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Dolly Parton Was More Than an Icon

Later in life, she was heralded as a symbol of Americana—complete with her own amusement park. But what will last of her is her body of work.

Dolly Parton at the Roxy in West Hollywood in 1977.

Dolly Parton, the country artist best known for songs like “Jolene” and “9 to 5,” died last week at the age of 80. Though she herself would have been too modest to publicly make such a claim, she belongs, by all accounts, on the short list of musicians who should be considered among both the greatest singers and greatest songwriters in the genre’s century-plus history. A recent YouGov survey put Parton’s favorability rating at 77 percent, higher than any other musician, living or dead, and up there with Christmas (75 percent) and Thanksgiving (78 percent). Her beatification was complete well before her passing, confirmed by countless articles along the lines of “Dolly Parton, Secular Saint” (Vox) and “Everyone Loves Dolly” (oddly, Vice).

Even as a fan—and later, as a journalist covering country music—I sometimes found this to be a bit over the top. It was as if, for some, Dolly had ceased to be Dolly and had become instead an avatar of the desire for a celebrity who was truly good. Her philanthropy and her local investments were both extensive, but they are still best served by clear-eyed appraisal. Is Dollywood, her signature amusement park, really the rising tide that has lifted all boats in Sevier County, Tennessee, her childhood home, as its boosters proclaim? On the one hand, it is the county’s largest employer; on the other, it’s hard to live like a rhinestone cowboy when you make $14 an hour working seasonally parking cars.

This sort of adulation was especially unnecessary for Parton, because her life was remarkable enough without it. Born on January 19, 1946, in a cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains, she was delivered by a doctor who arrived on horseback, and her father, a sharecropper, paid for his services with a sack of cornmeal. Her family’s poverty—and the search for joy and dignity amid it—was one of the enduring themes of her work, the subject of songs like “Coat of Many Colors,” “Daddy’s Working Boots,” “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad),” and “Applejack.”

The last of those, off her 1977 album New Harvest…First Gathering, tells the story of an old man who played banjo for her when she was a girl. It’s a window into the deep musicality of the community in which she was raised. Her mother sang church songs and old ballads; her grandfather was a fiddling preacher. (His song “Singing His Praise” would be recorded by Kitty Wells and Johnny Wright, and later on Parton’s final album, Smoky Mountain DNA.) She got her first guitar from one uncle, and she made her radio debut at 10 years old, with another uncle, her longtime collaborator Bill Owens, playing beside her.

Parton moved to Nashville the day after she graduated high school, boarding a Greyhound bus with her belongings stuffed into brown paper bags, which she would later describe as her matching luggage. She went to Music Row, the stretch of 16th Avenue South that was home to most of the city’s country music publishing houses and recording studios, in search of a record deal, but she couldn’t find a label that was interested in signing........

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