Part 2
Was she nervous? Of course she was nervous. “I’m still nervous when I do stuff,” she admits. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, you seem so relaxed.’ I said, ‘Well, I am once the spotlight hits me.’” The waiting is the hard part. The butterflies. The what-ifs. But the moment itself? That’s where Dolly Parton has always lived.
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She didn’t just tolerate the pressure. She got addicted to it.
The Attention She Was Fighting For
Here’s the part that gets lost when we talk about Dolly Parton the icon: she was a middle child in a huge family. Twelve kids. A cabin with no electricity. Parents who worked themselves to the bone. There was no time for special attention. You had to fight for every minute of it.
Dolly fought by writing songs.
“I was always writing these songs,” she remembers. “Stuff I never lived — love songs, people getting killed in the war. I would hear everybody talking and I’d write all these songs.” Her mama was fascinated. Whenever visitors came to the house, Mama would say, “Rammie, get your guitar.” (Rammie was Dolly’s childhood nickname.) Then she’d tell the guests, “I want you to hear what this little young’un wrote.”
And everybody would listen. And they’d say, “Well, that’s really something.”
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That’s where the belief came from. Not from a record executive. Not from a talent scout. From a mother who recognized that her daughter was doing something special — and from a little girl who realized, “I felt like I was doing something that everybody else wasn’t doing at that moment.”
That feeling — of being seen, of being appreciated — became a drug. “I kind of got addicted to that,” Dolly says. “I thought, ‘Yeah, well, I got to get better and better so I can keep doing what I do because I like that feeling.’”
That’s the engine. Not fame. Not money. The feeling of connecting. The rush of knowing you moved someone.
The Musical Savant Who Calls Herself an Idiot
Somebody once called Dolly a “musical savant.” Her response? “Well, I wouldn’t go that far. The idiot part would be more like it.”
That’s classic Dolly — self-deprecating, quick with a joke, never taking herself too seriously in public. But don’t let the punchline fool you. When it comes to songwriting, she is dead serious. “I take myself more serious as a songwriter than anything else,” she says. “If I had to give up every other part of the business, I would choose to be a writer.”
Think about that. She’s an actress (9 to 5, Steel Magnolias, Straight Talk). She’s a business mogul (Dollywood, Imagination Library). She’s a pop-culture icon who has been famous for over six decades. But if you strip all of it away — the wigs, the rhinestones, the theme park — what’s left is a woman with a guitar and a notebook.
“That’s my therapist,” she says of songwriting. “My guitar is my friend.”
She uses it to process her own pain. She uses it to channel the pain of people she loves who can’t express it themselves. “Anything that I see other people that I love going through that don’t know how to express it, I am able to do that. I’m able to channel their feelings as well as mine.”
That’s empathy turned into craft. And then there’s the thing she loves most: “I love that I can rhyme.”
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It sounds simple. It isn’t. Rhyme is the skeleton of a song. It’s what makes a line stick in your head. Dolly has been rhyming since she was a kid, and she still gets a kick out of it. But as her interviewer pointed out, it’s not just the rhymes — it’s the words she chooses. The specificity. The detail. The way she can say “Jolene” four times in a row and make it feel like a prayer.
“Well, I love doing it,” she says. “Let’s put it that way.”
More Talented? Maybe. More in Love? Never.
Dolly is the first to admit she’s not the most gifted songwriter who ever lived. “There’s a lot of people more talented than me that writes songs better,” she says. “But I don’t think there’s anybody out there that loves doing it any more than me.”
That’s not false modesty. That’s a working philosophy. Talent is common. Obsession is rare. Dolly had enough talent — and then she outworked everyone. She believed she could make a living doing what she loved, and she was right. But the belief didn’t come from nowhere. It came from those early days, from Mama’s living room, from Uncle Bill’s encouragement, from the rush of a spotlight on a ten-year-old girl who decided she’d rather die than freeze.
“I was fighting for attention,” she says of her big family. And she never stopped fighting. She just turned the fight into songs.
So when you hear “I Will Always Love You” — whether it’s Dolly’s original 1974 version or Whitney Houston’s 1992 juggernaut from The Bodyguard — you’re not just hearing a love song. You’re hearing a woman who learned early that the only way to be heard in a crowded room is to write something nobody else could write.
And she’s still writing. Still rhyming. Still chasing that feeling.
Next up: the mystery of a good line, the miracle of “Jolene,” and what happened when Beyoncé came calling. Trust me — you don’t want to miss it.
