Under the influence of Ken Burns's Country Music, I've been listening, while pedaling my stationary bike, to Pandora's Loretta Lynn station, and the Willie Nelson station, and the Hank Williams station, and I find that I like, or love, some stuff that I would never have thought might appeal to me in the least—Dolly Parton, for instance. I thought she must be a ridiculous person who, thanks to ten million rubes, had managed to parlay a pleasant voice and plastic surgery into a financial empire. Where did I get such notions? Am I now overcompensating for my past pissy neglect or is she in her way one of the most gifted Americans of our time? The songs she's famous for: I assumed she just performed them but of course she's the songwriter. Shania Twain calls "Coat of Many Colors" her favorite song, ever, and I'm sure her tastes have more to recommend them than mine.
The Wikipedia article on Parton conveys a vivid, likable personality. Her origins sound . . . like a country song:
Dolly Rebecca Parton was born January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Pittman Center, a very small community in Sevier County in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. She is the fourth of twelve children. . . .
Though her career may call to mind the similarly diverse talents of Kris Kristofferson, she's not like him a former Rhodes Scholar:
After graduating from Sevier County High School in 1964, she moved to Nashville the next day.
On her business acumen, which she claims to have inherited from her illiterate father:
In 1974, her song, "I Will Always Love You," written about her professional break from Wagoner, went to number one on the country chart. Around the same time, Elvis Presley indicated that he wanted to record the song. Parton was interested until Presley's wily manager, Colonel Tom Parker, told her that it was standard procedure for the songwriter to sign over half of the publishing rights to any song recorded by Presley. Parton refused. That decision has been credited with helping her to make many millions of dollars in royalties over the years.
I would have predicted, considering all the fame, wealth, and plastic surgery, her personal life to be in a puddle, but here is the article on the subject of her marriage:
On May 30, 1966, Parton and Carl Thomas Dean were married in Ringgold, Georgia. . . . Dean, who is retired from running an asphalt road-paving business in Nashville, has always shunned publicity and rarely accompanies his wife to any events. According to Parton, he has seen her perform only once. She has also said in interviews that, although it appears they spend little time together, it is simply that nobody sees him publicly. . . . In 2011, Parton said, "We're really proud of our marriage. It's the first for both of us. And the last."
An asphalt road-paving guy! She could as well have married around 80 of my high school classmates, except that they did not hail from Nashville. Regarding her public image:
Parton is known for having undergone considerable plastic surgery. . . . [She] has repeatedly joked about her physical image and surgeries, saying, "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap." . . . When asked about future plastic surgeries, she famously said, "If I see something sagging, bagging or dragging, I'll get it nipped, tucked, or sucked." Parton's feminine escapism is acknowledged in her words, "Womanhood was a difficult thing to get a grip on in those hills, unless you were a man."
I won't try to pull anything out of the long section on her philanthropic work. Ditto for the even longer section on "awards and honors," but I will call attention to the way in which it's easy, in the nearly endless catalog of musical citations, to pass over such a deceptively casual sentence as, "She has also been nominated for two Academy Awards and a Tony Award."
I know, I know, you can't judge everything by awards, the people who give them out are fallible, too—James Joyce never won the Nobel—but, where there's this much smoke . . . .
Here's a couple of multimillionaires performing, as Oprah sings along, "Coat of Many Colors" and then, because I love it so, Emmylou Harris,"Two More Bottles of Wine":
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