Part 2
The rest of this piece follows the sound of that applause outward into the whole career. We will go to Nashville and the Porter Wagoner show, to the writing of "Jolene" and the way a single name can become a song that never dies, to "9 to 5" and the feminist question Parton answers on her own terms. We will end up back in that room, with a ten-year-old and a clap that will not stop, because that is where Dolly Parton still lives. She is 73 in the CBS interview, still writing, still working, still calling it her god zone. She has said she will walk that road till God tells her to stop, and he has not said anything yet. The applause is still going. She is still listening.
From the Porter Wagoner Show to 'Jolene': Writing the Songs That Outlived the Decade
The bus was dark and rolling, and Dolly Parton was doing doing doing — a sound, not yet a song. She had just stepped off the Porter Wagoner show, where she was singing before a national audience for the first time, and a little girl had come up to her after the performance. Red hair. Green eyes. Pretty little thing. Dolly asked her name. The girl said Jolene. Dolly said she loved it. Then she climbed onto the bus and repeated it all the way home so she wouldn't forget it. That's the whole origin story. No lightning bolt. No grand concept. Just a name, a hum, and a woman terrified of losing a word she liked.
That's how Dolly Parton writes. She hears something — a phrase, a name, a rhythm — and she carries it around like a stone in her pocket until it turns into a song. 'Jolene' is one of the most famous country songs ever recorded, and it started as a fan's name on a bus ride. But the song needed more than a name. It needed jealousy. It needed ache. And Dolly found that in a second redhead: a bank teller who flirted with her husband, Carl Dean. Same name. Different woman. One gave her the word, the other gave her the feeling. Put them together and you get a song that's been covered by everyone from The White Stripes to Miley Cyrus, and still sounds like a wound that won't close.
'Jolene' helped launch Parton's solo career, the moment she stepped out from behind Porter Wagoner's shadow and became the headliner. And through all of it — the country hits, the pop crossover, the Hollywood years — she stayed married to Carl. They chose not to have children. She's been asked about it a hundred times, and her answer never wavers: 'It wasn't meant to be and I don't regret it... you make your choices, you make your sacrifices, and I never looked back.' That's not a deflection. That's a thesis. Dolly Parton has spent her whole life making choices and refusing to apologize for them.
She's written more than 3,000 songs. Let that number sit for a second. Three thousand. That's not a hobby. That's a factory. And when she's asked which one is her favorite, she doesn't say 'Jolene' or '9 to 5' or 'I Will Always Love You.' She says 'Coat of Many Colors.' A song about a poor kid from the Great Smoky Mountains whose mother sewed her a coat out of rags, and the other kids laughed at her, and she wore it anyway because she knew what it meant. The lyric goes: 'she made it just for me.' Read that line slowly. It's not a song about poverty. It's a song about love. The coat was ugly. The love was not. That's the whole point.
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Then there's 'I Will Always Love You.' Dolly wrote it in 1973, recorded it in 1974, and it became a hit. Then in 1992, Whitney Houston sang it in The Bodyguard, and it became a nuclear event. Eighteen years later, the song was bigger than it had ever been. Did it bother Dolly that people thought it was Whitney's song? Not even a little. 'I always say she can have the credit because I get my cash,' she said. That's not just a good line. That's a woman who understands exactly how much her work is worth and refuses to be bitter about someone else's success with it. She controls her own narrative. She always has.
That control extends to her image. Dolly Parton has been open about her cosmetic surgery in a way that most celebrities never are. She sings about it in 'Backwoods Barbie': 'don't be fooled by thinking that the goods are not all there... it is true that I look artificial, but I believe that I'm totally real.' In an on-camera interview, she insisted she was never a natural beauty. The interviewer pushed back. Dolly didn't budge. 'I'm not like a natural beauty but I can enhance it,' she said. 'Whatever it takes.' She's not ashamed of the work she's had done. She's not pretending it didn't happen. She's just telling you: this is the package. Take it or leave it.
And then there's the humor. Dolly Parton can out-joke anyone in the room, and she knows it. 'How long does it take to do your hair?' — 'I wouldn't know, I'm never there.' 'Are they real?' — 'They're real expensive.' 'How do you want people to remember you 100 years from now?' — 'I want them to say, God, don't she look good for her age.' She's not just funny. She's funny on purpose. She gets ahead of the joke before anyone else can make it, and in doing so, she takes the power away from anyone who might try to use it against her. That's not just comedy. That's strategy.
