Part 5
The wig line is the funniest part of the announcement and also the most on-brand. Dolly has been wearing wigs for most of her career, and she's said so herself, cheerfully, for decades. A Dolly Parton wig line isn't a cash grab. It's a public service.
50 Years at the Grand Ole Opry — and a Kid Who Never Stopped Hustling
Now put all of that next to her NBC special, '50 Years at the Grand Ole Opry,' where the girl who once made fifteen dollars a week stands in the middle of the biggest stage in country music to mark half a century as an Opry member.
Fifty years. Her reaction to the milestone is pure Dolly: 'I'm not even 50 years old.' Which is technically true and completely beside the point.
The special itself is smart staging. She filmed narration back at the Ryman Auditorium — the old Opry house, the mother church — then cut back and forth to the new Opry auditorium, where a full slate of artists performed, playing their own songs as well as hers. She sings Hank Williams Sr.'s 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry' a cappella at the Ryman. No band. No net.
She opens with '9 to 5,' because of course she does. You give the people the hits. If you've somehow never seen the movie — 1980, directed by Colin Higgins, 110 minutes, with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dabney Coleman — Dolly plays Doralee Rhodes, and the song she wrote for it is still the best three minutes of workplace rage ever recorded.
Here's the detail that will delight you if you nerd out about craft. When she wrote that song, she used her acrylic nails on the set to keep time. They clicked like a typewriter. She played that clicking on the actual record, and the album credits it — 'Nails by Dolly.'
She closes with 'I Will Always Love You,' the way she's closed every show for decades. And if you only know the Whitney Houston version from 'The Bodyguard' — 1992, directed by Mick Jackson — go back to the original. Dolly wrote it about leaving Porter Wagoner's TV show and finally walking away from a man who didn't want her to go. It hits completely differently when you know that.
Every one of those projects — the Opry special, the perfume, the wigs, the skincare — is the Pancake House kid with a plan. She's been monetizing her own hustle since she was ten years old, and she has never once acted like it was beneath her.
That's what people get wrong when they talk about Dolly Parton like a saint. She's not a saint. She's a business. A warm, funny, extremely well-run business with a heart the size of Tennessee and a flawless instinct for the punchline.
That's the thing about watching her now. You're not watching a legend coast on a legacy. You're watching someone still pitching, still flirting, still telling a story about a walking stick and a breakfast bill like it happened last Tuesday. She's earned the right to sit down. She never does.
So stay tuned for more Dolly, because she's just getting started. And that's why we can't get enough of her.
