It’s an understatement to say that Dolly Parton, who died on Tuesday, was many things to many people. She was multifaceted in a way that few are: she was a popular, well-respected, beloved iconoclast, a true original, and she also radiated the self-referential camp of a celebrity impersonator. She operated both as a person and as an idea: Dolly seemed to consciously ‘do’ Dolly. A songwriter, musician, actress, philanthropist, advocate, mogul and more, she was always pivoting between different aspects of herself, and twirling those impressive embellished skirts and dresses all the while.
Someone who could sing, act and dance used to be known as a triple threat, but she was grander and more cherished than that. Unlike the stars who want you to believe they’re from nowhere so that they can play anywhere, she was ‘proud of being from the South’, she wrote in her 1994 autobiography, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business – in particular, from Sevier County, Tennessee, ‘back in the hollers at the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains’. ‘I’d rather be rocky road than vanilla,’ she said.
She would praise human rights and scripture in the same sentence, and made it clear that she valued gay and trans people. Her ever-shifting presence, both aesthetic and ideological, suggested she was in search of something and not ashamed if people knew it. But there seemed to be no set destination, no fixed political orientation, no guiding principle except that music is manna and every person is deserving of dignity and respect.
Dollywood, her theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, may provide a way to think about her duality. Like Graceland, the park was a testament to her greatness and the culture of her portion of Appalachia, and she employed a lot of people. There were thrill rides, of course, but she provided a lot of excitement on her own. She was the draw, the attraction, with her outsized impression on the American pop-culture landscape, but she also seemed to look askance at what all of it meant. When the subject was herself or her fame, she had the scepticism and circumspection of a rogue tour guide or historical interpreter who’d met the idol herself, and been disabused of her idealism.
But, crucially, she also believed in herself enough to get going, enough not to be relegated to the ‘girl singer’ role on a Country and Western showcase, enough to turn down Elvis’s request to cover ‘I Will Always Love You’ because his manager wanted half the publishing rights, enough to make a life as a songwriter.
Born in poverty a decade or so after the New Deal policies were initiated (her father paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal), she was a plain-dealing, straight-talking person who spoke of the beauty and power of beneficence. I can’t help but associate her with that time in the country’s life. There were magnanimous celebrities before her, just as there were visionary social schemes designed by governments before FDR’s. But just as none of the country’s programmes has come to be spoken of in the same quasi-romantic terms as the New Deal, so Dolly Parton was a rare example of all that a demigod could be in the last American century. Her steadfast and beautiful voice was a clarion call. For a time, you heard or saw her everywhere; it was hard to live in America and not be under her influence.
At my most avoidant, I ran right into Dolly Parton. In the autumn of 2000, the first few months of middle school, I was having a rough time. I got my period that October, and the physical discomfort dominates my memories of that year. I hated school for the myriad reasons kids that age hate school. I was also bored. I decided I was not going to be sick and bullied and bored at the same time. Something had to give. So I gave up.
It started innocently enough. One morning I left the house at the normal time but when the first wave of period pain hit, I turned round and asked to stay home. My mom would’ve been in the bathroom, curling waves into her hair, or craned over the ironing board, pressing pleats into her work uniform, the scent of Niagara starch mixing with steam, the gurgle and hiss of the appliance audible even over the din of the TV.
It got easier to turn back once I knew it could be done. I exploited my mom’s kindness. I convinced myself I really did mean to go to school. I was dressed and packed, wasn’t I? But somewhere along the twenty-minute walk I’d falter and head home.
My mom’s empathy only extended so far, though, and after too many turnarounds she would shake her head disapprovingly and tell me that I had to go, that I was missing out on something important. So I’d walk around the neighbourhood in loops, biding my time until she’d left for work and it was safe to come home. But as I turned my key in the lock, Dolly was waiting for me.
Loafing on the couch, eating cereal, I began the day by watching the calibrated sociological chaos of Maury or Jerry Springer or TheJenny Jones Show, telling myself that cutting school wasn’t nearly as bad as the stuff the ‘out of control teens’ on those talk shows were up to. Then I’d switch over to HBO or TBS. Pop culture’s twenty-year nostalgia cycle meant that cable channels were regurgitating the staples of Reagan’s America: TV shows such as Family Ties, The Facts of Life, Diff’rent Strokes and Silver Spoons; women-in-the-workplace comedies like Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Big Business, Baby Boom, Working Girl and – most memorable – 9 to 5,starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton.
Some of what I got from these movies was a confirmation of what I saw and heard about at home: the disaffection of a grown woman stalled at work, discounted and undercut, required to do more for a nominal promotion and a bullshit raise. I also absorbed, unconsciously, a message about race and feminism: there were a few black women and other women of colour in supporting roles – Jumpin’ Jack Flash was a rarity in having a black woman, Whoopi Goldberg, as its star – but by and large these were movies about middle-class white women’s angst.
