Dolly Parton’s peerless career turned country music cliches inside out
In December 1977, Dolly Parton submitted to an interview with ABC Television’s Barbara Walters, much against her friends’ advice. Walters was not noted for her deep love and understanding of country music. She was a notoriously tough cookie, a Boston-born, Sarah Lawrence-educated journalist who had battled scarcely believable sexism to become the first female co-host of an American news programme. The month before she met Parton, she had interviewed Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin while they were working out the terms of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.
It was all a very long way from Parton’s world, and the interview has something of the anthropological exercise about it. Walters looks aghast as Parton shows her around her tour bus, her collection of wigs and her “hand-washable and wrinkle-free” stage outfits (“you really like this? To me, it seems like horror”), and sits impassively as Parton sings Coat of Many Colours to her: an impressive feat, given the song’s saga of rural poverty and homespun wisdom is the mother of all tearjerkers from an artist never averse to yanking at her audience’s heartstrings. She asks Parton if people from “where I come from” would call her a hillbilly; regards the singer’s outfit with a jaundiced eye and tells her “you don’t have to look like this”. And, most infamously, she enquires: “Do you ever feel that you’re a joke?”
“The joke’s on the public,” responds Parton, her smile never slipping. “I know exactly what I’m doing and I can change it any time … I’m sure of myself. I’m sure of my talent.”
It was a TV appearance that told you a lot about public perceptions of Parton in the years when she surged from Nashville fame to international superstardom – an era when you could turn on British TV and find a Canadian duo called MacLean and MacLean performing a mocking song called Dolly Parton’s Tits – and also told you a lot about Parton herself, most notably that, beneath the wig and the rhinestones, she had rather more in common with Walters than anyone might have thought.
Of course she was sure of her talent: by the time she sat down with Walters, she had already written a string of imperishable country standards: not just Coat of Many Colours, but Jolene, My Tennessee Mountain Home, Down from Dover, I Will Always Love You, Little Bird, Kentucky Gambler, Love Is Like a Butterfly, The Bargain Store, The Seeker. Of course she knew exactly what she was doing with her image, based – as she never tired of telling interviewers – on “the town tramp” back in Pittman Center, Tennessee. A woman whose first solo hit was called Dumb Blonde, she used it both to lure in a certain type of country fan (“rednecks with flat tops who bring women who wear short skirts or tight pants,” as one 1970s journalist sniffily put it) and as a kind of glitzy, fluffy shield.
Behind it, she could be subtly subversive. Years before the controversy around Loretta Lynn’s 1975 single The Pill highlighted the issue of Nashville’s sexism, Parton was writing songs of a distinctly feminist bent – Just Because I’m a Woman and When Possession Gets Too Strong among them – even if she always demurred from describing herself as such. She also had a line in songs that could give more conservative Nashville stars palpitations. Down from Dover was extraordinarily beautiful, but it seemed to simmer with empathic rage on behalf of its protagonist, an outcast unmarried mother, and concluded with a description of her giving birth to a stillborn baby. Her duet partner Porter Wagoner was so horrified that he urged her not to release it: she did, and it was summarily banned by country radio.
And behind her image, she could be a model of smart, steely self-determination. If the country music establishment had a tendency to look down on her (the songwriter Tom T Hall once noted that he and Kris Kristofferson were the only two people in Nashville “who could describe Dolly Parton without using their hands”), she was abundantly aware of her own worth. The then-more-famous Wagoner was doing her a favour in 1967 when he adopted her as his duet partner, but Parton did most of the heavy lifting when it came to the pair’s songwriting, and left when it became apparent her success was beginning to outstrip his, occasioning a $3m lawsuit in the process. Moreover, she famously turned down Elvis Presley’s overtures to record the heart-rending song she wrote about the duo’s split, I Will Always Love You, when Presley’s manager indicated he wanted a cut of the songwriting royalties in return.
She was clearly possessed of a far greater artistic and commercial ambition than she was given credit for. The former was evidenced by 1973’s My Tennessee Mountain Home, an entirely self-penned autobiographical concept album that was rather less sentimental in its recollections than you might expect: “No amount of money could pay me to go back and live through it again,” she sang of her poverty-stricken rural upbringing on In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad). It ranks among the best things she ever released. Her daring became apparent around the time of the Walters interview, when Parton made a lunge for the pop mainstream, disregarding fears that it would alienate her existing audience.
