Reading Dolly Parton a Radiant Entertainer Finally Gets Her Due As a Composer and Lyricist—And Champion of Resilience Amid Troubles
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This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit https://www.djreprints.com. https://www.wsj.com/articles/here-she-comes-again-reading-dolly-parton-11609433264 BOOKSHELF Here She Comes Again: Reading Dolly Parton A radiant entertainer finally gets her due as a composer and lyricist—and champion of resilience amid troubles. Dolly Parton in 1978. PHOTO: RICHARD E. AARONREDFERNS By Eddie Dean Dec. 31, 2020 1147 am ET Listen to this article 12 minutes In the late 1960s, Dolly Parton got her big break as the “girl singer” on “The Porter Wagoner Show,” a syndicated television program that brought hard-core honky-tonk and down-home humor into the living rooms of America. It may be hard to believe now, but back then Ms. Parton was only the second most flamboyant performer onstage. One of country music’s most magnetic stars, Wagoner had a peroxide pompadour and eye- popping, rhinestone-studded Nudie suits that defined Nashville glitz. Meanwhile, “Miss Dolly,” as he called her, was kept buttoned up in demure outfits despite her natural radiance and zest. Underpaid and underappreciated, Ms. Parton would later compare her seven-year stint with Wagoner to the time that indentured servants were required to work in order to earn their freedom. It was indeed a raw deal, but it was worth it. It gave her national exposure and performing experience with a peerless entertainer twice her age. It also allowed her to hone her songwriting talent, which had brought her to Nashville in 1964 as an 18-year- old from the Smoky Mountains. Dolly Parton on stage in 1971. PHOTO: LES LEVERETTGRAND OLE OPRY One day, as the Wagoner tour bus headed to the next town, something caught Ms. Parton’s fancy. “We rode past Dover, Tennessee, and my mind started going,” she recalls in “Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics” (Chronicle, 376 pages, $50). “There was this field of clover waving in the wind. So there we were, Dover-clover, and that started me off: ‘The sun behind a cloud just cast a crawling shadow o’er the fields of clover. And time is running out for me. I wish that he would hurry down from Dover.’ ” The verses that flowed from this roadside epiphany told a story from the point of view of a pregnant girl deserted by her lover and abandoned by her scandalized parents. Alone but still hoping for her lover’s return, she decides to have the baby, which is stillborn. With its Southern Gothic overtones, “Down From Dover” evokes the dark fatalism of the mountain ballads that Ms. Parton heard as a child. Its subject matter was taboo for country radio when it appeared on a 1970 album, so “Dover” was never the hit that she thought it could be. But it remains a favorite of Ms. Parton and many of her fans, and it has enjoyed an afterlife as one of her most covered songs, not only by country singers (Skeeter Davis) but also by campy pop sirens (Nancy Sinatra) and New Wave chanteuses (Marianne Faithfull). “Down From Dover” is one of 175 Parton compositions over a six-decade career featured in “Songteller,” a lavishly illustrated compendium of annotated lyrics and back-story anecdotes. The songs range freely across genres, from classic country weepers to proto- feminist hits like “Just Because I’m a Woman” to frothy upbeat pop crossovers; from stark acoustic bluegrass and movie-soundtrack blockbusters like “9 to 5” and “I Will Always Love You” to Broadway show tunes. It is only a portion of Dolly Parton’s staggering output of 450 recorded songs. A pair of timely new studies, by a journalist and a musicologist, both unabashed Dolly fans, trace the thematic threads that run through this canon. Both offer reappraisals of Ms. Parton as a complex and often contradictory artist overshadowed by her larger-than- life image as an entertainer and the proprietor of a multi-media empire. Sarah Smarsh’s “She Come by It Natural” (Scribner, 187 pages, $22) is a bracing personal account that celebrates how Ms. Parton has given a liberating voice to an often ignored segment of the American working class—resilient and independent-minded blue-collar women. Lydia R. Hamessley’s “Unlikely Angel” (Illinois, 286 pages, $19.95) offers a scholarly analysis of representative songs, as text and in performance, to explore Ms. Parton’s creative process. This trio of books makes a solid case for a composer due to receive her just deserts as “one of our greatest American songwriters,” asserts co-author Robert K. Oermann in his preface to “Songteller.” From self-described “Backwoods Barbie” to American Bard may seem a stretch, but there is merit in