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Dolly Parton died yesterday, aged 80. Alamy Stock Photo
Columnrip dolly
Stars and Stripes Dolly Parton truly belonged to all of America — red and blue
From a one-room cabin in Tennessee to global superstardom, the late Dolly Parton managed to bridge the political and cultural divides that have fractured the USA.
SINGER AND SONGWRITER, celebrity and philanthropist, sex symbol and businesswoman, a supporter of liberal causes who retained the loyalty and affection of the most rock-ribbed conservative states.
Dolly Parton’s multi-faceted career, larger-than-life persona and outsized contribution to America’s country music canon, was only part of the story.
The damburst of accolades that followed the announcement of her death are testament to her ability to transcend musical genres and nimbly sidestep cultural boundaries, towering stilettoes notwithstanding. Eleven Grammys, 10 gongs from the Country Music Association, and another 13 from the Academy of Country Music are just the beginning.
There were Emmy Awards, People’s Choice Awards, Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and inductions into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Gospel Music Hall of Fame and the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame.
The accolades she notched up for work as a humanitarian and philanthropist are, likewise, legion. But Parton’s better known for repeatedly declining one of America’s most coveted awards: the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, turning both Trump and Biden away when they offered her the US’s highest civilian honour. Trump gave Elvis a posthumous award instead. Biden made do with Bono.
Quietly political
She claimed to have rebuffed Trump because of bad timing – pleading her husband’s illness the first time and an unwillingness to bust Covid travel restrictions the second. When Biden came calling, she declined again, explaining that having refused Trump twice, her acceptance of a Biden medal would look like a partisan act.
Throughout her career, she avoided political landmines and cultural and sexual pigeonholes with a lightness of touch that belied a shrewdness and cognisance that for all her optimism and effervescence, she inhabited an America that was dark, divided and politically treacherous.
With humour and empathy, she slipped the bonds of the left and right. Both sides battled to claim her as the ultimate prize in the cultural wars that have ravaged America for almost the entirety of her career. Neither triumphed.
She was on the liberal side of every chapter of America’s culture wars – standing up for women’s rights, gay and transgender rights and most recently the Black Lives Matter movement – yet managed to remain the most beloved daughter of deep red America.
Trump’s response to her death, ordering that all American flags on federal buildings in the US and overseas be lowered to half-mast for a full week, is an acknowledgement that even this most bitterly divided of countries can occasionally agree on something; her status as an enduring American icon.
Her legacy
Dolly’s contribution to the country music canon was enormous; 25 Number One singles and an astonishing 47 Top 10 albums in the country music charts is no small feat; she sold 110 million records; covers of her songs by other singers sold the same number again.
This most instantly recognisable of stars was fiercely private. News of her illness was kept from the public. She deflected a media stampede when less discreet family members indicated she was seriously ill in much the same way as she deflected close to six decades’ worth of questions about her 59-year marriage to Carl Dean, who died last year.
She revealed little about their relationship, disclosing only that Jolene, one of her biggest hits, was inspired by his flirtation with a Nashville bank teller in the early days of their marriage and that they first met at the WishyWashy launderette on the day she arrived in Nashville in June 1964.
Back then, a perky blonde with a distinctive, emotionally resonant voice stood a decent chance of becoming a singer. Achieving respect and fame as a songwriter was altogether more difficult. Music Row’s was male-dominated and macho. Even a songwriter of Parton’s calibre struggled to gain a foothold, but her talent was impossible to deny.
Her upbringing, which inspired some of her biggest hits, is the stuff of which country songs are made. One of 12 children, she was raised in an isolated one-room cabin in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains without electricity, plumbing or running water, the daughter of a sharecropper and seasonal construction worker.
If her childhood read like a country music playbook, her life as one of its superstars was less so. Drink, infidelity and divorce are the drivers of the genre’s greatest hits, but her father’s alcoholism prompted Parton to give alcohol a wide berth, and her 59-year marriage was an outlier in Hollywood and Nashville.
Instantly recognisable by sight or sound, there was no one quite like her. American country music has been gifted with females of formidable talent – Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Reba McEntire amongst them. But none had Parton’s outsize persona or infectious exuberance. She didn’t just stay true to her Appalachian roots while forging paths in Hollywood and recording studios from New York to Nashville; she amped them up to a point of borderline caricature, merging the authentic and the artificial with verve and wit, connecting with the traditionalists in Tennessee’s dance halls and the marginalised LGBTQ communities who created their own subculture.
“If I’m gonna have any looks at all, I’m gonna have to create them,” she observed when asked for the umpteenth time about her looks, hair, whether she had undergone cosmetic surgery. Her look — which she described as a combination of ‘Mother Goose, Cinderella and the local hooker’ wasn’t a statement; it was a continuum of her life. Everything she achieved she created from scratch. The rhinestone-emblazoned confections, the elaborate wigs and heavy make-up were the sparkly, eye-catching encasement of a far more substantial package.
Nobody’s fool
Her support for political and cultural causes came with a deftness of touch, a warmth and empathy that prevented supporters from annexing her and opponents from excoriating her. Affirming her support for gay marriage, when it was still a white-hot issue of contention in the US, she declared that the gay community ‘should suffer like the rest of us.’
Asked about her equally contentious support for the BLM movement more than a decade later she retorted: “Of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!’
She was both an advocate and an icon for transgender rights. ‘Travelin Thru’ a song she wrote for Transamerica, a road trip movie about a transgender woman and her son, landed Parton an Oscar nomination for best song and a Golden Globe for Felicity Huffman. Her style launched a thousand Dolly Parton drag queens. She joked about how she entered – and lost – a Los Angeles Dolly Parton lookalike contest because she was outclassed by ‘all these beautiful drag queens.’
Those who underestimated her did so at their peril; she refused to sell the recording rights for ‘I Will Always Love You’ to Elvis Presley when ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, his notoriously grabby manager, tried to wrangle half the publishing rights as part of the deal. It may have seemed like a foolhardy move on her part. Elvis was still a massive star; his ‘Aloha From Hawaii’ television special had been watched by more than a billion people worldwide a year earlier.
Parton admitted that the decision to refuse him ‘broke my heart; I cried all night’. But she was vindicated 18 years later when Whitney Houston’s cover sold more than 30 million copies; Parton invested a hefty chunk of the royalties in Black-owned businesses in Tennessee, including an office complex and strip mall in Nashville.
An astute businesswoman, she owned 50% of Dollywood, the 165-acre theme park that bears her name and helped transform its Tennessee location from an economic sinkhole to one of America’s top tourism destinations, attracting upwards of four million visitors each year, generating annual revenues of almost $600 million (€514.18 million) and creating almost 4,500 jobs for locals.
She attributes her father’s illiteracy as the driving force behind her Imagination Library, her massive endeavour that mails more than 38 million books to American households each year. More than 322 million books have been bought and dispatched to low-income households since she started the project; at least one in six American children under the age of five has received a book from Dolly.
If I’m remembered 100 years from now, I hope it will be not for looks but for books,” she said.
Simply put, Parton was the living embodiment of everything that was great about America distilled into a single pint-sized package; replete with humour, relentless optimism and indefatigable can-do spirit.
Her flamboyance, fearlessness and outsized generosity of heart and spirit mirrored America at its best. Small wonder America is mourning her passing; who she was and what she represented.
Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker.
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