She scored a succession of huge pop hits: 1977’s Mann and Weill-penned Here You Come Again went to No 3 on the Hot 100, a chart on which Jolene had, incredibly, only peaked at No 60; three years later 9 to 5 hit No 1. She also transformed into an actor and dabbled in disco without losing her country essence. During her quest for mainstream success, she was as likely to essay a bluegrass version of the Beatles’ Help!, or a cover of Woody Guthrie’s Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos), or unleash upon the world Me and Little Andy, a song that anywhere other than Nashville would be regarded as a bit much – a child and a puppy snuff it in the final verse – as she was to release the winningly high-camp disco of Potential New Boyfriend. She really did know exactly what she was doing.
In a sense, her moment as a mainstream crossover pop star was relatively short-lived. There was one more huge hit with 1983’s peerless Islands in the Stream, a Bee Gees-penned duet with Kenny Rodgers, but that moment had drawn to close by the time of 1987’s Rainbow. It seemed Parton had reached her limit with trying to cater to a broad audience – doggedly ploughing her way through its written-to-order contents, she sounded bored stiff, particularly when compared with the same year’s superb Trio, a collaboration with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt.
And besides, Rainbow’s commercial failure didn’t matter. Perhaps because she had never really turned her back on country – 1984’s Tennessee Homesick Blues opened with sound of Parton yodelling – Nashville welcomed her full-blooded return to the genre, with 1989’s Ricky Skaggs-produced White Limozeen. If she never scored another US Hot 100 hit, the broader celebrity she had established in the late 70s and early 80s never waned for the rest of her life. Tellingly, while promoting White Limozeen’s standout track, the insanely catchy and uproariously funny Why’d You Come in Here Lookin’ Like That?, she hosted Saturday Night Live: it would be a decade before another country star did so.
In truth, Parton’s subsequent albums were of a decidedly mixed quality, at least until she returned to absolute basics: 1999’s Grammy-winning The Grass Is Blue kicked off a trio of stark, fantastic albums that dealt in bluegrass, Appalachian folk and country gospel, the music that she had “grown up surrounded by”. Thereafter, what she put out was hit-and-and miss: misjudged horrors including 2003’s post-9/11 collection of patriotic songs, For God and Country, abutting albums as good as 2014’s Blue Smoke, although her voice sounded magnificent no matter the material. She was still more than capable of writing fantastic songs – but nothing that could eclipse the best of her 70s material.
It didn’t really matter, because the best of her 70s material had long taken on a life of its own outside country music. Whitney Houston’s cover of I Will Always Love You became the biggest-selling single of all time by a female artist. At the last count, Jolene has been covered nearly 90 times: you could hear it rendered as noisy alt-rock by the White Stripes, synth-pop by Strawberry Switchblade, or a dubby post-club soundtrack by One Dove. Stars queued up to pay homage.
Meanwhile, in the 21st century, the full extent of Parton’s influence on pop became apparent. Younger stars queued up to pay homage of one kind or another. Taylor Swift, who knows a thing or two about pivoting away from country to pop, called her “a force of evolution and transformation in our industry”. Parton co-wrote Rainbowland on her goddaughter Miley Cyrus’s 2017 album Younger Now, and you didn’t have to analyse Sabrina Carpenter’s work too deeply to spot the influence. The fact that Carpenter’s 2024 smash Please Please Please sounded like something Parton might have written evidently didn’t escape Parton herself: she turned up duetting with Carpenter on a remixed version of the song, the swearing decorously omitted.
As fans of Tammy Wynette or Patsy Cline would be quick to point out, Parton certainly wasn’t the first female country star to cross over into the pop charts, but she nevertheless seemed like the godmother of the pop-country that has swept the charts in recent years, which one Spotify playlist characterised as “Neon Cowgirl” (Parton was by far the oldest artist to make said playlist, rubbing shoulders with Swift, Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Kesha et al). When Beyoncé made a musical leap into country on Cowboy Carter, it somehow seemed inevitable that Parton would be involved, and so it proved: she delivered a spoken-word introduction to Beyoncé’s redux of Jolene. In fact, she seemed as present in pop music in the mid-2020s as she had been in the late 70s. The difference was that no one would have asked her if she was a joke. That question had been answered to everyone’s satisfaction a long time ago.