As a kid growing up I didn’t like Dolly Parton. She and her musical partner, Porter Waggoner, represented everything I hated about country music at the time. They were well-coifed, fancily dressed, polished, with heavily produced records. Absolutely nothing of value to a teenage boy. Fast forward a few years and she’d shed Porter and, reading between the lines, much of Nashville’s caste system. She was a movie star now, and her hits were topping popular charts not just country ones. Along the way I’d grown up enough to understand the advice of not judging a book by its cover. All of that came together on the 4th of July, 1986. Dolly was the headliner at St. Louis’ VP Fair, an outdoor music/food/air show festival under the Arch. As I looked around at a hundred thousand of my closest friends, I was amazed at the crowd. From drunken frat boys to families with kids to little social cliques of all ages, they weren’t spread around the acres and acres of park, they were camped out on their blankets to see Dolly.
Now jump ahead another 20 years to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2005. Dolly was the headliner on the main stage for the last day of the festival. By then I was a fan of her music and aware that beneath that wig of gold was an even bigger heart of gold. So I resisted the urge to settle in at one of the other stages and plopped down late morning to hear the acts leading up to the main event in the late afternoon. I can’t tell you who the other bands were that day, but I remember the crowd just kept getting bigger and bigger. Speedway Meadow is a damn big open space, but it was *packed*. And while San Francisco isn’t exactly renowned for being a country music town, the city showed up, in all its glorious diversity. Being Golden Gate Park there are always plenty of happy people there. But the joy that multitude had at seeing Dolly was palpable.
You can read elsewhere about her Grammy’s and Emmy’s and Golden Globe’s and all the other awards she’s won. There’s not a musician I know who can’t launch into a favorite Dolly song. All of that comes from Dolly the musician and Dolly the actor. That may be what most people will remember, but I happen to think it was a lot smaller part of Dolly the person. Her charitable acts, whether planned over years or spontaneous reactions to disasters, changed way more lives than her music did. Through it all her gratitude and humility, along with her comedic timing and repartee, kept the focus on the deed not the doer.
Many people have commented that nobody doesn’t like Dolly. I think that’s because she is the epitome of the American Dream. Raising herself up from nothing she succeeded, through grit and determination, at nearly everything she tried (we’ll leave that Stairway to Heaven cover aside). Nowhere though, will you find a boast or self-congratulatory comment. That’s a package of skill and talent so hard to achieve most people don’t even aspire to it. That’s transcendent. RIP Dolly. As for the rest of us, be more like her.
About the author: I've actually driven from Tehatchapee to Tonopah. And I've seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night.