Dolly Parton still pulls the heartstrings

I CAN’T say I own all of her 47 solo albums. Still, I’m a fan of the Smoky Mountains’ finest, and I’m enjoying Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings on Netflix.

The feminist and LGBTQ+ icon and the long-reigning queen of country music has been pulling at our heartstrings for a long time.

From

One Day At A Time in 1970 (“Life has dealt us our fair share of pain along the way”) to Jolene (“I’m begging of you please don’t take my man”) in 1974, to Christmas Without You in 1984 to Let Her Fly in 1993, Dolly Parton’s songs show her vulnerability. “Much of her music is grounded by an authentic sense of insecurity that she’s worked hard to overcome,” Lindsay Zoladz wrote in The New York Times. “She’s not a one-dimensional paper Dolly. She has bled.”

In 2002, I was privileged to meet her for an hour in a suite at the Shelbourne hotel in Dublin.

The legend from the two-room farm in Locust Ridge, Tennessee talked about how she was the fourth of 12 children; her mother, Avie Lee Parton, was married at 15 and Dolly said she always had one on her and one in her. She told me she could remember being little and not feeling pretty as a young girl. She thought she was unattractive as a teenager. She also had religion whipped into her. She said it was from that unhappy place that the Dolly Parton look sprang from. Her hair would never do anything she wanted it to do so she exaggerated it. Her hands were short so her wore nails as long as her fingers. She was short so she wore shoes with five inch heels. (You could see why she was called the patron saint for working-class women of a certain age who dressed as boldly as possible to assert themselves in a man’s world.)

Dolly talked about how she grew up in an extremely religious family; her mother’s beliefs were the Pentecostal Church of God, talking in tongues and laying on of hands variety; while her father leaned towards the more strict Baptists. “My grandfather thought I was going straight to hell from the time I was 15 years old. I was a Jezebel going straight to hell!”

So when they told you that you couldn’t dress like that, you would make your skirts that little bit shorter?

“You’re damn right,” she replied. Religion is based on fear of women, I said.

“Fear of everything,” Dolly replied. “They try to scare people and scary religion is no religion.”

Dolly admitted that after she made The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas movie in 1982, she sank into a long depression. “I had got [sic] overweight and I had a lot of female problems, hormone problems and had a bad period of my life. For 18 months I had a really hard time and I just finally said ‘Get off your fat ass and move that weight. Get out of this depression or blow your brains out’.”

Did she have suicidal thoughts?

“You go through those thoughts,” she answered. “You can relate to how people get on drugs and alcohol, or how they commit suicide. I didn’t do either but I certainly had a better understanding.”