The night Dolly Parton finished high school, in 1964, she stood up and told her graduating class that she would be a star. Everyone around her laughed, but she could not understand why. She was quiet, embarrassed, and as determined as she had been at the start of the night.
Parton had spent years singing outside her family’s rural Tennessee shack, imagining herself awing audiences in a glimmering silk dress, and had no doubt about her plans, she recounted during a 2009 commencement speech at the University of Tennessee.
Parton was an odd child in Sevierville, her small hometown in the Smoky Mountains. She would gaze at a flamboyant lady in town and compliment her style, despite others writing the lady off as trash, a trollop. She even tried to emulate the lady’s glamour, to the violent anger of her family.
In her 1987 song Wildflowers – a beautiful collaboration with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris – Parton sang that “I grew up fast and wild, and I never felt right, in a garden so different from me.” She loved those around her, but longed to get away and pursue her dreams.
“I wanted more than to be a farmer’s daughter, even though I am proud to be [a farmer’s daughter]. I just wanted pretty things … I wanted to [be] a star,” she told ABC’s Barbara Walters in December 1977.
Parton left Sevierville soon after graduation, released her first charted single just three years later, and spent the next six decades releasing a steady stream of country hits. Yet, throughout her career, she never changed.
She grew up and travelled, shot movies and sold out arenas. And through it all, where others saw trash, she saw beauty to uplift. Parton rarely crossed genres, but leaped between perspectives. She could belt out a love song at the start of an album, and put herself in the shoes of a hobo contemplating death at the end of it.
Parton wrote deeply personal, aching tracks about heartbreak and betrayal, alongside songs about the dignity of the ‘poor folks town,” the fierce determination of the working woman, and the pain of the migrant worker away from home.
“If you truly care for people, you won’t judge them, and then you will learn to appreciate the uniqueness in every single soul,” she said in her 2009 speech. And Parton applied the same standard to herself.
She was deeply vibrant, deeply Southern, and wholly unapologetic about it. At the start of her 1977 interview with ABC, Walters greeted Parton with a barrage of intrusive questions about her body and style, and the singer responded with charm.
Walters asked if she was a hillbilly, whether her body had been full as a teenager, and why someone as beautiful as her would wear wigs and ‘extreme dresses.’ Parton brushed her off with a smile and explained that she would not change.
“I don’t like to be like everybody else … I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable, that’s the easiest thing in the world to do,” Parton said. “I enjoy [how I dress]. I am sure of myself as a person. I am sure of my talent. I am sure of my love for life,” she added.
Parton did not lose her temper or snap at Walters. She rarely ever did. Interviewers often pushed Parton in directions she did not want to go, but never got very far. She would respond to pettiness with a calculated, disarming laugh and a healthy dose of self-deprecation, shutting down conversations.
Parton never ceased to be her beautiful, authentic self. But she did not make a big deal out of it. She never tried to defend her style or explain her life. She was herself, and that was enough for her.
Even in the realm of politics, where Parton avoided grand gestures to ensure that every fan felt welcome, she spoke through her music. Over decades, she covered some of the more explicitly political songs in the American canon.
In 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs – a companion album to her and Jane Fonda’s 1980 movie – Parton belted out covers of Woodie Guthrie’s Deportee, a searing anti-racist track about the treatment of undocumented migrants, and Merle Travis’ Dark as a Dungeon, a plea to young men descending into mine shafts.
Parton chose to love herself and everyone else for who they were, looking past imperfections and messiness, most days of her life. And she chose to do it quietly, rarely asking or expecting praise.
For one slightly dour teenage boy in 2010s East Auckland, that mattered. As the kid searched for the balance between expression and decorum, and tried to understand when to defend their difference and when to embrace it with a smile, Parton became a model to learn from.
She managed to be herself, proud and beautiful and different, without ever succumbing to myopia or disdain. She walked her joyous, extravagant path without losing her love for those around her. She showed the teenager that they could be themselves without needing to explain themselves.
Parton, to the teenager, was the wildflower that had blossomed for five decades and showed no signs of slowing down. But that is, sadly, no longer true. With the passing of Dolly Parton on 25 August, Tennessee’s wildflower has withered away. Yet, though she is gone, she remains with those she inspired and shaped by doing little more than being her beautiful self.
Rest in peace, Dolly Parton.
By Avinash Govind