I’m not surprised that I was sad to hear about the passing of Dolly Parton. (Do I need a series of descriptors for her – singer, actor, philanthropist, et al.? I think not.) But the melancholy frankly astonished me.
I have only one of her albums. The Grass is Blue, which I bought at a library deaccession sale. It starts with a cover version of Billy Joel’s Travelin’ Prayer. I do have the three Trio albums with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris; the three-part harmony on the chorus of Telling Me Lies always makes me weepy.
Watching a bunch of television coverage reminded me of her grace. My favorite Dolly story involves the song I Will Always Love You. Incidentally, a guy on NBC News said that the song was written in response to someone’s death, which I knew to be untrue.
When The Times included Parton on its 30 Greatest Songwriters list earlier this year, their pop critic Lindsay Zoladz wrote:
“Perhaps the rich emotional range of her vast body of work is best expressed in those two songs she supposedly wrote in a single night. “Jolene” crackles with nervous envy, anxiety and desperation. “I Will Always Love You,” her huge-hearted farewell to her mentor Porter Wagoner, is sung with the omniscient benevolence of a guardian angel. The human and the divine: Dolly Parton is a little bit of both.
In an interview with Dan Rather, she talks about Elvis wanting to record IWALY, which thrilled Dolly. But his manager, Col. Tom Parker, informed her that Elvis would get 50% of the publishing royalties. She was disappointed and declined the offer, but didn’t blame Presley or Parker; she graciously acknowledged that the Colonel was just being a shrewd businessman. Of course, Parton was just as clever.
Cinema
Little wonder that Jane Fonda saw that Dolly would be perfect for the movie 9 To 5. (The Empire State Building was lit on Tuesday night at 9:25.) The fact that she memorized everybody’s lines, which may have made her performance stronger, and wrote and recorded the iconic title track, was a bonus.
She was probably underestimated for a time. The New York notes that “at the time of her death, Parton reportedly had more than 350 wigs and 2,000 pairs of shoes. She embraced rural stereotypes and kitsch to develop a chic all her own.
Dolly said, “I’ve created this [caricatured public persona] and played it up. But this isn’t all I am. It’s not even most of what I am. Hopefully people can see beneath the hair to know there’s a brain, beneath the boobs to know there’s a heart, and behind all the other stuff to know there’s some talent.”
Definitely, heart. She has a children’s hospital named after her and helped fund the Moderna mRNA COVID vaccine. “She was the first in her family to graduate from high school; years later, her philanthropic organization donated more than 200 million books to children.”
What really caught me was something Heather Delaney Resse wrote: “Dolly Parton died. She was 80 years old, too. And suddenly, I found myself thinking about 80 years in an entirely different way. About how much life that really is. How many choices it holds. How many opportunities we are given to make someone else’s life a little better, or a little worse. And ultimately, how differently two people can choose to spend the time they are given.”
Read the NYT obit and a piece from the Smithsonian.
