OP-ED: The passing of an American icon
When I learned that she had died, I said to myself, “Imagine, a world without Dolly Parton.”
The singer and singular personality died last week in her native Tennessee at the age of 80. She had cancer.
Dolly Parton was an American original. An exceedingly small club, it includes the likes of Babe Ruth, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley. Like Presley, Parton had a hardscrabble beginning. Like Sinatra, she rolled the dice and came up big. Like Ruth, who authored home runs, she authored songs.
More than a few of the 3,000 songs she wrote became major league round-trippers. Among other hits, she wrote “I Will Always Love You,” which reached No. 1 three times. For Parton herself in successive decades and for Whitney Houston, who tethered Parton’s lyrics to her own belting style for the movie “The Bodyguard.”
That song alone made Parton a multimillionaire. At her death, she was worth an estimated $450 million.
Raised in a two-room cabin in the Appalachia foothills, Parton began singing on radio a few years past her 10th birthday. Stuffing her clothes into a grocery bag, she headed off to the country music mecca, Nashville, the day after her high school graduation.
In 1967, Dolly joined Porter Wagoner’s syndicated TV show as a second banana. She eventually outgrew the middling Wagoner. When Sinatra left big band leader Tommy Dorsey in the early 1940s, it was the gamble of a lifetime. Parton’s decision to leave Wagoner and fly solo was fraught with uncertainty.
Soon enough, however, she was collecting music awards and starring in movies. A lyric from her song “Dumb Blonde” says it all, “This dumb blonde ain’t anyone’s fool.”
More than anything perhaps, the public was attracted to her megawatt personality that was at once familiar and homey and outlandish. Where and how the real-life Dolly Parton and her show business persona melded was always a guessing-game.
Once, on the Tonight Show, she began to tell Johnny Carson that she had always been well-endowed. Somewhat later, she more or less admitted to not a few nips and tucks and enhancements along the way.
She quipped that it “takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” Asked point blank whether her breasts were real, she answered, “They’re real expensive.”
“This isn’t all I am,” she told the New York Times. “It’s not even the most of who 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 the other stuff to know there’s some real talent.”
She was a savvy businesswoman. She created Dollywood, a hugely successful theme park that she situated in her native county of Tennessee, thus fulfilling a private vow to create jobs in one of the most impoverished corners of the country, if the opportunity came her way.
She was caring and empathetic in other ways as well. Childless (by choice), she used her vast wealth to utilize the power of books to help kids kick-start their education. Her Imagination Library has distributed some 330 million copies of children’s books nationally and worldwide.
She was charitable. She donated millions of dollars to medical research at Vanderbilt University. When the pandemic struck, she opened her wallet to help fund the development of Moderna’s mRNA COVID vaccine.
Steering clear of politics (she had fans on all sides, she said), Dolly Parton was a real-time feminist who supported gay, lesbian, and trans rights. And she made a point of devoting some of her musical royalty checks to the Black Lives Matter movement.
She said when she got into songwriting mode it was her “time with God.” Neither eating nor sleeping, her “creative juices” buoyed her. “I just get into a place where nothing else exists,” she noted.
As a composer, she wasn’t Johnny Mercer or Brian Wilson. But on her best days this daughter of an illiterate tenant farmer could spin music and lyrics together in the best tradition of American pop culture.
More Stephen Foster than Stephen Sondheim, nevertheless her star turn on Broadway will begin in January, with the premier of “Dolly: A True Original Musical,” which she co-wrote and produced.
Instead of goodbye, Dolly, it will be hello, Dolly. It promises to be a bittersweet run.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.