By Goldy Locks
Today is a day that weighs heavy on hearts around the world. Dolly Parton has died at 80, and I am having a hard time even typing those words. I was supposed to be writing something completely different today, but sometimes you stop what you’re doing because somebody mattered enough that the schedule doesn’t matter anymore. Dolly was one of those people. There will be thousands of articles written about her today, and they will list the awards, the number-one songs, the movies, the Grammys, Dollywood, the businesses, the records broken, and the history made. And they should. Her career deserves every inch of ink it receives. But I wanted to write about Dolly from a different perspective. I wanted to write about her as a woman who grew up watching another woman quietly show us what was possible, because before I understood Dolly Parton the icon, I understood Dolly Parton the feeling.
I was a tiny girl when I became aware of 9 to 5. I remember being fascinated by the song and by the woman singing it. The voice, the hair, the nails, the clothes, the humor, the whole package was impossible to ignore. It wasn’t until I got older that I understood what I had actually been watching. 9 to 5 was funny, but underneath that comedy was something incredibly serious. Women were being underestimated, harassed, dismissed, and paid unfairly in the workplace, and Dolly was helping put that conversation right in the middle of American popular culture alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. The movie made people laugh while making them look at something they might otherwise have preferred not to see. That was Dolly’s magic. She could put medicine in the candy. Long before the “Me Too” hashtags and social media movements, she understood that women deserved respect, ownership, and a seat at the table. She didn’t have to scream it every five minutes. She lived it.
People sometimes reduce Dolly to “country singer,” and that description suddenly seems ridiculously small. She was a songwriter, actress, producer, businesswoman, philanthropist and cultural force who figured out how to turn a childhood in rural Tennessee into a body of work recognized around the world. She eventually landed in both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, although in typical Dolly fashion, she initially questioned whether she belonged in the latter because she didn’t consider herself a rock artist. Then she went out and made Rockstar, surrounded by artists including Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Elton John, Sting, Stevie Nicks, Joan Jett, P!nk, Brandi Carlile, Chris Stapleton, Debbie Harry, Rob Halford and her goddaughter Miley Cyrus. That wasn’t an aging artist desperately trying to attach herself to younger relevance. That was relevance coming to Dolly.
She somehow remained completely old school while never becoming old news. I absolutely love Miley Cyrus telling the story that when she wanted to coordinate with Dolly, communication could still involve a fax. Dolly would send the fax, somebody would scan it, turn it into a text message and send it to Miley, and there would be Dolly’s signature at the bottom. Think about how wonderfully insane and perfectly Dolly that is. One of the most recognizable entertainers on planet Earth, collaborating with generation after generation of artists while still basically saying, “Fax me.” She didn’t chase technology, trends or whatever everybody else was doing. She stayed current without surrendering the things that made her Dolly.
Living in Nashville, I see every day how deeply people love her. Dolly isn’t just somebody whose songs come through your speakers around here. She is woven into Tennessee. People drive around with Dolly Parton Imagination Library license plates on their cars. Her name is on a theme park, yes, but more importantly, it is on books arriving in children’s mailboxes. I also watch people come to Nashville every day because they have decided they want a country music career, and believe me, I understand chasing a dream. But I’ve always had enormous respect for the true pioneers of country music because “country” wasn’t a marketing lane to them. It was their life. Dolly grew up one of 12 children in a poor farming family in the mountains of East Tennessee. Her father worked the land. Her mother made do with what the family had, an experience Dolly would eventually immortalize in “Coat of Many Colors.” Like Loretta Lynn singing about the coal miner’s daughter she actually was, Dolly didn’t have to invent authenticity. She lived it. Her sound wasn’t fabricated, her story wasn’t assembled in a conference room, and she wasn’t an industry plant. She scratched her way to the top with those long fingernails and somehow still managed to play the guitar while doing it.
And here’s something every artist reading this needs to understand: Dolly Parton knew the difference between being famous and owning what made you famous. The story of “I Will Always Love You” should be required education for every songwriter who ever signs a publishing agreement. Elvis Presley wanted to record it. Imagine being a songwriter and hearing those words. Elvis wants your song. Dolly was thrilled, but the night before the recording was supposed to happen, Colonel Tom Parker told her they would need at least half of the publishing. Dolly refused. She later recalled crying over that decision, but she knew the copyright was too important to surrender. Then, years later, Whitney Houston recorded “I Will Always Love You,” and that song became one of the most famous recordings in popular music history. Dolly had protected what she created.
I think about my late mentor Prince whenever I hear that story. Prince taught me that ownership matters. He fought very publicly for artists to understand the value of their work and their masters, and I can almost imagine Dolly and Prince having that conversation. Two wildly different human beings who understood one very important thing: if you create something valuable, don’t be embarrassed to know its value. I remember Prince teaching me that 50 percent of something is better than 100 percent of nothing, and I understand exactly what he was trying to teach me about making deals and getting things done. But Dolly also taught us the other side of that lesson. Sometimes you need to know when the 100 percent is worth protecting. Sometimes the deal isn’t worth making. Sometimes the most powerful word an artist can learn is “no.”
