At 68, Dolly Parton still ‘real where it counts’
I have loved Dolly Parton since I was a small child. I sat spellbound as her records spun on my parents’ 1970s turntable. And that pure, quavering voice still goes straight to my heart. I’m not alone. Over an astonishing 59-year career, Dolly Parton has sold more than 100 million records and received 46 Grammy Award nominations. So, although the taxi driver who takes me to meet her makes the predictable jokes about her famous cleavage, there’s far more to Parton than the assets that — with a wink towards her goddaughter Miley Cyrus’s hit — she refers to as her “wrecking balls.” As she always says: “I may look fake but I’m real where it counts.”
Although she surely must keep some things back — is she really, as rumoured, covered in tattoos where we can’t see them? — she’s invited her public into her life like a good Southern hostess. Her Dollywood theme park in her native Tennessee (which welcomes an average of three million visitors a year) even features a replica of the one-room shack in which she was raised: the fourth of 12 children born to a poor sharecropper and his wife.
When Dolly was born, the family were so broke they had to pay the doctor who delivered her in cornmeal. But poverty led to creativity: her mother would make dolls of corn husks and she wrote her first song about one of them: Little Tiny Tassletop. It was a wild childhood in which the kids ran free. At one point, Parton jumped a fence and landed on a ploughshare, slicing the toes from her foot. Her mother doused the wound in kerosene to fight infection, packed it with cornmeal to stop the bleeding and re-attached the toes with a regular needle and thread. No anesthetic. She’s one tough cookie.
Her musical impulses found an outlet in the rhythms all around her: the clang of shucked peas hitting a pan, the clonk of a cow bell. Her three main passions (God, sex and music — although she says the order changes) were all united in an abandoned church where she gazed at the pornographic drawings scrawled on the walls and took the strings from the old organ to fashion herself a makeshift dulcimer. She continues to be a musical innovator: demonstrating to me how she learned to play her long, acrylic nails like a washboard, then picking up the old guitar that I couldn’t resist bringing along for her to sign, and explaining how she uses open tuning and some nifty fingerwork to steer those same pink talons around the fretboard.
She becomes even more girlish with the guitar in her hands and I remember that she was already singing on local radio by the age of nine. She cut her first record at 13, which led to an appearance on the Grand Ole Opry, where she was introduced by Johnny Cash. She charts her progress from there on her new album, Blue Smoke, singing on the single Home how she left for Nashville aged 17, but still has the gift of a “magic door that opens up back to the time when I was a kid, to the sounds of the crickets and katydids … Home!”
“THE HUSK (IN MY VOICE) IS FROM A LOT OF TALKIN’ AND HARD LIVIN’. IT’S AN UNUSUAL VOICE: PEOPLE EITHER LOVE IT OR THEY HATE IT.”
DOLLY PARTON
I ask if she’s part of a dying breed of “authentic” country musicians, if she thinks it’s possible for young pretenders such as Taylor Swift or Miley Cyrus to access the same innocence, and she smiles. “Well, Miley does have that ol’ time feeling from her daddy (Billy Ray) and the way he grew up. Through her grandparents in Kentucky she is connected to that earthy feeling and attitude.” Of her goddaughter’s more sexually provocative stage antics she says: “She had to make her statement because people wouldn’t let her grow up. Just like people wouldn’t let Shirley Temple grow up. But I promise you that she’ll surprise the world with her talent through the years. Taylor Swift is very clever and really knows how to handle herself. I admire them both.”
But she admits: “There’s nothing like really being from that old world. That real authentic sound in the voice. From the soul. It’s just embedded in my Smoky Mountain DNA and even though great voices can duplicate it there is a missing link if you haven’t totally lived it.”
Most articles you read about Parton concentrate on her appearance. But we all know how (despite rising at 3 a.m. to work each day) the 68-year-old retains her youthful looks. The real miracle is that she still sounds about 25. There’s a duet with Kenny Rogers (with whom she sang Islands in the Stream) on the new album called You Can’t Make Old Friends. The cracks and croaks in his weathered voice sound rich and warm, but you can tell how old he is. I tell Parton she sounds young enough to be his granddaughter and she giggles “Well, thank you! You’re just makin’ me feel better and better! I sing every day and I guess if you keep it up it stays strong. The husk (in my voice) is from a lot of talkin’ and hard livin’. It’s an unusual voice: people either love it or they hate it.”
One of her favourite tracks on Blue Smoke is a cover of Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice. She recently described Dylan as “a weird buckaroo” and tells me, “I met him a few times through the years and I don’t feel like we ever connected. Maybe he just thought I was too phoney or he didn’t get to know me too well. But I always loved his music. His mind is so deep but his melodies are so good. They lend themselves so well to harmonies. I’ve even thought about making an album called Dolly Does Dylan but I think that sounds too close to Debbie Does Dallas!”
My own favourite song from Blue Smoke is If I had Wings, which sees her hopeful vocals flutter unaccompanied. She says she’s always been fascinated by flying things: hummingbirds, butterflies and the june-bugs she once tethered by string and watched soar like kites. But, having flown free so long herself, Parton has no intention of being grounded yet. “I only feel as old as yesterday and as young as tomorrow!” she proclaims as she swirls the pen across my guitar and whisks off, high heels a-clickin’.