Dolly Parton for the People

Four score and three thousand songs ago, in the middle of a whopping winter storm, a sharecropper and his young wife brought forth upon this continent a baby girl named Dolly Parton. If you know the rest of this story, you know that it never gets old. Her parents, Avie Lee and Robert Lee Parton, had married at the respective ages of fifteen and seventeen. Dolly was the fourth of their twelve children, born in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River, in Sevier County, Tennessee, and also born into the kind of poverty that meant the doctor who delivered her got paid with a sack of cornmeal and the kids wore the elastic from old underwear as hairbands. At six, she started singing in the church where her grandfather was the preacher. At seven, she began playing a homemade guitar—later, also a jerry-rigged mandolin, constructed from the guts of an old piano she’d found in an abandoned chapel in the woods. By ten, she had landed a gig on the local radio station. Three years later, Johnny Cash strode onstage at the Grand Ole Opry and told the Saturday-night crowd, “We’ve got a little girl here from up in East Tennessee.”

It was among the last introductions Dolly Parton would ever need. In the course of her long career, which was almost completely coextensive with her long but not long enough life, she produced some fifty studio albums, sold north of a hundred million records, won ten Country Music Association Awards and eleven Grammys, and got inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Gospel Music Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. If there were a Fame Hall of Fame, she would be in that, too.

Dismayingly, for those of us who are perpetually stuck on item three of our to-do list, all that barely begins to describe how Dolly Parton spent her days. She also starred in several movies, at least three of which are good; wrote or co-wrote a handful of memoirs, several children’s books, a few cookbooks, and one novel; and created a sprawling business empire that made her into not only the most famous export of Sevier County but also its largest employer. To honor her father, who never learned to read, she started a charity, the Imagination Library, that sends a free book every month to roughly one in seven preschool-age American children. That would have been plenty; richer people usually do far less. But, when her home county was devastated by wildfires in 2016, she sent a thousand dollars a month for six months to every family that had lost a home, and when the coronavirus came around four years later, she donated a million dollars to help fund the development of a vaccine. As her fellow country-music stars Montgomery Gentry once sang, that’s a life you can hang your hat on.

Still, for all this, songs were always the heart of it. Dolly never learned to read music, but she could play just about anything with strings, plus the recorder, the harmonica, the saxophone, and even her own fingernails, permanently recorded in all their ninety-words-a-minute acrylic glory in those driving opening measures of “9 to 5,” that national anthem for the nation of women. She always said that she didn’t have the greatest voice, and, since the competition included Patsy Cline, Wynonna Judd, and Reba McEntire, that was true; nonetheless, hers was somehow the most distinctive in the business. It was a little trembly, a little breathy, good at all the girly stuff, but with a girder of light-gauge steel beneath it, like you’d slink away real embarrassed if you tried to mess with her. She was a dead-center soprano, but her emotional range was ample: she could purr, she could plead, she could growl, she could yodel, she could croon. She could even sort of belt, although a little daintily; compared with Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” Dolly’s version sounds as delicate and sweet as Queen Anne’s lace.