Part 2
Two years later, in 2001, she followed it with Little Sparrow, also on Sugar Hill. She describes it as taking the sound a few steps further — less strictly bluegrass, more acoustic, more heartfelt. That's a working musician's description. She's not trying to fit into a box. She's trying to stretch the box until it fits her. And that stretching leads to some choices that would make a purist's head spin.
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On Little Sparrow, she does a bluegrass arrangement of Cole Porter's I Get a Kick Out of You. That song was written for the 1934 musical Anything Goes and famously sung by Ethel Merman. It is about as far from a Smoky Mountain holler as you can get. Then she covers Collective Soul's Shine, a rock hit from 1993. That's a song that lived on FM radio, not on a front porch. But she doesn't see the contradiction. She just sees songs.
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Part of the reason those songs reach her ear is her husband, Carl. He loves rock music and bluegrass. That's the combination. That's the household. So the music that comes into her life isn't filtered by genre. It's filtered by what she loves and what he loves. And what they love turns out to be a pretty wide field.
Read those choices the way you'd read sentences in a novel. The Cole Porter cover is a wink. It's Dolly saying, I know exactly what I'm doing, and I know you didn't expect it. The Collective Soul cover is a bridge. It connects the radio in the camper to the porch in the mountains. She isn't abandoning the mountains. She's bringing the mountains into contact with everything else she's heard. That's not a betrayal of her roots. That's what roots are for — they let you grow in more than one direction.
And that's the real arc of this section. The woman who once fled New York in fear is now the woman who can sit in a New York studio and sing a Cole Porter song with a banjo behind her. The city didn't change. She did. She stopped being the girl who thought the whole town was singing "Hello, Dolly!" just for her. She became the woman who could take a Broadway standard and a '90s rock song and fold them into the same record as a mountain ballad. That's not assimilation. That's expansion.
But the title of the album is the key to all of it. The Grass Is Blue. It sounds like a metaphor. It sounds like something a poet would invent. But it isn't. The grass is blue because the mountains are blue. And the mountains are blue because that's what they're called back home. The Smokies, the Blue Mountains. It's not a metaphor she invented. It's a place she came from. The album title is a return address.
So when she stands on a stage and sings these songs, she isn't just performing. She's reporting back. She's saying: this is where I'm from. This is what it sounds like. Fiddle, mandolin, banjo. Guitar, dulcimer, autoharp. Blue Mountain music. And if you don't know what that is, she'll show you. She'll take a Cole Porter song and a Collective Soul song and a Billy Joel song and she'll run them all through the same filter. The filter is her. The filter is home.
That's why the Grammy nominations matter less than the sound. Awards are nice. But the sound is the thing that lasts. The sound is the thing that tells you where a person is from without them having to say it. And when you hear The Grass Is Blue, you know exactly where Dolly Parton is from. You can hear the mountains in it. You can hear the blue in it. You can hear the grass growing back.
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Next, we'll look at the camper, the coveralls, and the woman who stays gone. Because the same woman who brought the mountains into the studio also built a life that keeps her moving. And that life — the one with the bus and the husband who stays home — is its own kind of music.
The Camper, the Coveralls, and the Woman Who Stays Gone
The camper is small, the kind you might pass on a two-lane highway and never notice. Inside, Dolly Parton and her husband, Carl Dean, have been married since 1966. He loves to drive. She loves to ride. They stop on the river bank, stay in cheap motels, and avoid restaurants and functions. He doesn't like any of that. She says she stays gone. That's how the fire stays lit. When she's home, he's excited to see her, and she's excited to see him. At the time of this conversation, they've been married 43 years.
On the road, she doesn't wear the getup. A little makeup—enough that she doesn't scare him to death—hair pulled up or under a baseball cap. People don't know her unless she talks. Her voice is the tell. This is a woman who can be recognized by sound alone, and who uses silence as a kind of privacy. The same instinct that makes her want a river bank and a cheap motel is the instinct that makes her want fiddle and banjo and a song her brother wrote.
She is not chasing the mainstream. She is going home on purpose. The bluegrass records—The Grass Is Blue, Little Sparrow—are not a detour. They are a return. The Grammy nominations, the performance on the telecast, the simple and heartfelt sound: it's all the same woman who pulls on coveralls and climbs into a camper. She's not running from the city. She's just done needing it to tell her who she is.
The interview itself is a masterclass in comic timing. The wet nurse joke, the ab roller joke, the observation that she's wearing pants and the host can't get over it. She says she buys every gadget she sees and never uses it. She says he's making her feel good. These are not throwaway lines. They are the same timing that made 9 to 5 work—the 1980 film with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dabney Coleman, directed by Colin Higgins, runtime 110 minutes—and later the Broadway musical. The comic instinct and the musical instinct come from the same place.
Return to the opening moment, changed. The girl who pulled a gun on 42nd Street because no one would take her seriously is now a woman who can walk into a studio and cut a Cole Porter song as a bluegrass tune, who can be nominated for a Grammy for an album named after the mountains, who can ride in a camper and be anonymous until she speaks. The city did not change. She did. Or rather, she stopped needing it to.
The next part goes deeper into the bluegrass revival of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the O Brother, Where Art Thou? moment, and how Dolly Parton's Sugar Hill records fit into a larger turn back toward acoustic music. Stay tuned.
