What We Miss When We Reduce Dolly Parton to a Saint
Slate · L · trust 36/100
We are thanking her for supporting both gay marriage (“ They should suffer like the rest of us do ”) and, later, Black Lives Matter (“ Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No ”), each of which reminds the journalists among us, at least, to give thanks perhaps most of all for her quotability. We are quietly, politely forgetting about that weird, Lost Cause–peddling Dixie Stampede tourist show her company puts on that we’re hoping she didn’t have too much to do with—granted, after Slate reported on the event, it changed it name —while simultaneously perhaps giving her too much credit for distantly co-executive-producing Buffy the Vampire Slayer .
Some of us will even discuss Parton’s music. By the numbers, for a start, she reportedly wrote more than 3,000 songs , played upward of 20 instruments—mostly strings, but I’ve also witnessed her playing saxophone—and put out 243 singles as a lead or featured artist, 25 of which were No. 1 country songs , not to mention 49 Top 10 country albums, and had many of those cross over to the pop charts, in a career that touched eight different decades. Leaping genre barriers too often assumed unbreachable or enforced that way, Whitney Houston’s cover of Parton’s “ I Will Always Love You ” was the definitive and chart-dominating power ballad of the early 1990s. And in the new wave of country crossover that’s beginning to look like a definitive element of 2020s pop , many of the major players have sought out Parton’s co-sign, with covers and collaborations popping up from Lil Nas X , Beyoncé , Post Malone , and Sabrina Carpenter (as well as Parton’s goddaughter Miley Cyrus , of course), and this year’s newly coronated country queen Ella Langley has tagged Parton as her No. 1 role model.
This is not to mention Parton’s acting roles and (short-lived) TV show or the adaptations of her songs and life into various movies , streaming series , podcasts , and, I don’t know, maybe video games? Not really, though apparently gamers love her anyway . Perhaps the only utterly uncontroversial aspect of the New York Times’ list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters earlier this year was that Parton deserved her place there. “I’ve watched Dolly writing one song while she’s singing another,” it quoted her past collaborator Emmylou Harris as saying. “I’ve never seen anyone so spontaneously creative.”
Often the death of an artist is an occasion to regret that they didn’t “get their flowers” while they were still on Earth, but I’d venture that in the past two decades, Dolly Parton was practically buried in advance with avalanches of her favorite yellow roses , not to mention medals and superlatives of every other kind. She’s been set up as the last great cultural unifier in a time of poisonous division, the one thing we can all agree on , a stance that recalls yet instantly disproves critic Lester Bangs’ statement after Elvis Presley’s death in 1977 that “ we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis .” This suggests the possibility that even on this sad occasion of collective loss, perhaps we can hope that we will all get to feel that way once more, though I can’t quite imagine about whom, with her juniors Prince and David Bowie, for instance, both having predeceased her by a decade. (As for her elders, well, please hold on, Willie !)
I also have to acknowledge that in many of these sentences, the word we is hauling a lot of hidden freight, the way Bangs’ “we” did in Elvis’ case— Chuck D and others clearly would have wanted to get a word in there. In fact, I recall my own reaction to Elvis’ death as a little kid in the 1970s being mystification at what so many adults could possibly have found so great about this clownish figure—that puzzlement, I think, powered a lot of Gen X’s ironic fascination with Elvis iconography and impersonators. That thought also brings me back to the inchoate feelings I had about the increasing mainstream visibility of Dolly Parton herself in the period after that, and the incongruity of it with much of the contemporary mode of veneration.
Though I share all your likely feelings about Parton’s extremely impressive and graceful final act, the whiff of vanilla incense that wafts around this “ Saint Dolly ” stereotype feels anodyne and neutered compared to the fantabulous weirdness of Parton’s career and persona in general. When I would see her on TV in the late 1970s—and she was everywhere on TV in the late 1970s and early 1980s—she seemed like another kind of difficult-to-grasp grown-up fixation. But I did vaguely understand what this one was about: sex. I was too preadolescent and nerdy to get why the endless jokes about her boobs, both to her face and in her absence on talk and variety shows, were supposed to be funny. Only an accident of timing spared me that, I think, but if it had been me who had grown up to clone a sheep from its mammary gland, I don’t think it would have occurred to me to name it Dolly . The shocking part to me at the time was that she was frequently the one making the jokes, with oft-quoted quips like “I was the first woman to burn my bra—it took the fire department four days to put it out.”
Today I understand that as one of the few moves to claw back power that a brilliant working-class woman could pull on such smug, sexually harassing city slickers as Johnny Carson while still getting invited back to the TV couch. Part subversion and part appeasement, it’s a skill she would have picked up via childhood trials like the one recounted in her most famous and foundational early song, “ Coat of Many Colors ,” in which her mother cobbles rags together into a multicolored garment that Parton wears to school and then gets bullied for. In the song, she can respond merely by doubling down on her belief in its gorgeousness, via the extremely American delusional justification “one is only poor only if they choose to be.” It’s the same sleight of hand she used in constantly…
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