Dolly Parton’s Gifts in Song and Storytelling Arose From an Upbringing Steeped in the Ethic of Self-Reliance

The doctor who ushered the infant Dolly Rebecca Parton into the world in 1946 was paid with a sack of cornmeal. Such was the transactional nature of health care for some around the Great Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee. Her father and mother had been 17 and 15, respectively, when they married, and could not have imagined how the world would be their daughter’s oyster.Yet not immediately. In “Ain’t Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton,” Martha Ackmann writes that once a year, Parton’s father would measure his children’s feet with sticks that he took to town to buy shoes that did not fit. And Ms. Ackmann says that for country kids running barefoot most of the time, calamities were inescapable:“Once Dolly climbed over a fence and came down hard on something poking through the dirt: the sharp cutting blade of a plow. She nearly severed her toes.” Was she taken to a nearby hospital? No, there wasn’t one. “As Dolly’s older brothers and father held her down, her mother poured kerosene into the wound, packed it in cornmeal, and sewed up the wound with a quilting needle.”Her family knew the old story of a cheerful preacher saying to a hardscrabble farmer, “This is a right nice place you and Lord have here,” and the farmer replying, “You should have seen the som’bitch when the Lord had it hisself.” Young Dolly was steeped in the ethic of self-reliance.She was a savvy businesswoman even when getting started in Nashville’s music industry, which was not a lagoon of advanced thinking about the emancipation of women. In 1974, she was 28 and starstruck when Elvis Presley expressed interest in meeting her and recording “I Will Always Love You,” which she had written. Yet when Presley’s management insisted on at least half the rights to the song, she refused, the meeting was off, and she never met — never again wanted to meet — Elvis. Even so, Ms. Ackmann reports that Parton said keeping the copyright to that one song made her enough money — perhaps $10 million — she could have bought Graceland, Elvis’s Memphis home.Cinched into tight sequined gowns, wearing mountainous wigs and makeup seemingly applied with a trowel, she said people had no idea how expensive it was to make her look so cheap. A born aphorist, she also said: “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you got to put up with the rain.” And: “I’m not offended by all of the dumb blond jokes because I know I’m not dumb … and I also know that I’m not blond.” What she became was a genre-blending storyteller.Saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker (1920-1955) was a genius who played on Manhattan’s West 52nd Street when it was the epicenter of jazz in the 1940s and 1950s. In “Country Music,” the companion book to Ken Burns’s documentary on this subject, writer Dayton Duncan tells this story: Some fellow musicians saw Parker feeding nickels into a jukebox to play country songs. One said, “Bird, how can you play that music?” He replied, “Listen to the stories.”Parton’s stories of humble origins and hard times disguised — usually — her steely pride. In 1977, she was interviewed by Barbara Walters, who asked her if “people like me” — meaning Manhattan sophisticates — would call Parton a hillbilly. Parton replied, “We were very proud people. People with a lot of class. It was country class, but it was a great deal of class.”Americans have long since outgrown the sentimental insistence that theirs is a classless society. Indeed, perhaps more than ever before, American politics is about class distinctions. The most predictive fact about today’s politics is the “diploma divide”: Those with and those without college degrees vote — and think and feel — differently. American resentments are less about the distribution of material wealth than about the allocation of status and respect.Ms. Ackmann says that, as a child, Parton heard, early and often, this phrase: “Don’t get above your raisin’.” Meaning, don’t get too big for your britches. Most of all, don’t forget where you came from.In 1995, this daughter of an illiterate father started Imagination Library, which in participating states mails free books — more than 318 million so far — to children when they are born. And every month thereafter, until they are 5, when they receive “Look Out Kindergarten, Here I Come!” The words “Here I come” could have been the overture for the well-lived life that began 80 years ago.The Washington Post

Dolly Parton’s Gifts in Song and Storytelling Arose From an Upbringing Steeped in the Ethic of Self-Reliance

Dolly Parton’s Gifts in Song and Storytelling Arose From an Upbringing Steeped in the Ethic of Self-Reliance

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