I first knew Dolly Parton through a pair of headphones that were far too big for my head. They belonged to my mother and were plugged into her record player, the heavy, padded sort that shut out the room. I would sit there listening to her records over and over: Jolene, I Will Always Love You, Here You Come Again and so many others, while studying the woman on the sleeves, certain she was the most enthralling person I had ever seen.
She didn’t look entirely human. An angel, I thought, with a halo of blonde hair, a tiny waist, enormous breasts and long vampish nails, then those impossibly gorgeous dimples that made her look, despite everything, like a cherub. She had a tinkling laugh that, as far as I could tell, lit up the world. Then there was that voice: high, sweet, pure.
Dolly has occupied some corner of my life for almost as long as I can remember. For years, I have planned to spend my 60th birthday at Dollywood. My partner and I have been together for 21 years and have always said that when we finally get married, our first dance will be to Islands in the Stream. He is emphatically masculine and no Dolly obsessive, but whenever it comes on the radio, he gets up and sings it with me.
I have written about famous deaths before. It is an odd corner of journalism, gathering up a life while the news of its ending is still travelling around the world. Most of those people moved me. I am lucky enough to have been asked to write only about the ones who did, but I had never cried over one before.
Yesterday, I cried for Dolly.
The news of her death made me gasp out loud. With the sadness came a weight I hadn’t felt before, the sense that I might get her wrong and that it would matter if I did. Ever since, I have been trying to understand why she meant so much to me.
Part of the answer must be in the songs, though I am not the person to explain why they travelled so far beyond country music. They simply turned up everywhere. I remember a dance mix I played obsessively in the 1990s that had 9 to 5 tucked among the club tracks. Rhinestones at the rave, and Dolly somehow sounded entirely at home.
Perhaps that was the thing about Dolly: she belonged in everyone’s world. The outpouring of love since her death has made that clearer than ever. Tributes have come from people who seem to have almost nothing in common: Eminem and Jane Fonda, Beyoncé and Paul McCartney, country singers and rappers, actors and politicians. Everyone appears to have had their own Dolly.
And yet she never seemed to alter herself to gain admission to any of those worlds. She arrived in all of them completely intact: the Tennessee accent, the hair, the rhinestones, the jokes, the faith. She didn’t have to become more like everybody else for everybody else to love her.
What I hear in her songs is how much she understood. In Jolene, the sweetness of her voice disguises what is really there: sexual jealousy and terror with every defence stripped away. There is no anger to hide behind; she marvels at Jolene’s beauty, admits she cannot compete, and simply begs her not to take him. The vulnerability is almost shocking.
Her voice seemed to contain joy and pain in almost equal measure. There was an ache in its sweetness, but also warmth in the sadness. Somehow, both could exist at once.
The song that undoes me is The Grass Is Blue, from the album of the same name, which marked her return to the bluegrass music she had grown up with after years of more commercial success. It is one of the Dolly albums I love most, partly because her voice has such extraordinary gentleness. In the title song, heartbreak has made the world nonsensical: snow burns, rivers run the wrong way and the grass is blue. Reality itself has to be rewritten to make the loss bearable. She sings it with such tenderness that it breaks my heart and comforts me at the same time. So much of Dolly did that.
It was part of her gift as a songwriter. She used plain language for feelings that were anything but simple. I knew many of those songs by heart as a child, years before I had any real understanding of jealousy, heartbreak or loss, and as I got older they seemed to reveal more of themselves.
She had the same directness when she talked. One of her best-known lines was: “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” Written down, it risks sounding trite. Coming from Dolly, it never did. Perhaps because there was no pretence that she had discovered some great secret to life. She said these things with a laugh, as if they were simply obvious, and then got on with living by them.
I realise, writing this, that I am often drawn to people who are deeply self-aware without being particularly self-absorbed. Dolly had that quality in abundance. She had an extraordinary certainty about who she was, but seemed to feel little need to explain it. Most things, in her telling, were less mysterious than we make them: you knew what you loved, you knew what mattered, and you tried to live accordingly. She often returned to a line from Shakespeare: “To thine own self be true.”
Those words have followed me through much of my own life too. Their simplicity belies how difficult they are to live by. Knowing who you are, and then having the courage to live accordingly, may be one of the hardest things we ask of ourselves. Dolly appeared to have worked it out remarkably early, and rarely wavered.
All this while building one of the most artificial-looking women in America.
The look itself went back to her childhood. Dolly often talked about a woman in her hometown whom everyone called the “town tramp”. She had peroxide-blonde hair piled high, red lips and fingernails, high heels and tight skirts. The adults around Dolly called her trash. Dolly thought she was the prettiest thing she had ever seen and decided, with impeccable childhood logic, that this was what she wanted to be when she grew up.
Dolly never pretended the hair was hers. She joked about her breasts, her nails, her clothes and the surgery. It cost a lot of money, she said, to look this cheap. She made the joke before anybody else could make it for her, yet I cannot think of many famous people who felt less false.