the argument that, for too long now, Ms. Parton’s formidable body of work has been overlooked for the sake of her relentlessly scrutinized body. As Ms. Smarsh puts it, Dolly Parton has had to “answer more questions about her measurements than her songwriting.” “Songteller” displays previously unseen photographs of precious tokens of Ms. Parton’s life, especially her writing life, such as Wagoner’s dry-cleaner receipts, on which she scrawled the lyrics to her signature song about a mother’s devotion, “Coat of Many Colors.” One of the most poignant images is of a corncob doll with corn-silk hair. It evokes an upbringing “as poor as Job’s turkey” in the remote mountains of east Tennessee, one of a dozen in a sharecropping family. Her first song, “Little Tiny Tasseltop,” composed at age 6, was an ode to one of these homemade dolls. But “Songteller” is packed as well with luminous photos of Ms. Parton in all her celebrity splendor. She seems at ease with the gap between her exaggerated appearance (“a country girl’s idea of what glamour was”) and her artistic aims—as well as the gap, some would say chasm, between her “sad-ass songs” and the sunny disposition she is famous for. “I’ve killed a lot of puppies and kids and ladies in my songs. I’ve killed myself a few times,” she deadpans in an annotation for a lesser-known gem from 1969, “Gypsy, Joe, and Me,” in which a family of drifters are wiped out: First, the dog Gypsy is hit by a car; then the narrator’s boyfriend Joe dies from exposure; then the narrator herself jumps off a bridge in despair. “Lord, I just can’t get depressing enough, can I?” Ms. Parton writes. In fact, the lyrical content at the heart of “Songteller” shows the wide sweep of her oeuvre, a blend of darkness and light with natural affinities for the scorned and the misunderstood. There are outcasts and misfits of all sorts: hermits, prostitutes, winos, orphans, clairvoyants, gamblers and, not least, resourceful women of all stripes, but mostly poor and rural, in every conceivable predicament. Wordplay and O. Henry-like plot twists abound. No subject is off-limits: suicide, insanity, lust, faith and doubt, adultery, depression, illegitimacy; there is even a song called “PMS Blues.” To help explain Ms. Parton’s prodigious output, Ms. Hamessley, in “Unlikely Angel,” credits the rich musical heritage back in the Smokies, especially the gripping ballads of tragedy and death that Ms. Parton’s mother sang and the eerie folk hymns that Ms. Parton heard in the local Pentecostal churches. A music teacher at Hamilton College and a clawhammer banjo enthusiast, Ms. Hamessley is especially attuned to the subtle ways in which Ms. Parton interweaves old and new musical strands—for instance, by ornamenting her verses with archaic flourishes and stock phrases from centuries-old ballads: “My life is like unto a bargain store”; “all ye maidens heed my warning.” In her 1973 hit “Jolene,” a bank teller who flirted with Ms. Parton’s husband is transformed into a classic femme fatale, whose “beauty is beyond compare / With flaming locks of auburn hair.” Some of Ms. Parton’s best-known tear-jerkers, such as “Me and Little Andy,” about an abandoned girl and her puppy seeking refuge in a storm, have been savaged by critics through the years. (“As heinous as any of her past offenses against good taste,” wrote one.) In fact, these songs, concert staples still beloved by fans, reveal Ms. Parton working in the tradition of the sentimental Victorian-era parlor tunes with which, we learn, her mother serenaded her. Ms. Hamessley supplements her close readings (and close listenings) with incisive comments from Ms. Parton, who sent responses via cassette to the author’s inquiries, mostly about her native Appalachia’s folk roots. When asked about the early 19th-century hymn “Wayfaring Stranger,” whose stark melody re-appears in a number of her compositions, the now 74-year-old Ms. Parton dredged up a childhood memory of an old man at a local church in faded overalls who stood up mid-service and sang it impromptu: “It was the saddest, most beautiful, most lonesome thing I’d ever heard,” she tells Ms. Hamessley. Dolly Parton performing at the Dominion Theatre, London, in 1983. PHOTO: PETE STILLREDFERNSGETTY IMAGES Early in her career, Ms. Parton mined her past not only for these emotional touchstones but for raw material. By the time of her 1973 nostalgia-drenched album “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” her boss Wagoner had had enough. As her producer, he controlled much of what she recorded, often in slick arrangements that went against her wishes. For him, the money was in love songs. “Dolly, nobody gives a shit about ‘Mama’s Old Black Kettle,’ or ‘Daddy’s Working Boots,’ ” he told her.