But 9 to 5 had something more to it. In part it was the comedic, pop-feminist Rashomon element – as the three stars fantasise about the very different ways they’d ‘bump off the boss’, a ‘sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot’, then inadvertently carry the fantasies out – but there was also an important lesson about perspective and consciousness-raising and solidarity: the three protagonists were women united but they saw things individually. In the opening credits, we watch dozens of women on their way to work. And over those credits, as they announce halfway through, plays the ‘title song “Nine to Five” written and performed by Dolly Parton’, her voice rising to an emotional tremolo, a hair’s breadth from cracking but held in precise control, as she sings: ‘But you’ve got dreams he’ll never take away.’ She was a paragon of self-confidence, whether merely projected or deeply felt, and I benefited from the example she provided of how to wear your body like a badge of honour.
Eventually – weeks later – my mom got a letter about my absences, which threatened to send her to truancy court, and I went back to school because it wasn’t fair for her to be punished for what I was doing. Short-lived though my one-girl film club was, I never forgot the crash course in the previous generation’s gender politics and, of course, I never forgot that song.
What Zohran Mamdani is doing to popularise class consciousness today, Dolly had already done with ‘9 to 5’, with its upbeat critique of ‘a rich man’s game, no matter what they call it/And you spend your life putting money in his wallet.’ Unlike ‘Islands in the Stream’, her duet with Kenny Rogers written by the Bee Gees, ‘9 to 5’ doesn’t mix its metaphors: ‘You’re in the same boat with a lot of your friends/Waiting for the day your ship’ll come in/And the tide’s gonna turn and it’s all gonna roll your way.’ The percussive instrumentation, a rhythm she tapped out with her acrylic fingernails to mimic the sound of a typewriter, anticipated the high-femme production flourishes of artists like Cardi B and Saucy Santana.
Central to Dolly Parton’s appeal was her appreciation of different ways of seeing the world; her interpretative generosity is what I will miss most about her. (One example: she found it flattering to be reimagined by drag queens.) It seems like this was a quality that came from her upbringing – the creativity and resourcefulness that poor people display every day, which she sings about in ‘Coat of Many Colours’, one of her many masterpieces of compressed storytelling, a novel in three minutes. In her autobiography, she tells an anecdote about Granny Ogle, the mother of her best friend, Judy:
Every year she would play Santa Claus. She’s a skinny little woman and looked more like a praying mantis in a red sock than like Santa. We got a kick out of it and loved her for it just the same. Anybody can be Santa Claus if the desire and the love are there.
She extended that openness to musical interpretation. It’s lucrative to lend out one’s songs to other performers, but Dolly didn’t seem to have much ego about it. When I think of the American lodestars of 20th-century popular music, I think of Dolly Parton and Aretha Franklin. Their legacies collide in the art of the cover song. Aretha was known for singing covers and Dolly was known for writing songs that others covered, but it goes without saying that the opposite was also true: Aretha wrote and Dolly covered songs. It isn’t a matter of black American audacity (Aretha) and white American humility (Dolly), but of something like convivial intimacy, an attitude that interpretation is important – it must be done and it must also be allowed for.
These women showed that songs, like stories, could be passed back and forth among variable voices, and added to, reimagined, disagreed with, defended. Whitney Houston’s powerhouse, standard-bearing rendition of ‘I Will Always Love You’, Beyoncé’s oddly defiant remix of ‘Jolene’ and Pras Michel and Mya’s exuberant, lyrically quixotic ‘Ghetto Supastar’, which interpolates ‘Islands in the Stream’, are forever in dialogue with Dolly and her dreams of what life in America could look like.
Another note about interpretation: Dolly’s friendship with Judy Ogle (like Houston’s with Robyn Crawford) made her sexuality the subject of gossip and speculation. She left space for lots of readings about her love life, even as she remained devoted to her husband, Carl Dean (who died last year), while defending her privacy and deflecting invasive questioning. Once asked whether she’d ever been with a woman, she replied: ‘All my life. I love women. My mother was a woman.’
In My Life and Other Unfinished Business, Parton wrote, straightforwardly, of one of the problems of fame:
I have to be very careful what I say in public. Everywhere I turn there’s always somebody with a tape recorder or a notepad, and every word I say has the potential to come back to haunt me. Words and phrases can be taken out of context. They also have a way of looking very different printed in black and white. Perhaps the tone of voice you use or a preliminary assurance makes it clear that you’re only joking.
This from the woman who scrambled visual and caste codes, forced you to see and look again and again and reimagine your associations with what you saw. It might be the smallest dint of her brilliance that even a prosaic turn of phrase in the book, ‘people have a strange way of looking at stars,’ has the brilliance of an opening lyric (‘just the fact that we refer to certain people as “stars” is a little weird’). Her ‘Tennessee Mountain Home’, where ‘life is as peaceful as a baby’s sigh’, was the twinkle in her eye, and Dolly, who’s gone back to stardust, is still the twinkle in ours.