Why Dolly Parton is a feminist icon (even though she wouldn’t call herself one)
Dolly may be knocking on 76 but she’s busier than ever – recording, acting and even funding Covid-19 research.
I’ve been a fan of Dolly’s for ever. (‘Is it okay if I call you Dolly?’ ‘What else would you call me – Reba?’) I loved her long before her Glastonbury appearance in 2014 rebadged her as ‘cool’ – as if she cares about cool – and in the weeks leading up to this meeting I’ve had sleepless nights soundtracked by earworms of ‘Dumb Blonde’, her first US chart hit (‘Just because I’m blonde/ Don’t think I’m dumb/’Cause this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool’). And I sobbed again at the crystalline beauty of ‘I Will Always Love You’ – written for the leery, sharpsuited country legend Porter Wagoner when she left his show, her muchdissected double act with him the platform that launched her on the road to superstardom.
And now here she is, arranged on a studded leather armchair at her Tennessee headquarters – ‘We’ve all been holed up here.’ She is immaculate, dressed in – remarkably for her – understated black, makeup dramatic as ever, scarlet talons punctuating her every point, the inevitable blond wig adding centimetres to her tiny fivefoot frame. I’ve borrowed a cowboy shirt from my husband to get in the mood and look like a Minnesota trucker. Born in 1946, she doesn’t look her age – she doesn’t look like anything other than Dolly Parton.
So how has being holed up been for her? ‘It’s always difficult to be locked down for any reason. I’m a free bird – I have to be able to do whatever I feel, whenever I feel like doing it. So I wrote a lot of songs and got a lot of business done, safely and smartly.’ She laughs that frequent, tinkly laugh.
She has agreed to speak to me because she has something to promote: a book titled Songteller, featuring the stories behind 175 of her most beloved songs. Just before Christmas last year she also produced an album (A Holly Dolly Christmas) and a Netflix Christmas movie (Christmas on the Square).
Was it her mission to rescue what seemed set to be a bleak Christmas? ‘I talked a lot on that album, during musical interludes and instrumentals, so I could feel like I was in people’s houses, like we were just family and friends,’ she says. ‘The album and the book made good Christmas presents,’ she continues, deliciously shameless. ‘I said, “Wrap up really early!” I wanted it to be a holiday at Christmas for me too. So I have enough money to do some more when life is good again.’
ONLY ONE STORY
Dolly’s story is so well known it has taken on the air of folktale. Her dirtpoor family, 12 kids. Their cabin in the Smoky Mountains ‘holler’ that had running water ‘if we ran to the well to get it’. How her parents had to pay the doctor with a sack of oats for delivering her. How, aged 18, she took the bus
to Nashville to make it as a country star and met her future husband, Carl Dean, outside a laundromat on the same day. She has been married to the mysterious, rarely seen former asphalt contractor for 54 years. Health issues meant they couldn’t have children – something, she has said, that may have given her wings. Yet she told Oprah Winfrey recently: ‘I think a big part of my success was that I was free to work.’
Even articles promising ‘25 things you never knew’ about her are full of Dolly-lore already familiar to fans: refusing to sign over song rights to Elvis Presley; losing a Dolly Parton lookalike contest… Does she get weary of telling her story over and over? ‘Well,’ she says rather beadily, ‘I only have the one story.’
Relenting, she goes on: ‘I don’t know that I get tired of it as much as I feel the public might get tired of it. But I love the fact that I have a rags-to-riches story. I love that
I feel like Cinderella. I take a lot of pride in that.’ It’s part of the reason people love her so much, I suggest. ‘I draw from my childhood. That’s what keeps me strong. I’m not
ashamed of any part of my life.’
When I worry I’m asking her a million things she has been asked over and over, she says it’s always different, ‘because I’m connecting with you and your personality, which I like – I can tell you’re smart.’ She probably says this to all the gals but, frankly, I can now die happy.
And a surprisingly disparate multitude of people do love her.
I tell her I was astonished when
I saw her live at how unusual her audience was – gay, straight, black, white, old, young – all unified in Dolly adoration. ‘People respond to what you’re giving out,’ she says, launching into a constant refrain. ‘I accept everybody. I love the spice of the world, and we’re all spice. It takes us all to make it full of flavour.’
