I don’t often get nervous interviewing people, but Dolly Parton was someone I’d idolised since I was a child, driving my family crazy with off-key renditions of “9 to 5” and “Jolene”. Alongside my grandma and Shania Twain, she was one of the three big role models in my life. She was the queen of country music and so much more: a pioneer, a business genius, an exceptional songwriter and storyteller, a producer, a benefactor… in short: a one-of-a-kind woman. As someone who has often been made to feel as though I am “too much” – something I know many women will relate to – Parton seemed to exist to tell you to be more.
So in 2023, when I finally got the email that I had 40 minutes with her, after around three years of hounding her poor publicist, my heart flipped. Parton was notoriously tricky to interview – a mastermind when it came to dancing around a question she didn’t care for. But the moment she answered the call, that famous southern trill coming out of a black video screen, she made me feel like we were old friends. “How do you pronounce your name, darlin’?” she asked. I told her “Ro-sheen”, and that actually my university friends used to sing it to me to the tune of her most famous song, “Jolene”. She burst out laughing. “Well of course!” And then she began to sing. “Ro-sheen, Ro-sheen, Ro-sheen, Ro-sheeeen.”
My life now complete, the conversation that followed felt easy. Parton was in great spirits: playful, spirited, frank. She was preparing to release her new album, Rockstar, which she recorded after trying to “bow out” of her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nomination in 2022. After widespread objections, she relented, and debuted a song she wrote especially for the ceremony, “Rockin’”, on which she hollered: “I’ve still got rock and roll down in my country soul/ And I’ll be rockin’ it ‘til the cows come home!” She was very proud of it – she told me as much. “I wanted it to be good, because I wanted rock artists to hear it and say, ‘Well, you know, that ain’t bad!’”
Of course, she was being modest. Parton enjoyed (and deserved) the praise she got, but never waited for anyone to tell her how good she was. She just knew. The story went that she wrote two of her biggest hits – “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” – on the same day (Parton later said she believed she’d written them a few days apart). She was always writing: she had desk drawers and chests stuffed full of ideas, some written in lip-liner on paper napkins while she was out at dinner.
On the Rockstar track “World on Fire”, Parton sang about “greedy politicians, past and present/ They wouldn’t know the truth if it bit ‘em in the ass”. During our chat, I’d barely mentioned those lyrics when she jumped in, insisting: “I wasn’t trying to be political…”
Parton was famous for shutting down questions about politics (though arguably they lay in plain sight, from her donations to LGBT+ charities and Aids research to her children’s literary foundation and the million dollars she gave to research a Covid-19 vaccine). She said in 2019 that she had “too many fans on both sides of the fence” and had “learned years ago to keep my mouth shut about things.” When she had cut in to deny being political, I expected that to be the end of it. So I was surprised when she started to elaborate on her worldview. “I was just seeing the world go down the tube, and nobody was even trying to do better,” she sighed. “And the only way I know how to fight back in my songs.” It was “hard to know what to make of it all,” she said.
I’d argue she was wrong to say she only fought back in her songs. Her generosity, kindness, warmth and wit – the very way in which she rose from an impoverished upbringing, through a misogynist industry, to one of the most successful artists of all time – was a kind of fighting. And woe betide the fools who tried to get in her way.
When I asked Parton how she wanted to be remembered, I thought she might say as a songwriter, as she had in previous interviews. Instead, she said she wanted to be remembered “as somebody who took her work serious, but not herself. Someone who brought books to children all over the world. For the fact that I managed to make a living doing something I love to do. And as a caring, giving, working girl.”
If we all followed Parton’s example, the world would be a better place. It feels like nothing less than a miracle that we got to exist in her timeline.
