Dolly Parton Had the Voice, and Concerns, of an Earth Angel
New York Times · LC · trust 25/100
Parton gave hopeful expression to songs she wrote about the hard times and hard-won triumphs of her life.
Listen · 5:34 min Share full article Dolly Parton performing on the steps of New York’s City Hall in 1978. Credit... Bettmann/Getty Images By Lindsay Zoladz
Her voice was angelic not because it possessed some kind of divine perfection or unattainable beauty, but because it seemed to be personally invested in the well-being of anyone and everyone who listened to it, illuminated from within with an almost otherworldly benevolence. How many singers in the history of popular music have told us some variation of “everything’s gonna be all right / it’s gonna be OK”? When Dolly did it, though, as on her soaring 1977 single “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” the sentiment somehow transcended cliché. Dolly made you believe.
To speak of her in the past tense still feels wrong. Dolly Parton was an American icon who seemed taller than death itself, a Paul Bunyan in a beehive wig and rhinestone stilettos. That stature came in part because she wrote her legend over and over, wittily but with a savvy control over her own image, in the so-called Dollyisms that she peppered throughout interviews, stage banter and public appearances.
And so we know from her own lips that her parents were so poor that they paid the doctor who delivered her in cornmeal, and that their one-room cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains had “running water, if you were willing to run and get it.” We know, too, that if she had it her way she would have lived well past 80. Once, when she was asked how she’d like to be remembered in 100 years, Parton quipped, “I want ’em to say, ‘God, don’t she look good for her age!’”
The most enduring parts of Parton’s legend were the ones she captured in song. Some of her most beloved compositions elevate key scenes from her life into modern-day folk tales, animated in vivid, almost cinematic detail. “Coat of Many Colors,” from 1971, recalls a time in her youth when her mother stitched rags together to make a coat that the other schoolchildren mocked: “I couldn’t understand it,” the adult Parton sings, still aching, “for I felt I was rich.” The beautiful redheaded bank teller who flirted with her husband lives on in infamy in “Jolene,” a lyric and vocal performance that combine to create one of popular music’s most wrenching (and oft-covered ) confessions of neediness and insecurity.
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