That lesson has become even more important to me as I’ve gotten older, especially with what We’ve been trying to say through “Buy the Record, Not the Bod” and “Only Talent.” I worry about young artists being taught that their quickest path to attention is selling access to themselves instead of building value around their talent, and Dolly is such a beautiful example of why being sexy, glamorous, and feminine never had to mean surrendering your power. Let’s not rewrite history and pretend Dolly wasn’t sexy. Good Lord, the woman knew exactly what she was doing. She had the hair, the boobs, the rhinestones, the nails, the heels, the waist, and the jokes. She could walk into a room looking like a human disco ball and have everybody staring before she ever opened her mouth, but then she opened her mouth, and there was the talent. Then came the songwriting, then the business brain, then the ownership and then the longevity. Dolly never apologized for being feminine or glamorous, but she also never allowed the package to become more important than what was inside it. She could make the joke about herself before anybody else could, then turn around and probably buy the building the joke was being told in. That’s power, and to me, that’s “Only Talent” covered in rhinestones.
She also taught women something about aging that I wish our culture understood better. Dolly never suddenly showed up pretending she was 22. She just kept showing up as Dolly. The hair was still Dolly, the clothes were still Dolly, the humor was still Dolly, and the sparkle was still Dolly. She evolved without erasing herself. She stayed cool without chasing cool, and she collaborated with younger artists without looking like she was begging them to make her relevant. Instead, she shared her spotlight with them. That may be one of the greatest signs of a true star. When your own light is strong enough, helping somebody else shine doesn’t dim yours. Dolly seemed to understand that instinctively, and generations of performers wanted to stand beside her because of it.
Then there are the children, and this may ultimately be the part of her legacy that moves me most. Dolly’s father could not read or write, and instead of simply telling that story in interviews for the rest of her life, she did something about it. In 1995 she started Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library in Sevier County, Tennessee, with the simple idea of mailing free books to children from birth to age five so they could fall in love with reading. By March of this year, her organization reported that it had gifted more than 314 million books to children across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and the Republic of Ireland. More than 314 million books. Think about what that actually means. Think about the little hands opening those packages, the parents sitting on beds after long days reading those stories, and the children discovering words because a woman who had everything remembered what her father didn’t have.
Her generosity went far beyond literacy. She helped families devastated by the Smoky Mountain wildfires & supported medical causes. That is the part of success nobody can put on a Billboard chart. What did you do once people started listening? Dolly used the microphone to sing, but she also used the platform the microphone gave her. She came from almost nothing materially, yet somehow she never seemed ashamed of where she came from. She made it the story. She took poverty and wrote “Coat of Many Colors.” She took heartbreak and wrote songs. She took sexism and made comedy. She took people underestimating her and built businesses. She took jokes about her appearance and told them better herself. She took illiteracy in her own family and turned it into hundreds of millions of books for other people’s children.
That’s why today hurts so much. We didn’t just lose a singer. Artists lost one of our greatest teachers. Women lost a woman who showed us you could be soft without being weak, sexy without being stupid, funny without being the joke, kind without being a pushover, and successful without pretending you got there alone. Songwriters lost one of the greatest examples imaginable of why you protect the song. Children lost the woman who kept sending them books. Tennessee lost one of its brightest lights, and the world lost somebody who managed to become larger than life without ever acting like she was larger than the people around her. Dolly sold more than 100 million records and wrote thousands of songs, but when you look at the entirety of her life, the numbers almost become secondary.
So for every artist reading this who is struggling right now, who thinks nobody sees you, who is being told you’re too old, too young, too weird, too country, too rock, too female, too independent, too much or somehow not enough, remember that little girl from the mountains of Tennessee. She didn’t wait for the world to understand her. She made the world catch up. Protect your songs, own what you can, help somebody when you finally have enough to help, don’t be afraid to be glamorous, and don’t be afraid to be smart. Don’t confuse attention with respect, don’t confuse a trend with a career, and never let anybody convince you that somebody else’s name on your song is worth giving away the part of yourself that wrote it. Dolly Parton spent 80 years on this earth, and somehow it still doesn’t feel like enough, but maybe that’s the final lesson. We don’t get to decide how long our names stay on the marquee. We only get to decide what we do while the lights are on, and Dolly used every damn bulb.
Somewhere tonight, a child is going to open a book that exists in their hands because Dolly Parton cared whether they learned to read. Somewhere a songwriter is going to sing “Jolene.” Somewhere somebody is going to blast “9 to 5” on the way to a job they hate. Somewhere Whitney Houston’s voice will soar through “I Will Always Love You,” and underneath every second of it will still be the words written by a Tennessee woman who once had the courage to say that what she created had value and belonged to her. So thank you, Dolly, for the songs, the laughs, the rhinestones, the guts, the books and the blueprint. Thank you for showing women that femininity and intelligence were never opposites, for teaching artists to know their worth and for sharing your spotlight instead of guarding it. You spent a lifetime encouraging the rest of us to dream more, learn more, care more and be more, and now it’s our turn to prove we were listening. The world feels a little less sparkly today, but because you were here, it will never be without your shine. Stay Golden, Dolly. From one blonde girl with big hair and bigger dreams to another, I will always love you.
Goldy Locks
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