Perhaps because she understood something about authenticity that is easily missed: it has very little to do with looking natural. There was no deception in the wigs or the nails because she never asked you to believe they were real. They were decoration, part costume and part pleasure. The real Dolly was elsewhere, in what she believed, how she treated people, the work she made and the decisions she took. Her appearance wasn’t a contradiction of “to thine own self be true”. It may have been one of its purest expressions.
Success never seemed to make her feel she ought to become more tasteful, either. She could have toned herself down as she became richer, more powerful and more respected. Instead the hair got higher, the nails got longer and the rhinestones multiplied. She never accepted the idea that seriousness required restraint.
None of which meant she was a pushover. When Elvis Presley wanted to record I Will Always Love You, his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, demanded half the publishing rights. Dolly refused and later said she cried all night over it. Years afterwards, Whitney Houston’s recording became one of the biggest-selling singles of all time.
What stays with me is that she cried. Dolly never seemed to accept the idea that strength required hardness. She could be sentimental, emotional, extravagantly feminine and deeply attached to people while remaining nobody’s fool. She could love something deeply and still say no to it.
The same lack of fuss characterised her generosity. In 1995 she began sending a free book every month to children under five in her home county, in honour of her father, who never learned to read. That small local scheme became the Imagination Library and has since sent more than 300 million books to children around the world. In 2020 she gave a million dollars to Vanderbilt for coronavirus research, and her name eventually appeared in the funding acknowledgements of the Moderna vaccine paper, wedged between the institutional grants.
There is something wonderfully Dolly about that. Her father couldn’t read, so she sent children books. Scientists needed money, so she gave them some. There was no grand theory of philanthropy attached to it, no instruction about how anybody else should behave.
Perhaps that mattered more than ever in a world that can make cynicism feel like the only intelligent response. Dolly was hardly innocent of its cruelties; they run through her songs. She knew about poverty, grief, betrayal and loneliness. But knowing what was ugly in the world never seemed to make her suspicious of what was good in it. She remained open to delight, to sentiment, to other people. There was something almost defiant about that.
Perhaps this is what I responded to even as a little girl who knew nothing about publishing rights or sexual jealousy or the difficulty of leaving somebody you love. There was remarkably little distance between what Dolly believed, what she said and how she lived, and a moral clarity to her that never became moralising. She was generous without making a performance of generosity, direct without being cruel, and had the great gift of being able to laugh at herself without ever diminishing herself.
Maybe what I loved most was that she never seemed embarrassed by who she was. Her humour was part of that freedom. She could make the joke about the hair, the breasts, the nails and the rhinestones because she genuinely loved them; nobody else’s judgement had the power to spoil the pleasure. Dolly wanted the enormous hair, the songs that could break your heart, the filthy jokes, the mountains of Tennessee. She wanted all of it.
As a child, I knew none of this, and perhaps that helped. Children haven’t yet learned all the complicated ways adults have of looking past what is in front of them. Dolly had once looked at the woman her elders called trash and seen the prettiest thing in the world. Years later, I looked at Dolly Parton on my mother’s record sleeves and felt much the same. I saw the hair, the rhinestones and the dimples, heard that voice and that laugh, and in that moment, thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Perhaps, in the uncomplicated way children sometimes see people, I had understood something essential about her before I had the words for it.
Whether that explains why I cried, I still don’t know. Perhaps when somebody has been there for nearly your whole life, their death takes a bite out of the past as well as the present. Somewhere inside those songs is a little girl in her mother’s enormous headphones, and the teenager she became, and the woman after that. My mother is in there, and her record player, and years I haven’t thought about for years.
And there was Dolly, somehow, through all of them. I had assumed she would still be around when I got to Dollywood for my 60th. I had assumed that one day my partner and I would finally get married and dance to Islands in the Stream while Dolly Parton continued existing somewhere in Tennessee, cracking jokes and wearing impossible hair.
Of course I knew she wouldn’t live for ever. Knowing something and really expecting it to happen are quite different things.
I am finishing this piece on a plane to Nice. I am half French, and France has always been as much a part of my emotional geography as England. Sitting beside me, by complete chance, is an older couple from Tennessee, on their way to Nice for the first time. I have never met anyone from Tennessee before.
We spend much of the flight talking about Dolly. They talk about her “magic”, and I know immediately what they mean. I tell them what she meant to me; they tell me what she meant back home. Somewhere over France, it strikes me as wonderfully improbable that I should be finishing this beside two people from her part of the world, as they travel for the first time to a place that is part of mine. It makes me smile.
Perhaps tomorrow I will understand better why the death of a woman I never met has made me so sad. For now, I don’t.
[Further reading: The soft power of Dolly Parton]
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Subscribe here to commentWonderful! Passionate and deep. Like those islands fording the stream. Please tell us when you’ve finally danced in that stream. I for one, want to know you finally got to see Dolly in Dollyland. Thank you, from all Dolly fans.