorehouse. Both of these films gained her a Golden Globe nomination and they are well-deserved. Unlike a lot of country stars trying to act (Johnny Cash is one notably bad example), she could pull it off. She acted consistently through the ‘80s. Rhinestone, from 1984, starring Sylvester Stallone, is not a good film, but hey, whatever. She also got some hits from recording the soundtrack. More useful was 1989’s Steel Magnolias, one of those films with a million stars that are all good.
Through this period, Dolly was getting a few Top 10 hits on the country charts. But with the exception of her Kenny Rogers duet with “Islands in the Stream,” she wasn’t making much of a lasting impact musically in this period. RCA dropped her at the end of 1986. She did just fine. Columbia signed her right away. But getting dropped from her long-term label suggested that her moves toward pop-country were neither commercially nor artistically successful anymore. She had something of a comeback in 1987 with the release of Trio, her album with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. This was good for all three of them. The mid-’80s were after all not great for ‘70s country and folk figures, no matter who.
Parton the capitalist became more interesting than Parton the singer in the ‘80s. She decided to use her fame to lift her hometown out of poverty. Now, whether the creation of Dollywood was good or not for the area around Pigeon Forge is open for debate. There’s no question that the region has much more money than it used to. On the other hand, it is the most crass place in the universe, a region of beautiful mountains surrounded by chain restaurants, putt putt courses, tacky tourist shops, and of course Dollywood itself. I’ve never cared for the type of country musician who created their own theaters in Pigeon Forge and once, when trying to show my visiting parents the region during my years in Knoxville, I ran into a ridiculous level traffic jam going through there because Alan Jackson was putting on an outdoor show and this just destroyed any semblance of the town being functional that day. I never can forgive Jackson for that traffic. Or his music.
There’s no way to talk honestly about Dolly Parton without talking about her looks. The blonde hair and the huge breasts were central to her legend. She always claimed two things — first, the breasts were real and while of course like so many superstars, she had plenty of work done on her body over the years to stay “young,” this was true. Second, she was not a natural blonde but she was open about this and why it matters. She saw herself as a redneck’s ideal of glamour, what she saw growing up in east Tennessee as what beauty was, which was basically Marilyn Monroe. It worked for her, no question about that.
Dolly had one of the most interesting relationships in the history of celebrity. As everyone reading this knows, Dolly Parton would become a celebrity beyond celebrity, one of the most famous people in the world. On the day she arrived in Nashville, still just an 18-year-old girl, she met a man named Carl Dean. As she rose in the country music industry, he would support her. But he found out almost immediately that he hated all of this. He didn’t mind if Dolly was a big star, but he wanted nothing to do with fame. So they made a deal — she would do her thing and he would stay completely and 100 percent in the background. For so many people, this would not work. The reality of fame makes stable relationships difficult. But it sure worked for them. They got married in 1966 and stayed that way until his death in 2025, which by all accounts absolutely devastated her. This worked in part because as absolutely famous as Dolly was and for as public as she remained, she was also an extremely private person and nothing could pierce her persona into the inner Dolly. That might be the reason for a 59-year marriage.
People have often debated Dolly’s politics. She often was portrayed as liberal, but was she? What she really pushed was broad ideas of love and tolerance. That definitely makes her not a modern day Republican! She became an icon in the gay and trans communities because of her fashion and her broad-based tolerance. But here was the thing — she was never going to do a single thing that would risk a dollar. So when Tennessee started moving extreme Right in the 2010s and passing all sorts of hideous legislation, Dolly spoke out — but in such a way you could read what you wanted into her words.
“I think everybody should be treated with respect” said Parton to CNN. “I don’t judge people. I try not to get too caught up in all the controversy of things. I hope that everybody gets a chance to be who and what they are.
“I just know if I have to pee I’m gonna pee. I don’t care where it’s gonna be.”
Fundamentally, Dolly’s vision of the world is apolitical dreams of everyone getting along while they forked over their cash. I’m not really that critical of her here, but it’s hard for me to see her as the icon of tolerance that a lot of people want to define her as. There’s no just no sense of any strongly held belief at all except for love and America and money. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. She could have said that Tennessee attacking trans people was wrong. She didn’t.
Through the ‘90s and into the 2000s, Dolly released albums that fit whatever could make her some money in the larger world of country music. This is past her hit-making era, which is fine, no one makes hits forever. When the larger musical trends were good, she could reach back to her roots and release fantastic music. The Grass Is Blue, released in 1999, is a great example. Dolly was not a bluegrass musician, not at any time in her career. But of course she grew up around that in east Tennessee and could certainly sing it. The late ‘90s was the era of the Americana revival, with alt-country bands becoming famous and the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack opening up album sales to a lot of people who didn’t usually move a lot of copies. It’s a fantastic album.
It’s possible though that the biggest impact Dolly made in the ‘90s was Whitney Houston covering “I Will Always Love You” for the soundtrack of The Bodyguard. That was an excellent combination of material and singer at the right time. It went gangbusters. Years later, someone asked Parton what she thought about the cover. She said that she loved it because it made her a whole lotta money. Which does describe how Dolly evaluated the world.
So she spent her later decades as a senior figure. She’d zig and zag to whatever was popular at a given moment. Again, when Americana hit big, she did a great bluegrass album. 9/11 happened and here came the patriotic songs. Time for another Christmas album? Sure, she’d do that yet again. Someone has an idea to do some classic rock songs, she’s down. Whatever. No one is listening to these albums because they are great.
In the end, Dolly the Icon became far more important than Dolly the Country Singer. That was her choice. She was, in the end, a remarkable businesswoman. Put her up there as one of the best, smartest, and most savvy women in the history of American capitalism. Put her up there too as one of the best shapers of her image that has ever existed in this country and did so in a way that appealed to a lot of marginalized communities. Put her voice on the Mt. Rushmore of country music too. God bless her. But as a very intense fan of country music, I still wish she had the quantity of good albums that she could have made.
This Saturday's movie is changed to Steel Magnolias in honor of Dolly.
One of my visitors brought me Dolly brownie mix and a tub of Dolly frosting last year and I still haven’t made it. Maybe I will tomorrow in her honor.