NOT TAKING SIDES
Famously, down the years Dolly has never declared a political affiliation, usually interpreted as wanting to keep a deeply conservative Southern fanbase onside. Even when 9to5 was adopted by feminist movements, she refused to define herself as a feminist, despite having had to forge a place for herself in 1960s Nashville, the most patriarchal of societies. She became a formidable businesswoman and took control of publishing and rights almost from the off. (Watching some of the early Wagoner shows is to cringe at the condescension, all pretty lil’ Miss Dolly Parton.)
Isn’t it difficult for her not to get involved? ‘I don’t have to be political,’ she says with asperity. ‘I don’t have to march in the street with signs. I have to live my life, my convictions. I’m an entertainer.’ This line, ‘I’m an entertainer’, is a get-out clause I’ve heard from her many times. ‘I’m never going to be political. But I’m going to say that one person is as important as another. I don’t care what colour you are; I don’t care what your religion is; I don’t care if you’re gay, straight, transgender. And if I’m gonna be crucified for loving people, well, bring the nails.’
But even Dolly couldn’t avoid the frenzy around the US election. ‘Oh, it was crazy here. I mean, it’s crazy everywhere with the Covid virus, but then having that crazy election…
‘I draw from my childhood. That’s what keeps me strong. I’m not ashamed of any part of my life.’
You just got up every morning with a rock in your stomach. You had to keep the faith and pray that God’s will be done, not yours. I just wanted it to be over.’
I’m confident she would not have voted for A Certain Candidate. But I guess that’s part of her genius, allowing us to project our own convictions onto her reflective, glittering canvas. ‘It was going to be a piss-fight either way,’ she goes on. ‘You know, with the followers of either one. Crazy, crazy.’
I’m wondering at this point why everyone’s so keen to turn her into a political entity anyway. She’s her own magnificent construct, and if she shucked off the Dolly suit and came out on this side or that, she might lose that magic ability to unite Americans in a way nobody else seems able to do.
‘When life kinda gets back to normal, I’m thinking we’re going to be better people. We’re gonna try a little harder. I have to believe that. I think we’ll be better now that that’s all over.’ I wish I had her faith, I say. Does she have any advice for the godless likes of me? ‘I know a lot of people who don’t have faith. They’re the ones having the hardest time because you’ve got to believe in something bigger than yourself or you really do have problems.’
I blame my convent-school nuns, I say. ‘I often think of people who don’t believe in God, like you. It must feel lonely in there, right? You can’t just run around feeling nothing or you’re just like a little dust devil, don’t you think? Don’t you feel like you’re just spinning around because you’ve got nothing to hang on to?’
Oh, God. Now that she mentions it… She becomes brisk: ‘Yeah, well, don’t be religious because I say be religious. Because I’m not religious. I’m very spiritual. Even if I knew there was no God, I’d still choose to believe, because I want to believe in something good and wonderful. And I do. Some people blame it on the nuns, some blame it on – like my Pentecostal background – the Holy Roller of hellfire and damnation. Scared me to death.’
UNSTOPPABLE
From the moment Dolly appeared on stage at the Grand Ole Opry aged 13, she doesn’t appear to have stopped. Does she ever feel like slowing down, shaking off the towering stripper heels and just chilling? ‘I don’t know why I’d ever want to stop. Especially after you get older, you need things to do.
I’d rather wear out than rust out. You only have one life. No, I won’t retire. I might pull back if my husband’s not well or if I’m physically not well. But I’d never do it for any other reason.’
Dolly has so many balls to keep in the air at any time – the songwriting, the performing, the movies, the books, plus a whole swathe of other less glamorous interests. She’s a bona fide mogul. There’s her charity, Imagination Library, which donates books to children. And early last year she gave $1 million to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville towards research into Covid-19 treatments. Moderna, the company behind the vaccine, namechecked her in an
official report, which stated that the work was supported by ‘the Dolly Parton Covid-19 Research Fund’. So there’s that. Not forgetting her theme park, Dollywood, the biggest ticketed tourist attraction in Tennessee and an important employer. Isn’t it exhausting? ‘It’s really not; it’s a way of life with me,’ she insists. ‘Sometimes, like now, when you’re promoting so many different products, I can get a little physically weary and a little irritated…’ – eek! – ‘but you just pull back and think, hey, you dreamt yourself into a corner. You wanted all this. These dreams have come true.’
I can’t imagine the pressures of this level of fame. Researching Dolly opens a sluicegate of rumours and disinformation. Is she gay; is she covered in tattoos; has she had affairs with virtually every highprofile man who ever crossed her path? Does any of that stuff bother her? ‘Well, I’m a very sensitive person,’ she says. ‘I notice everything – I don’t even want to hear one bad thing. That’s not gonna damage me, but I hate it when they bring in other people, names and all. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity – that’s BS. Even if some of it’s, you know, based on some truth. But it’s so overexaggerated, like all the conspiracy theories; some people are always gonna believe that. But you can’t have everything. And I’ve had more good than I’ve had bad.’
