I had the same feeling when Diane Keaton died: Confusion. Dolly Parton can’t possibly be gone. If anything could inoculate someone from The Clock, it would be easy laughter and broad smiles. But, no.
Dolly of the cotton candy hair. Dolly of the rhinestone boobs exploding in the minds of fifth graders. Dolly of the quavering, sweet twang. Dolly of working Nine to Five and Islands in the Stream when, at last, every time, still, I wait for the duet’s second verse and the ladies’ turn... And you just walk in the night… it raises the hair on my forearms, every time, still.
She waited for the nation’s full attention, patiently as an elementary school teacher, over six decades, never changed a thing, didn’t move a inch towards or away, won us over one by, and then all the rest, as if at once, until America could only remember being fans forever.
“I’m just a backwoods Barbie,
Too much makeup, too much hair,
Don’t be fooled by thinking that the goods are not all there.”
And the Appalachian-sharp knife when she needed it, dispatching Barbara Walters in a scandalous 1977 interview, but even then only enough to stand her ground and not stick the blade an inch deeper.
“But when I think of hillbillies, am I thinking of your kind of people?” Walters asks, the first in a jaw-dropping cascade of big-city insults that includes questioning whether Dolly’s breasts are artificial. Dolly’s answer deserves to be watched directly. Dolly Parton returns what amounts to an artist’s creed. For the rest of her career, Walters huffed and puffed and tried to claw back that cruel interview. “The smartest woman I ever interviewed,” she insisted. Rubbish on Manhattan rubbish.
But Dolly Parton might have been the wisest. Certainly, the classiest. “Country class,” Dolly puts it in the interview, smiling back, chin up, eyes flashing.
Dolly Parton wore a costume, dared us to see past the spangles and the wink, named her game, the pure artist’s move. The price of entry to her world meant playing by her rules, passing through her theme-park gates. And if you did, then she’d show you what she’d show you. And what she wanted to show us was that she was, above all, a songwriter.
Then a philanthropist, then a hero of the drag queen and the cowboy, the lesbian and the cowgirl, an American to share with the world.
It must be mighty to know who you are when you have an easy laugh and a broad smile.
Oh Adam, you said it perfectly. The world has lost a beautiful soul.
Thank you once again for the pause, and read. When the news arrived, and the days prior and after, my thought was the creatives have decided the world is too much to bare ❤️