Multi-talented international benefactor, singer songwriter and all round good egg Dolly Parton died last Tuesday. It hit me like a ton of bricks.
It clearly did the same for a load of people round the world. They were all over Facebook and, for once, I followed up some of the links in my feed.
Many were to media-junkies on the shock news bandwagon. But far more, it seemed to me, were just everyday people who don’t post about celebrities, just brought up short by shock at the loss and a complicated sadness.
Lots of them recorded that they wept. More than once, some of us.
Fan of Dolly? Moi?
Yes, I was a fan, very much so. Though I admit to coming to it in a rather roundabout way.
First a bit of context. I never really encountered Country in the full Nashville sense, until I worked in DC and met an enthusiast in the early 90s. Until then I didn’t understand its conventions at all.
I’d found Dolly long before that, however. To begin with, she was just catchy tunes on the radio (I’m a devoted radio girl, always have been) and a refreshing voice of down-to-earth principles in the occasional interview. She sounded friendly and sensible and I liked that.
But I really hated the first big song, Jolene. Its lyrics drove a train through my idealistic philosophy of love and marriage.
In my defence, I was a newly published romantic novelist at the time. My heroines didn’t have any time for an unfaithful spouse. He sounded frankly weedy. Not worth keeping, much less negotiating with a (horrible word) rival. Pair bonding, in my romantic world, was NOT a competitive sport. My readers seemed to agree.
But then I got my own Dolly song. Yes, it was still catchy. I could sing along to it in the kitchen. Even dance a bit. Yet the lyrics were pitiless and, to me, all too recognisable.
Here was the detritus of a hopeless relationship, stripped down to the bare bones of very nearly cliché and set out plain. It was telling me something I knew was true in a way that I could not wriggle out of. Suddenly I understood what people heard in Jolene.
It made me wince. And I still danced anyway.
Respecting Dolly
I have respected Dolly ever since, though I have learned much more in the last few days. There is so much to admire.
She came fourth in a family of twelve, born in the mountains of Tennessee, the first person in her family to finish High School.
Sang on radio and television from a small child, a born performer. Went to Nashville the moment she left school, determined to have a successful music career. There she met her husband of nearly 60 years when she was under 20 and he was only just over it. He was her best friend, the one she came home to and made plans with, until he died in 1982.
I gathered all of this from strikingly open interviews, interspersed, generally when invited to do so, with home-spun wisdom of a generally encouraging sort.
Be true to yourself. Kindness and generosity are important. You can do anything you really want but you have to work at it. Learn to read. There are books on everything these days, so you can do your research. Don’t let others put you down.
She followed her own precepts too, donating substantially to causes she believed in, particularly in her home State.
But pride of place has to go to her international charity, Imagination Library. They donate a book to any child under 5. Throughout the English-speaking world, as far as I can see.
Dolly’s Writing Process
Oh, the fellow feeling when I came across an interview where Dolly was asked how she wrote her songs. She did her best to answer helpfully. But it seemed to me it was a question she hadn’t quite prepared for. She was clearly reviewing her practice as she came up with the answers.
Sometimes she’d get an idea for a song but didn’t have time to write it, so just scribbled something down in one of the notebooks she always had to hand. Sometimes she faltered, when the lyric clunked or the tune wouldn’t finish itself. Sometimes, it just flows. How I recognised all of those.
Yup, me too, Miss Dolly. Me too.
That Phenomenal Song
I Will Always Love You was one that flowed, apparently. She had been trying to break away from Porter Wagner, who had given her that important first break with a regular spot in his popular TV show. They sang duets. Porter took Dolly on the road with his band: five guys and she was the girl singer, terminally subordinate. At the start Dolly promised him five years. But they were into seven now, and he wasn’t letting go. “He was so stubborn,” she said.
So she wrote him the ultimate break up song. He wept and agreed, she says. Then the song, a genuine three hankie job, became possibly her highest earner ever.
At one point Elvis Presley wanted to sing it, but his voracious manager, Colonel Tom Parker, demanded half the world rights in the song which Dolly had already published. She cried over the decision but refused.
And then, as she told an interviewer at CMT, Witney Houston recorded it for The Bodyguard and took it to Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 for 14 weeks.
“And I made enough money to buy Graceland.”
Love, love, love Dolly’s mischievous sense of humour, occasionally wry, often self-deprecating, always on point.
Dolly and the Best Duet
Another story , which I completely love, is how she came to record Islands in the Stream with Kenny Rogers – and gained a lifelong friend into the bargain. Rogers on his third or fourth incarnation in the music business was recording the album Eyes that See in the Dark, produced by Barry Gibb, released August 1983. Gibb and his brothers in the Bee Gees had written IITS and Rogers struggled with it for 4 days. In the end — he must have been desperate and exhausted, poor soul — he told Gibb he didn’t even like the damn thing. (Don’t think he put it like that.)
Gibb said, “What we need is Dolly Parton.”
She took up the challenge. They recorded the duet. And it went to number one on the American pop chart, number one on the Country chart.
Dolly and Kenny went on singing it together, in each other’s shows and at awards galas, for the rest of their lives. It seems that it is still the best selling country duet ever.
And I see why. It was a slow burn for me, though, because I think Kenny’s intrinsic reaction was right. The lyric is rubbish, neither coherent, consistent nor sensible. As a solo song it’s a mess, though the music is great.
But turn it into dialogue between the right singers and there’s suddenly a couple of lovers, confident in their relationship but still surprised, telling each other how they feel and falling over their words.
Personally, I think the way Dolly emphasises “The real thing” at the end of her first verse may just be what nailed it.
Happy sigh.
Rationale of Mourning
But most of this is good stuff , to be treasured and enjoyed. So why am I still tearing up, from time to time, whenever I think about Dolly Parton?
Of course some of it must be the old John Donne thing, “Any man’s death diminishes me,” especially when the person in question was vibrant, funny, kind and a positive ball of fire, who made you feel glad to be alive.
(Aghast at current standards of political integrity worldwide, my dream team for US Government used to be Dolly for President, Taylor Swift for VP. Sigh. Another dream bites the dust.)
But a lot of my sadness is also is for those she has left, and in particular those people I spoke about at the beginning of this blog. I mourn with all those people who only knew her work and her public persona. Now they miss her and have come onto social media to say so and why, with such straightforward simplicity.
Like them, I mourn her because Dolly Parton spoke to me, spoke for me sometimes, stood up to bullies, was fun and approachable, tolerant, hard-working and knew her own worth. Above all I loved her unstuffy dignity and awe-inspiring self respect. (Watch Dolly’s classic response to Barbara Walters telling her she didn’t have to dress so trashy, if you don’t already know what I mean.) And I love some of the music.
A Time to Weep
I wept first when a quiet woman I didn’t recognise, said how touched she was that the Band of the Welsh Guards played 9 to 5, at the Changing of the Guard Ceremony this Wednesday, the day after Dolly’s death was announced. I know what she meant. My father would have said they really put a bit of swank into it. Musicians recognise each other, I think.
So for her, and anyone else who felt the same, please listen LCpl Cally Jones and the Band of HM Royal Marines performing I Will Always Love You at the Royal Albert Hall for the Mountbatten Festival of Music. It’s absolutely beautiful. No instrument does longing like the saxophone.
Sophie