That’s a very reasonable and rational way to approach it, I say. Does she think most people are basically reasonable? ‘Er…,’ she hesitates, ‘I think, for the most part. Certainly my fans are. But we all love gossip. This whole world is built on gossip and greed. Even I read some of those tabloids and say I believe everything about everybody but me!’
I’ve never heard her say a bad word about anyone else, never even a bitchy aside, I say. She laughs. ‘People say, do you ever lose your temper? I say no, but sometimes
I have to use it. I’m no pushover – that’s why I’m where I’m at today as a businesswoman. You gotta work at being happy, like you gotta work at being miserable. And some people choose to be miserable.’
You were even nice about Jolene, I blurt, referencing the love rival in her 1973 anthem. She just about stops herself from eye-rolling. ‘Well, that’s a song…’ She relents again: ‘I thought that was a good angle on a song, to go, “You’re pretty enough to have him, but this is the only one I love.” When you write, you try to think of all the different angles. But I really wanted to kick her ass.’
Bless her – kind as the angel she plays in her Christmas movie, she has thrown me a bone.
‘I’ve played a few angels. This one is trying to teach the old Scrooge lady, Christine Baranski. I’m trying to salvage her, bring her into the light. But my character’s not a sappy angel; I’m a feisty little angel. Not so different to who I am as a human being.’
I saw the film and it was… quite something: a musical mash-up of every Christmas movie ever made, for which she wrote 14 brand-new songs and starred not only as the angel but also the most glamorous
‘They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity – that’s BS.’
bag lady you’ve ever seen. (‘Not really; I thought I was pretty bagladyish.’ Hmm.) Cynical, godless person that I am, I found much of the sentiment hilarious; one couplet in a song referencing a sick child goes: ‘With her beautiful face… and her little bald head…’ I am clearly unsalvageable. But if Christmas isn’t a time for some syrup, I don’t know when is.
I do unreservedly love Dolly’s book – who wouldn’t want to know the stories behind some of the past century’s greatest songs? All her huge hits: ‘Coat of Many Colours’; ‘My Tennessee Mountain Home’; ‘The Bargain Store’, which DJs wouldn’t play because they thought it too suggestive but Dolly meant entirely innocently. And then there’s the new album too, which – in addition to both Cyruses, Billy Ray and Miley (Dolly’s goddaughter); Michael Bublé; and Dolly’s brother, Randy – also features Willie Nelson, and that’s good enough for me.
BIGGER DREAMS
I’ve nearly had all my time with her and one thing is clear: Dolly only ever gives away what Dolly wants to give away. Her gift is to look like an open book, one with the spangliest rhinestone cover, while really only delivering a table of contents and maybe, if you’re lucky, a bit of an appendix.
‘You can ask me whatever you ask me, and I’m going to tell you what I want you to hear,’ she told the host Jad Abumrad on Dolly Parton’s America podcast last year. Or as past co-star Lily Tomlin has put it: ‘I don’t remember Dolly ever really confiding anything to us. To this day I’ve never seen Dolly without a wig.’ But really, why would we want to?
I loved the podcast, shocked at the story about her appearing in London and her security having to fend off a potential attacker armed with a gun. She shrugs it off: ‘You’re going to get those crazy things now and then. That’s part of your memories if you’re lucky enough to become the star you’ve always dreamt of being.’
Does she feel like that? ‘I do feel I have accomplished more than I dreamt of. I dreamt of getting out of the Smoky Mountains. I dreamt of being successful with my songs. I wanted to be rich, to travel; I wanted to have things I could share. So I think I’m a very successful person. You can be a star, you can be rich, and still be miserable. I enjoy my little self – I never get too far from my little Dolly that I was then. I love watching her grow and be all of those things. But I still feel like I’ve got bigger dreams to dream.’
Does little Dolly enjoy being rich? She laughs again. ‘Yeah, little Dolly likes being rich. I wrote a song called ‘Sacrifice’, and one of my favourite lines says, “I was going to be rich no matter how much it cost. And I was going to win, no matter how much I lost. And all through the years I’ve kept my eye on the prize. And you ask if it’s worth the sacrifice.” And I would say yes, yes it is.’ ❖
You can be a star, you can be rich, and still be miserable.