Dolly Parton, 1946–2026
The Bulwark · C · trust 36/100
Behind the rhinestones and under the towering wigs was a singular artist and businesswoman who owned her talent, her music, and her place in American life.
Jill Lawrence August 26 Upgrade to listen 7 minutes 71 10 11 Dolly Parton in 1976. (Photo by David Redfern/Redferns via Getty) I FIRST TUNED IN TO DOLLY PARTON in the late 1970s. I had moved from Greenwich Village to Charleston, West Virginia for a job (yes, really), and going to hear her live seemed like the thing to do. This was in her giant hair, giant boobs, giant bellbottoms phase. But oh my God, that voice. Those songs. I was hooked for life.
There are three generations of classical music aficionados in my family, including me. But country music called to me. For the melodies, the voices, the stories, and, yes, the simplicity.
Although, in truth, it wasn’t always that simple, in songs or life. Dolly’s 1974 song “I Will Always Love You” was a breakup ballad about her struggle to leave Porter Wagoner’s TV show and get control of her own music—both artistically and financially. She wrote it one day and sang it to him the next. “He was sitting at his desk and he was crying. He said ‘That’s the best thing you ever wrote. Okay, you can go, but only if I can produce that record,’” she recalled decades later for filmmaker Ken Burns’s sixteen-hour documentary Country Music .
Wagoner sued her anyway, Burns said, but she never let go of her music again. Denying partial ownership of that song to Elvis Presley and his manager meant Presley never recorded it. But Dolly later said that Whitney Houston’s massive 1992 hit with the same song—which sold tens of millions of copies around the world—earned Dolly enough money that she could have bought Graceland, as Burns tells the story. So: No regrets.
At a time when many women (including buttoned-down journalism strivers like me) were tackling new professional roles in offices and other work settings, looking past Dolly’s personal style was an adjustment. I mean, a low-cut neon one-piece jumpsuit? Even on stage, it seemed a bit much.
But she was in on her own joke and it never defined her.
She was in fact a feminist pioneer. By 1980, the woman who had been through a fight to own her own songs had written a full-blown feminist anthem for a movie about exploited, underappreciated women in the workplace. “9 to 5,” the song, opens with a line about stumbling to the kitchen to “pour myself a cup of ambition.” 9 to 5 , the classic hit comedy, features workers played by Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly herself.
Of course Dolly Parton could act brilliantly. She was brilliant at so much. She was the “ Dreamer-in-Chief ” determined to spread cheer and hope at Dollywood, the 160-acre park she created in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. She was a philanthropist who, inspired by her father’s inability to read, began collecting and distributing books to children over thirty years ago in her home county in East Tennessee. Her Imagination Library now operates in five countries and has given out more than 332 million books.
And she was a humanist—an outspoken backer of LGBTQ rights, who kicked up a bit of fuss in 2020 when she told Billboard magazine she supported the Black Lives Matter movement and protests: “I understand people having to make themselves known and felt and seen. And of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!”
Our Bulwark+ members make possible our growing coverage of books, arts, movies, and culture. Sign up to become a member yourself:
DOLLY PARTON ALSO WAS good at friendship. Seven years after 9 to 5 with Fonda and Tomlin, she was part of another powerhouse trio—this one with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. They released an album called Trio , which I bought instantly. If you’re a sucker for gorgeous voices and close harmonies, this collection is addictive. Don’t take my word for it. “Their album is stunningly beautiful on every cut,” Billboard wrote . Check out “The Pain of Loving You”:
A dozen years later, in February 1999, the three women released a sequel— Trio II (recorded five years earlier). It was fate or coincidence that this past weekend, on Sunday, my husband sent me an email about a video he’d just come across. “Gotta think you’d like this: Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, and Linda Ronstadt on Letterman,” he wrote. And there they were on The Late Show , a month after Trio II came out.
“This is going to be great because we have the three huge, wonderful musical talents, and we have a great, great song, and we also have an instrument that I don’t think we’ve ever had on the show before”—a glass armonica invented by Benjamin Franklin, Letterman said by way of introduction.
The great song was their cover of “After the Gold Rush,” Neil Young’s dreamlike vision of environmental apocalypse—“Mother Nature on the run”—and some humans, “the chosen ones,” escaping to “a new home in the sun.” Bleak, but the performance was exquisite and, in the end, hopeful.
RECOGNIZING DOLLY’S ARTISTRY is a no-brainer, but she also deserves credit for business genius. There’s her Dollywood complex, of course. But maybe you missed this? Her 2024 collaboration with Krispy Kreme on the Dolly Southern Sweets Doughnut Collection—with “four all-new flavors,” including the Dolly Dazzler Doughnut, all in a special Dolly-themed box. “These doughnuts remind me of home,” she said in a promotional press release. The Allrecipes headline: “Dolly Parton’s New Krispy Kreme Collab Is Guaranteed to Sell Out. We’ll be tumbling out of bed for these.” You may also have seen her line of Duncan Hines cake mixes and ingredients—in pink boxes with her beaming smile—in your grocery store, or her signature home goods and partyware at Walmart.
The local girl made good made her last public appearance two months ago at the opening of her own truck stop, Dolly’s Tennessean Travel Stop, in Cornersville. And remember that “cup of ambition” line in her 1980 song? It’s…
Read the original at The Bulwark →
Open in TruthVane →