Part 3
And no, she doesn't ride the rides. "I have too much to lose," she says. "Like my hair, and my shoes, everything." She's joking, but she's also not. Dolly Parton has spent her entire career protecting the assets that make her Dolly Parton. Her hair. Her face. Her songs. Her publishing. That last one is where the Elvis story comes in, and it's the same story as the shoulder pads, just with higher stakes.
Elvis Presley wanted to record "I Will Always Love You." Dolly had written it, and she was thrilled. She never met Elvis, but he invited her down to the studio. Then, the day of the session, Colonel Tom Parker called. "He said that they only recorded songs that they had to publish it on," Dolly remembers. "And I couldn't do that. That broke my heart." She refused to give up the publishing. She kept the song. And years later, Whitney Houston recorded it for The Bodyguard in 1992, and it became one of the best-selling singles of all time.
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The shoulder-pad girl who made her own bra also refused to hand over the deed to her own work. That's not stubbornness. That's survival. That's a woman who understood, long before she had any leverage, that owning your art is the only way to stay free. She lost Elvis. She kept herself.
The ghosts of Nashville are never far from Dolly's story. She loved Johnny Cash. He was her first encounter with what she thought sex appeal was, seeing him on stage when she was seventeen. June Carter Cash was there too, part of that same mythology. And then there's Hank Williams, dead at twenty-nine — though Dolly says twenty-seven. Let her say it. "He was the greatest songwriter," she insists. His songs have been recorded all over the world, in every style. That's the kind of legacy she's chasing. Not just hits. A body of work that outlives you.
Which brings us to 9 to 5. Not the movie — though that 1980 film, directed by Colin Higgins and starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly herself, is a classic — but the musical. The national tour opens in Nashville at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in September, with stops in Chicago, St. Louis, and Denver. Dolly will be at the big opening. She may show up here and there. And the song "9 to 5" is performed with workers in the Hallmark special. It's a song about ambition, written by a woman who poured herself a cup of it every morning. The shoulder-pad girl grew up and wrote an anthem for everyone who's ever punched a clock and dreamed of something more.
Dollywood is twenty-five years old now. It's a success. It's a landmark. It's a testament to what happens when you ignore the people who tell you you're going to lose your butt, and you listen to that feeling in your heart instead. The shoulder pads are long gone. The bra she made out of them is a memory. But the instinct that drove her to steal them — that's still running the show. And it always will be.
Miley, the Transition, and the Long Game of Becoming Yourself
The conversation turns, as conversations about Dolly Parton eventually do, to the young woman she calls her unofficial goddaughter. Miley Cyrus was seventeen when this interview happened, and the tabloids were pounding on her like a hailstorm on a tin roof. Dolly doesn't flinch. She says they've been "ounding her to death" — her word, her rhythm — and then she does the thing that only someone who has survived her own reinventions can do. She remembers.
She remembers being seventeen. She remembers wanting to feel sexy, wanting to wear sexy clothes, wanting to be seen as something other than the girl she was yesterday. And she remembers the shoulder pads. Stealing them out of her grandma's winter coat to make a push-up bra, before Frederick's of Hollywood ever had the idea — or so she jokes, and you believe her. That image, the stolen padding, the homemade architecture of a new self, is the key to everything Dolly says about Miley. She doesn't moralize. She recognizes. That recognition is the whole point.
There is no lecture here about growing up too fast, no wagging finger about the Disney machine. Just a woman who built herself out of borrowed shoulder pads saying, in effect: I know what that pressure feels like. I know what it is to be seventeen and want to be something you're not quite yet. And I know what it is to do it in public, with cameras, while the world decides whether to love you or tear you apart.
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The Godmother Who Never Had a Ceremony
Dolly is careful about the word. "We never had a real ceremony," she says. "I've known her since she was a baby, but we never — I don't keep up with all the godmother things." Then she lands the line that matters: "But if I'm there for her if she needs me." That's the whole contract. No paperwork, no formal vows, just presence. In a business built on contracts and clauses, Dolly offers something older and simpler. She shows up.
And she has been showing up for the Cyrus family for a long time. Billy Ray Cyrus — Miley's father — did a video with Dolly back when he was as hot as Miley is now. "Achy Breaky Heart," 1992, the song that made him a global phenomenon and a punchline and a legend all at once. Dolly was there for his moment. Now she's there for his daughter's. The generational loop closes without anyone forcing it. You don't need to draw the line. It draws itself.
