‘I look artificial, but I’m totally real inside’

She is the bestselling female country-music star ever, and recently gave $1 million towards Covid-19 research. Dolly Parton will be 75 this week

In a career spanning 56 years, Dolly Parton has written, by her own estimation, more than 5,000 songs. She has never, she says, ‘been someone who gets writer’s block’. But there is one song in particular that Parton says she wished she had written, and that might summarise her career best of all. The song is Dumb Blonde, written by a Nashville songwriter Curly Putman, which gave Parton her first country hit in 1967. ‘Just because I’m blonde don’t think I’m dumb, because this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.’

Never a truer word… Parton may be the self-described ‘backwoods Barbie’, but the spiky heels, hourglass figure and towering wigs – the whole candy-floss confection – conceals a heart of gold and a character of pure grit.

The fourth of 12 children, Parton grew up in a one-room shack in Tennessee – forced to share a bed with three or four siblings. At the age of 10 she was singing on a local radio station and by 13 she’d recorded her first single, Puppy Love. In 1964, the day after graduating from high school, she caught a bus to Nashville, ready to take the city by storm.

Show business, as Parton once observed, ‘is a moneymaking joke – and I’ve always liked telling jokes’. And they’ve always been good ones. Gags about her appearance, leering remarks about her figure – whatever joke anybody could make about Parton, she’d thought of it first. ‘I know I look totally bizarre and artificial,’ she once said. ‘But I’m totally real inside.’

The reality lies in her songs. The great songwriter Harlan Howard once described country music as ‘three chords and the truth’, and it is a maxim that Dolly Parton has lived to the full, whether the songs be Jolene or Coat of Many Colours, conjuring vivid pictures and drawing on the hard-won truths of her impoverished childhood, or Will Always Love You, the song of choice for tens of thousands of wedding first dances.

Written in 1974, that song also illustrates something

Ibeyond her genius; her canniness and determination to control her own destiny. Porter Wagoner, the singer and producer who was her mentor in her early days in Nashville, liked to claim that she wrote the song after he had told her that love songs would be a better commercial proposition than ditties about mother’s old black kettle. Her version was that she wrote it for him as a fond farewell when she finally broke his hold on her. ‘He was the boss. He didn’t have all the creativity, but he had all the control.’ Elvis desperately wanted to record it, but Parton baulked at his manager Col Tom Parker’s stipulation that she give him the copyright. A wise move. Eighteen years later, Whitney Houston’s version of the song went on to sell more than 12 million copies.

Intimacy, of a kind, has been her gift. No one leaves a Dolly Parton concert feeling that she has not been talking to them personally. But as much as we might feel we know her through her songs, we don’t really know her at all. Her private life has always been just that; not a single public blemish (on the contrary, she recently gave $1 million towards Covid research), not a whisper of scandal. She lives in Brentwood, Tennessee, and has been married for 54 years to Carl Dean, whom she met outside the Wishy Washy laundromat in Nashville.

‘All my life,’ she once said, ‘all I ever wanted was to be a big star.’ And she has fulfilled her dream – spectacularly and unapologetically, while at the same time remaining completely down to earth. So, Dolly, at 75, we salute you. And we will always love you. — By Mick Brown

Parton (back right) and family in 1960