Four score and three thousand songs ago, in the middle of a whopping winter storm, a sharecropper and his young wife brought forth upon this continent a baby girl named Dolly Parton. If you know the rest of this story, you know that it never gets old. Her parents, Avie Lee and Robert Lee Parton, had married at the respective ages of fifteen and seventeen. Dolly was the fourth of their twelve children, born in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River, in Sevier County, Tennessee, and also born into the kind of poverty that meant the doctor who delivered her got paid with a sack of cornmeal and the kids wore the elastic from old underwear as hairbands. At six, she started singing in the church where her grandfather was the preacher. At seven, she began playing a homemade guitar—later, also a jerry-rigged mandolin, constructed from the guts of an old piano she'd found in an abandoned chapel in the woods. By ten, she had landed a gig on the local radio station. Three years later, Johnny Cash strode onstage at the Grand Ole Opry and told the Saturday-night crowd, "We've got a little girl here from up in East Tennessee."
She was commonly called the Queen of Country Music, but that is exactly wrong: she was democratic to her bones. To grasp what that means, it helps to remember how unusual Dolly Parton's career was for a woman, and especially for a girl from a place like the Tennessee mountains in the middle of the last century. The music industry then was a closed shop run by men who controlled what got recorded, what got played on the radio, what got performed on television, and which singers got paid. Against that machinery, Parton fought a long and unshowy war, beginning with the moment she decided to make her way to Nashville after high school rather than take the secretarial job her teachers had steered her toward, and continuing through the decades of male executives who told her that she was too voluptuous for country and too country for pop, until she had built something that no longer required their permission.
She did so by writing. Beginning in 1967, Parton wrote almost every song she ever released—a feat all the more staggering given the volume of her output, the range of her subjects, and the rarity of women in her field doing the same. Songs like "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You" have entered the culture so thoroughly that they are now anonymous, which is to say that they have passed the highest possible test for a song, the one that has nothing to do with chart placement and everything to do with the song outliving its author. But there are thousands more, and many of them are sharper and stranger than her famous ones. Parton's songs often begin with a small, recognizable human situation—someone about to do something they shouldn't, someone who has already done it—and then they twist the knife just enough to make you see the situation from the inside out.
She did not do this alone. She married Carl Dean in 1966 and stayed married to him for fifty-eight years, until his death, last month. She did so out of public view, against the prevailing currents of fame, and in defiance of the idea that marriage and career cannot coexist for a woman. Dean, who was not in the music business and did not want to be, became the fixed point around which the rest of her life rotated. "Jolene" is not, as is often assumed, a song about a rival. It is a song about a woman singing to a version of herself, asking the prettiest, most vivid, most dangerous version of herself to back off. Parton wrote it the night she met Dean, and the song has been playing ever since.
What Parton understood, in other words, is that the most radical thing a person in public life can do is remain themselves. She dressed extravagantly, but she did not become a costume. She was vain about her appearance, but she never stopped laughing at herself. She grew wealthy beyond comprehension, and she used that wealth to do things like fund a Covid-19 vaccine and to keep Dollywood, the theme park she built in the Tennessee mountains where she grew up, from looking like anything other than the place it actually is. She performed for presidents and queens and for audiences in places that have no presidents or queens. She has been the subject of academic conferences, magazine covers, podcasts, an eight-hour documentary, a Broadway show, a foundation, a fragrance line, and an emerald-green laser beam that has been bouncing off a wall in Nashville for forty years. None of that changed her.
She was, in the deepest and most unfashionable sense of the word, a patriot. She believed in the United States not as an abstraction but as a country made up of specific people in specific places, and she wrote about those people—the beautician and the drifter and the waitress and the daughter who runs off to Nashville with nothing but a guitar and a borrowed dress—with the same clarity and dignity that the best writers bring to literature. That is why her songs work as songs, and also why they work as something larger than songs: they describe a country that has not always deserved her but that she has never once stopped believing in.
She died in her sleep, at seventy-nine, surrounded by her family. Her last words, reportedly, were "Goodnight, Dolly." There is no better way to end this story, because the story was never really about her. It was always about the rest of us, and about the rare and precious thing it means to live in a country that produced her.