Dolly Parton’s Artistry Transcends Her Legend

It always seemed like “Jolene” represented a very specific triumph of imagination and storytelling. Can you imagine Dolly Parton encountering a woman who is so overwhelmingly beautiful and desirable that she would actually be worried that she would be capable of taking Dolly’s man away? I’ve always taken this as evidence of her having been a songwriter far beyond her generation or her genre. By which I mean that most songwriters of the last 50-60 years, going forward from Bob Dylan and Lennon and McCartney to the present, make a point to express their own feelings and their own opinions, as informed by their own experiences. This makes them inherently different from the older school songwriters, who wrote the Great American Songbook, who essentially came from a more theatrical tradition, and rarely wrote songs inspired by their own personal opinions or feelings. I’ve always maintained that I know more about Bob Dylan’s inner life than I do about Sammy Cahn, even though the late Sammy was a personal friend of mine. Unlike nearly everyone writing from the 1970s onwards, the age of the great singer-songwriters, Dolly Parton could transcend herself to write something that was truly universal. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Dolly Parton’s music was her ability to cast herself as an underdog. Surely, the unidentified speaker talking to Jolene has the odds stacked against her; so too is the central character speaking in “Coat of Many Colors.” In real life, she seemed like anything but, with her beauty, her talent, her charm, and her taste. Dolly Parton’s life and music were a study in abundance. She could make us believe anything she wanted us to believe. She was perfect in every way, visually, vocally, musically, melodically, harmonically, and yet at the same time, her artistry was never about perfection. It was always about being human. Perhaps it was because she was so much larger than life that she could appeal to the widest range of an audience of virtually any artist of the second half of the 20th century. Like many major figures — in multiple senses of the word — in what is generally referred to as country-and-western music, it was assumed that her core audience was, and is, people in so-called red states who identify as political conservatives. And yet, at the same time, she was beloved by a vast audience whom some of her constituents would have viewed as abhorrent, namely the LGBT community. It’s hard to imagine two more disparate, unconnected groups of individuals — one of the only occasions when people on such extremes of both the left and right could possibly get together in the same space, whether intellectually or physically, was at a Dolly Parton concert.It’s part and parcel of that abundance that the obituaries claim that she wrote 3,000 songs, surely an exaggerated figure. The outside estimate for Irving Berlin, by comparison, is a mere 1,500 songs. It makes more sense to argue for her triumph as a composer in terms of quality rather than mere quantity. In interviews, I’ve heard her say things like, “Sure, I’ve written thousands of songs, but maybe only a few of them are any good.” This is not what we would call a humble brag, but it was sincere, and offered evidence both of how skillfully she was able to thread that particular needle and how she had mastered the art of being exaggerated and understated at the same time.In reflecting on Dolly Parton after her passing yesterday at the age of 80, I find myself realizing that as imposing a figure as she was, her artistry was bigger still. Casual listeners are sometimes surprised to learn that Whitney Houston’s blockbuster, “I Will Always Love You,” was written by Parton, who actually sang it much more convincingly and movingly than Houston, or anybody else. And at the same time, some of my personal favorite Parton sides were composed by others. I never quite realized that “Here You Come Again” was by the Brill Building team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Dolly Parton attends “The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas” premiere in July 1982. R. Diamond/Getty ImagesAnd then there’s “Hard Candy Christmas,” her contribution to the literature of Christmas music, written by Carol Hall for the 1978 Broadway musical “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” which she sang for the hit 1982 movie adaptation. In both cases, she took these songs, written by others, and made them so totally her own that it’s hard to imagine anyone else could have had anything to do with them. She could sing a hard candy Christmas song and also use a reference from the Old Testament in “Coat of Many Colors.”If any one individual represented the best in American music — and perhaps all of American culture, including movies, television, theme parks, even the business — of the second half of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st, it was Dolly Parton. It seems too obvious and too easy, but it is hard to resist ending with the thought that surely everyone in the world is having right now: We will always love her.

Dolly Parton’s Artistry Transcends Her Legend

Dolly Parton’s Artistry Transcends Her Legend

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