My conversations with Dolly Parton, a musician of many colours

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I spoke with Dolly Parton a few times over the years. Once, I brought up a traumatic memory I associated with her.

As a teenager in the late 1970s, while living in Shawnee, Okla., I took guitar lessons with a few friends. I hated the sessions with a passion. The instructor tried to teach us to read music; I had only Chuck Berry chords in mind.

Each week we would show up to the guitar teacher’s house. I would sit outside in the living room, nervously waiting for my turn to play for the instructor in another room. I never practiced his lessons. The living room television set would inevitably be playing Dolly, a weekly variety show hosted by you know who. She was chirpy and effervescent. I sat on the couch wanting to chop my fingers off to avoid another embarrassing session.

Country music icon Dolly Parton, one of the best-selling female artists of all time, has died

She laughed when I told her the story. Parton had the best laugh in the business. Many will remember the country music icon as a bubbly entertainer. And she was that.

Before she died, Parton said she and her team were in early talks to produce “avatar performances,” which presumably would keep her on stages for eternity. It’s hard to imagine a digital projection capturing all her many dimensions.

Sure, she had a hit with 9 to 5, a catchy single she wrote and sang for the 1980 comedy film of the same name in which she co-starred with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. She was deeper than that. (The single’s B-side was Sing for the Common Man.)

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“It’s easy to write a peppy little song, but I have many emotions,” the native Tennessean told me in 2014. “As a writer, I have to live with my feelings on my sleeve, so I harden my heart. I strengthen the muscles around it. People always tell me I look happy, and I just say, ‘Well, that’s the Botox.’”

Parton was a pistol, and she was self-aware.

Her first charting single as a solo artist on the Billboard Hot Country chart was Dumb Blonde, off her debut 1967 album Hello, I’m Dolly. On a track that had the swagger of Johnny Cash’s death stare and Nancy Sinatra’s boots, Parton’s voice was steelier than the fluttery drawl she was known for: “Just because I’m blonde don’t think I’m dumb, ‘cause this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.”

Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s domineering manager, found that out. After Parton released her song I Will Always Love You in 1974, Presley expressed interest in recording it himself. But when a bullying Colonel Tom insisted Parton turn over half the publishing rights to him and the King, she refused.

“I wouldn’t allow it,” she told me in 2023. “I was heartbroken. I wanted Elvis to sing it. He was disappointed too. I found out later, from Priscilla, that he loved the song. And that he had sung it to her on the steps of the courthouse when they divorced.”

Whitney Houston’s 1992 version of I Will Always Love You was a blockbuster international hit. As the songwriter, Parton made a fortune.

In 2008, she released the album Backwoods Barbie. Among the songs was a cover of Smokey Robinson’s The Tracks of My Tears, about emotional despair hidden behind a sunny public facade. The album’s title song was a spiritual sequel to Dumb Blonde:

I’ve always been misunderstood because of how I look

Don’t judge me by the cover cause I’m a real good book

So read into it what you will, but see me as I am

The way I look is just a country girl’s idea of glam

Nobody could out-glam the bewigged and rhinestoned Parton, who had a way with a pop tune. It is her duet cover of the Bee Gees’ Islands in the Stream with Kenny Rogers in 1983 that made the song the karaoke classic it is today.

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The country music aficionado, however, is drawn more to Parton’s 1971 album Coat of Many Colors, an autobiographical account of her youth that showcased her storytelling gift, which became more well known with the 1974 single Jolene.

The song, a plea to a woman who had designs on her man, was ranked 63 on Rolling Stone 2021 list of the 500 greatest songs of all time and No. 1 on the magazine’s 2024 list of the greatest country songs. Jolene was covered by such varied artists as Olivia Newton-John, the White Stripes and Miley Cyrus. A 2016 version by American a cappella group Pentatonix won a Grammy Award.

In 2022, the Coat of Many Colors musician was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, thanks to Jolene as much as anything else she ever wrote or recorded. A version of the song was included on 2023’s Rockstar, an unexpected double album of classic-rock covers with Sting, Stevie Nicks, Paul McCartney and other A-list collaborators.

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The album closed with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird, a long-running rock ’n’ roll joke as a cover song. Parton’s version is especially poignant, though, with the question “If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?” posed sincerely.

Dolly Parton will be remembered as a gifted songwriter, a self-reflective artist and a humble superstar. Few could perform a televised duet of Sly and the Family Stone’s Everyday People with Kermit the Frog unironically, as she did.

She was an irreplaceable entertainer and relentlessly decent human being who had fun with her image in clever, confident ways. She liked to tell the story about finishing second to a drag queen in a Dolly Parton lookalike contest. When she referenced it in her autobiography, she said she was dying of laughter inside.

What is funny is losing to an imitator when there was absolutely no one like her.