On the death of Dolly Parton: From the girl from the Smoky Mountains to the icon of the entire USA

The year is 1973, and Dolly Parton wants to separate from her long-time duet partner and mentor Porter Wagoner. The country singer once helped her become famous by having her appear as a “girl singer” on his show, but she has long since outgrown him.

So, as the story goes, she ran into his office and sang him a song: a breakup ballad so full of love, so God-like generous that he couldn’t help but let her go. That song was “I Will Always Love You.”

15 years later, Whitney Houston would sing this ballad in the film “Bodyguard” and finally make it immortal: 14 weeks at number 1 on the US charts, one of the most successful songs of all time.

Dolly Parton, the myth goes, wrote it the same night as another immortal hit: “Jolene.” Two songs for eternity in one night is a symbol of the immense talent and immense productivity of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

Dolly Parton is said to have written more than 3,000 songs in her life. She had to do this every day; it was as natural to her as making breakfast, she said. Writing is her “time with God.” Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80.

She will be remembered, not only for her 60-year career, her country songs for eternity, the ten Grammys and numerous other awards, the films. But also as a pop culture icon for many, very different people in the USA and beyond, across seemingly ever-deepening political divides. “Is there anything we can all agree on?” asked the New York Times in 2019 – and concluded: “Yes: Dolly Parton.”

She wrote her first song when she was five years old

The fact that she is this amazingly unifying figure in the USA is also due to her origins: Dolly Parton grew up with eleven siblings in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The family was very poor, there was often not enough food and no running water anyway.

At age five, she wrote her first song, “Little Tiny Tassletop,” about a doll made from an ear of corn. “From the moment I could talk, I could rhyme,” Parton wrote in her autobiography. Noises from her surroundings, such as the chattering of geese, served as rhythm to create a song.

Dolly Parton was given her uncle’s guitar, played on the radio at the age of ten, became the first in her family to graduate from high school in 1964, moved to Nashville and ended up on Porter Wagoner’s show.

Parton played with the image of the dumb blonde

She had already dyed her hair peroxide blonde and teased it up, and her clothes were tight and decorated with rhinestones.

She always played with this image. The first song with which she entered the US country charts in 1967 was called “Dumb Blonde”. Dolly Parton once said that she doesn’t hold people against their blonde jokes because: “I know that I’m not stupid. And I also know that I’m not blonde.” One of her many witty sayings that became known as “Dollyisms.”

Dolly Parton showed generations of girls and women that it was okay to wear makeup, want to wear sparkly dresses and high heels. That external emphasis on their femininity does not make them inferior, less authentic or less intelligent people. That you can write brilliant songs even with long acrylic fingernails.

Her look was also an inspiration for many drag queens. “They sometimes look more like me than I look like myself,” Parton told The New York Times about her fans who come to her concerts in drag. She sometimes changed the lyrics to her hit “Jolene” for them, singing: “Drag queen, drag queen, drag queen / Please don’t take my man!”

Parton is an icon of the LGBTQI community and has always spoken publicly about acceptance. Even in times when that was by no means the norm for a country star from Tennessee. Her deep faith gave her reason to see the good in all people. She wrote the song “Travelin’ Thru” for the 2005 film “Transamerica,” about a trans woman traveling across the United States. She recorded “Rainbowland” with her goddaughter Miley Cyrus in 2017 to celebrate LGBTQI pride.

“Every person should be allowed to be who they are,” she said in a famous 2016 interview with Larry King, and had a message for her Christian fans who disagree with that: “If you’re such a great Christian, why do you judge people? That’s God’s job,” she said. “We are not God, we are not judges, we should love each other and not judge each other.”

Despite her glamorous looks and sometimes liberal views, Dolly Parton has always stayed true to her roots and paid homage to the Appalachian Mountains in songs like “My Tennessee Mountain Home” and the fan favorite “Coat of Many Colors.” In it, Parton sings about a coat that her mother sewed for her from various scraps of fabric.

The kids at her school made fun of it, but Parton isn’t ashamed, on the contrary, she’s full of pride. “And oh, I couldn’t understand it / For I felt I was rich / And I told ’em of the love / My momma sewed in every stitch,” Parton sings. The love in every seam makes her coat more valuable than the other children’s clothes.

It is this mixture of artificiality and authenticity, of glamor and down-to-earthness, that made Parton accessible to all classes, all political camps in the USA and beyond.

Parton paid for school scholarships for poor children in Tennessee

Dolly Parton never wanted to be captured by politics, neither for a party nor for a movement.

In 1980 she played a secretary in the comedy “9 to 5” (in German “Why don’t we kill the boss?”) and wrote the title song for it, for which she was nominated for an Oscar. “It’s a rich man’s game, no matter what they call it / And you spend your life putting money in his wallet,” Parton sang in it. Also a great Dolly myth: She is said to have tapped her long fingernails on a table during filming and thus found the rhythm for the film song.

Despite the decidedly feminist content of the film and the song, Parton did not want to describe herself as a feminist at the time. “I don’t feel like I have to demonstrate, hold up a sign or put a label on myself,” she later told the Guardian. “I think the way I have managed my life, my business and myself speaks for itself.”

Years later she was to soften, Parton told “Time” magazine in 2021: “I guess I’m a feminist if I believe that women should do whatever they want.”

Parton was also a major benefactor. She founded the Dollywood Foundation in 1988 to provide school scholarships to poor children in Tennessee. This later grew into the “Imagination Library” reading initiative, which today sends over five million books to children in five countries every month.

She never had children of her own with her husband Carl Dean, to whom she was married for over 60 years and who died last year. But she always had the feeling that all children were hers, Dolly Parton said in interviews.

In 2020, Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, money that contributed significantly to the development of the Moderna vaccine against the coronavirus. She changed the lyrics to “Jolene” again, this time to “Vaccine”.

Dolly Parton’s death was announced in a video by her nephew Bryan Seaver on Tuesday evening German time. He said that his aunt wanted to rest in a nice bed made of soft cotton. After a life in which she constantly wore heavy rhinestones, she finally wanted to be comfortable.