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Dolly Parton’s popularity has endured because even after five decades of stardom she remains an enigma in plain sight. Call it the Parton Paradox. “Very often someone will wow you, but as you get to know them, the mystery wears off,” Jane Fonda, Ms. Parton’s co-star in the feminist film “9 to 5,” told Rolling Stone in 1980. “One of the things that just flabbergasts me about Dolly is the amount of mystery she has.”
And at the moment, the magical mysteries of Dolly Parton seem to be captivating a whole new generation. The 73-year-old is riding high on a trifecta of millennial milestones: She’s the subject of a popular serialized podcast (“Dolly Parton’s America”), the inspiration for a Netflix anthology series (“Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings”), and the featured vocalist on an EDM song (the Swedish duo Galantis’s “Faith,” on which Ms. Parton appears with a Dutch rapper named Mr. Probz).
In some sense, though, 2019 is an odd time for a Dolly renaissance. It’s easy to see why someone like Ms. Fonda — a kind of octogenarian Greta Thunberg — is enjoying an uptick in intergenerational support from a politically aware cohort too young to remember her days of antiwar activism. Ms. Parton, though, has remained reluctant to make the slightest hint of a political statement.
One reason Ms. Parton’s approval rating is so high is that all the attributes that used to set her up for criticism — the outrageous, hyper-femme style; the unapologetic business savvy needed to pull off her late-70s pop crossover; even the so-what acknowledgment of her own cosmetic surgery — are no longer taboo.
A generation that has grown up with selfies and pop feminism seems to have an innate understanding that artifice doesn’t negate authenticity, or that a penchant for towering wigs and acrylic nails doesn’t prevent someone from being a songwriting genius.
Perhaps that’s why her rhinestone DNA is visible in young artists as varied as Kacey Musgraves and Cardi B — to say nothing of Ms. Parton’s own goddaughter Miley Cyrus. Ms. Parton sang a duet with Kesha on her 2017 album “Rainbow” — a 1980 Parton hit that Kesha’s mother happened to co-write. At this year’s Grammys, when Ms. Parton was honored with the MusiCares person of the year award for her philanthropy, she performed a rousing medley of her hits alongside a big-name billing of her millennial heirs, like Katy Perry, Maren Morris and Ms. Musgraves.
Like Cher, another 73-year-old multihyphenate icon, Ms. Parton has ascended to a rarefied level of intergenerational celebrity: a saucy grandmother of social media. When the Gen-Z sheriff and “Old Town Road” mastermind Lil Nas X wondered aloud, on Twitter, “y’all think i can get dolly parton and megan thee stallion on an old town road remix?,” Ms. Parton was quick to respond with a very appropriate unicorn emoji. “I was so happy for him,” Ms. Parton said of Lil Nas X. “I don’t care how we present country music or keep it alive,” she added. “I’m all about acceptance.”
That quote is classic Dolly: Anyone can see himself or herself in it, no matter which side of the country traditionalists vs. Lil Nas X debate they land on. Both-sides-ism rarely feels as benevolent as it does when coming from Ms. Parton, but that’s nothing new. When asked, in 1997, how she was able to maintain fan bases within both the religious right and the gay community, she replied, “It’s two different worlds, and I live in both and I love them both.”
Ms. Parton was born in January 1946, to parents so poor, they paid the doctor who delivered her in cornmeal.
As a child — one of 12 — she had no exposure to movies or television, so her earliest ideas of glamour came from two seemingly disparate sources: the glittering kings and queens she heard described in fairytales and Bible verses, and from the “streetwalkers” and “trollops” she’d see when her family went into town. “I was impressed with what they called ‘the trash’ in my hometown,” she later mused. “I don’t know how trashy these women were, but they were said to be trashy because they had blond hair and wore nail polish and tight clothes. I thought they were beautiful.”
The other night a friend texted that #DollyParton is trending on Twitter.
My heart skipped a beat as Dolly’s life flashed before my eyes, but it was about an hourlong interview airing on ABC. For all the musical legends we’ve lost in the past few years, it’s heartening to see this show pony get her victory lap while she’s still around to bask in the glory.
Not that she’s planning on going anywhere. Whenever she’s asked how she’d like to be remembered 100 years from now, Ms. Parton trots out one of her best Dollyisms: “I want ’em to say, ‘God, don’t she look good for her age!’ ”