RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Dolly Parton performs in 1978. —Bettmann/Corbis
Dolly Parton, the beloved country-music superstar known for writing about the lives of regular people in more than 3,000 songs and, in later years, for giving away more than 300 million books to children around the world, has died in Nashville . She was 80. Parton had recently shared updates about health issues she’d been dealing with since the death of her husband Carl Dean last year, and her representatives told People that her death in Nashville came after a “brief battle with cancer.” Her nephew and bodyguard Bryan Seaver announced her death in an Instagram video posted to her account on Aug. 25, saying, “Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus, surely met by Carl, her parents, and countless others who have watched her and longed for her to meet them in the heavens.”
To her fans around the world, she was Saint Dolly—the American godmother who channeled the sorrows of everyday life into song , wrapping ugly truths in pretty packages. Though she was described by music journalist Robert Oermann as “the Mozart of our times,” Parton’s larger-than-life hair, excess in rhinestones, surgical implants, and cosmetic work concealed the iron will through which she confronted the day’s realities with her craft. Most importantly, she wrote and sang with a woman’s voice and heart about topics that uniquely touched her gender. Her songs include stories of stillborn births (“Down From Dover”), suicide (“The Bridge”), shame (“Just Because I’m a Woman”), abuse (“A Gamble Either Way”), adoption (“Doing This for Your Sake”), isolation (“Two Doors Down”), mental institutions (“Daddy Come and Get Me”), and prostitution (“The Bargain Store”).
—David Gahr—Getty Images
I saw Parton play live in concert during her Pure & Simple Tour in October 2016, a month before the most divisive election in American collective memory, and a year before I began reporting a podcast on her life called Dolly Parton’s America . At the time, I was looking for someone or something to believe in. On the television and in the news, hatred from both sides of the American political aisle had never seemed more grotesque, but at Parton’s show, we all sang together. Parton visited more than 60 cities that summer and fall. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if she knew it would be something of a healing tour, the last of its kind she would do. When I asked Parton what “Dolly Parton’s America” meant to her, she responded that her perspective wasn’t limited by borders, that it was Dolly Parton’s World : “I just think we need to love one another. I think we need to try a little harder. We need to be a little kinder. We need to be a little smarter. We need to have more love and compassion.” The last time I saw her, she told me she was planning a comedy album. She also said that, unlike other artists of her stature for whom posthumously released music has been a point of contention, she’d recorded many more songs of hope she’d put away in a vault, to be released throughout the hundred years following her death.
Parton was a genius from humble origins. Because of them, she remained vulnerable, even relatable, in the public eye. Many wealthy folk prefer to be compassionate from on-high, if at all, never getting their feet wet or hands dirty. Parton rolled in the mud. She claimed she modeled her look on “the town trash whore,” whom she thought was “beautiful.” She dressed in a way that was her idea of glamour : yellow hair piled atop her head, bright red lipstick and nails, high-heeled shoes, and a tight skirt. “I thought [that woman] was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen,” she once said on Ellen . “So I grew up to look just like her!”
Once Parton achieved a certain level of fame, her body became a punchline for the late-night circuit. When two male scientists made the world’s first cloned sheep, in 1996, they named it after Parton for its “large mammaries.” Parton laughed the cracks off with quips of her own (“I don’t know if I’m supporting them , or they’re supporting me”). For the Dolly podcast series, I asked Parton once about whether she thought her look stopped journalists, mostly men in the time she was coming up, from taking her work seriously, or viewing her songwriting as equally important to her work as a performer. She shrugged off the question: “Sometimes you have to look like Jezebel in order to get some angelic things done in the world.”
There are countless examples of remarkable women erased by history, but Parton survived her own story long enough to tell it. Her cycle of resurrections, the highs and lows, didn’t seem to change her much over the years, even as the highs garnered her over half a billion dollars.
Dolly Parton’s early years
Dolly Rebecca Parton arrived on Jan. 19, 1946, in an unheated cabin about an hour outside of Knoxville, Tenn., atop the Smoky Mountains. Her parents paid the doctor who trekked to their home to deliver her with a sack of cornmeal. The fourth of 12 children—as she put it, “Mama always had one on her or in her”—the kids slept three or four to a bed. Their only modern convenience was a battery-powered radio. Her childhood home had no indoor plumbing, electricity, or running water. She later compared it to moving from " the Dark Ages into the light ages. "
Dolly Parton performs at the Roxy in West Hollywood in 1977. —Barr Brandon—MediaPunch/IPX/AP
She grew up surrounded by pines, butterflies, creeks, and neon-green moss. As her father worked from sunup to sundown as a farmer, her mother sang the children Irish and Welsh folk songs “from the Old World,” passed down through the generations. One day, Parton fashioned a makeshift microphone by putting a tobacco stick into the ground and placing a tin can on top, performing a show of her own. By the age of 5, she had written her very first song, “Little Tiny Tasseltop,” about a corncob doll. By 8, her Uncle Bill Owens, who wrote songs and performed across East Tennessee ...
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