So when people say she spoke to everybody, I have to agree: she included me.
When she died on Tuesday at 80, tributes came from everywhere, including one each from Donald Trump and Jane Fonda: it’s hard to think what else they would see eye to eye on.
Back in 2019, the New York Times ran an article asking “Is There Anything We Can All Agree On?” The answer was Dolly Parton.
She earned that. Born in a one-room cabin in eastern Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children, her sharecropper father was so poor he had to pay the doctor attending the birth with a sack of corn meal. She joked ever after that she’d been “raking in the dough ever since”.
She wrote and published some 3000 songs, many of them mining that same childhood; she sang about being mocked by schoolmates for wearing a coat made from scraps of fabric in Coat of Many Colours:
I couldn’t understand it
For I felt I was rich.
And I told them of the love
My momma sewed in every stitch.
She fashioned a folksy style with her voluptuous figure, big blonde wigs and rhinestone-studded stage costumes – she called it “a country girl’s idea of glam” and used it to great effect. “It costs me a lot of money to look this cheap,” she would laugh.
With Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, Dolly led a host of hit-makers into country music, including Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. Her songs were recorded by the likes of Tina Turner, Norah Jones, Merle Haggard and Kenny Rogers.
Whitney Houston gave Dolly’s I Will Always Love You a third run at the top of the charts after it featured in The Bodyguard movie; years before Dolly had refused to part with the publishing rights when Elvis Presley’s overbearing manager, Colonel Tom Parker, demanded she sign them over before Presley would cover the song.
With more than 100 million record sales, numerous movie roles and television shows to her name, she put her wealth to good effect. She opened the Dollywood theme park in her home county in 1986 and her many charitable ventures included a literacy foundation that has distributed more than 300 million books to children across the English-speaking world.
While she carefully avoided politics and stuck to country music’s values of God, flag and family, she supported gay rights and cheered her LGBT+ following. Her husband of 59 years, Carl Dean, an asphalt contractor, died only last year and, while nursing him took a toll on her own health, Dolly marked it with a song, If You Hadn’t Been There.
She was admitted just last Friday to the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Centre, another beneficiary of her generosity. But Dolly had canvassed mortality – among her many other themes of longing, life and love – with a short, sweet song back in 1969, called Little Bird:
Beauty is a rare perfume
Precious, yet doesn’t last long
Youth is but a playful breeze
That blows our way once, then moves on
Along the way, she lit up the world. Woof!
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