Dolly Parton’s passing on Tuesday at 80 years old marks the end of one of American music’s most important chapters. Her mix of rural Tennessee roots, pop music savvy, songwriting genius and vivacious persona made her an authentic icon. For this appreciation, I've pulled a never-published interview from my archives, in which Dolly talks about tuning her voice to the times, taking chances, and staying true to her conception of country music.
When Dolly Parton was getting set to record the first all-bluegrass album of her career in the summer of 1999, some of the musicians were nervous. They had no shortage of admiration for Dolly’s talents, her career, and her savvy, but some of her albums of the 1980s and 90s were slick and already sounding dated. Decades of rhinestone glamour seemed to distance Dolly from her mountain roots. Was this move sincere? Was she going to sing her parts live with the band? Would it be something everyone involved could be proud of - or a novelty?
“I wasn’t going to do the record at first,” Dobro star Jerry Douglas said in an interview at the time. “Whatever we do,” he was thinking, “it can’t be a cheap shot at country or bluegrass.” On the reassuring side were producer Steve Buckingham and Sugar Hill Records president Barry Poss (a new Bluegrass Hall of Famer, now deceased) assembling the top musicians in the genre, including Jim Mills on banjo, Stuart Duncan on fiddle, Sam Bush on mandolin, and Bryan Sutton on guitar. Then the sessions arrived at Sound Kitchen. Dolly showed up with a presence and poise that Douglas described as “overwhelming.” And she sang (live with the band) with the power of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the spirit of Bill Monroe.
She even brought her kitchen to the Sound Kitchen and served homemade chicken and dumplings to the band and crew on the first day.
Douglas summed it up in the year after it came out: “We were real careful not to do anything that would set off an alarm in the bluegrass community. Because we knew they were going to look for something to rake us. And they haven’t been able to crack it. They’re all just kind of going, ‘It really is a bluegrass record!’ They’re trying to find something wrong with it, but they can’t. Cause it’s the real thing.”
That masterpiece, The Grass Is Blue, was in fact voted Album Of The Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association, as well as the Best Bluegrass Album at the Grammy Awards. It set the tone for the final decades of her astonishing career and told braided stories about her essence – her tendency to exceed the expectations of men in the entertainment business, her ability to reinvent and inhabit new spaces, her expressive and playful voice, and her remarkable songwriting. While it was one thing for Dolly to interpret standards like “Sleep With One Eye Open” and “Cash On The Barrelhead,” her original title cut is exquisitely poignant, and her song “Will He Be Waiting For Me” will forever give me chills with its unconventional structure and its bittersweet ambiguity.
The shocking news that Dolly Parton had passed away on Tuesday meant that we’d suddenly lost that voice, that pen, that good heart, and that executive – and I don’t mean necessarily the CEO of Dollywood Inc., but the big-thinker/doer/visionary - the one who launched her massive books for kids program and who helped discover the Covid vaccine.
Like few other stars in any of the arts, Dolly built a world and an ethos. To call it a “brand” would be unimaginative. “Dolly” invokes a spirit of creativity, resilience, service, and philanthropy. She was uniquely encouraging to people from all walks of life and backgrounds. She affirmed my belief that for the most part, you can hear someone’s kindness and empathy in their music. And while sometimes Dolly could be kitschy or cornball, she was never cynical or ironic. In a 21st century churning with dark national discord, she was an authentic unifier. Radio producer Jad Abumrad, creator of the brilliant podcast Dolly Parton’s America, called her “the patron saint of the South.”
Dolly’s life embodied several country music archetypes - of heritage songs preserved and reimagined, of the blues branching out and going uptown, of overcoming poverty while remaining true to your hometown people, of regional stories set to music that hits the big time. She was the fourth of 12 siblings, born at home in a cabin in Sevier County, TN and raised by a farmer and a hard-working mother who sang for what Dolly recollected was therapy. She heard early idols like Brenda Lee and Rose Maddox sing over the radio, but most of her early sonic influences came from nature and her musically active extended family.
“The person I most wanted to sing like was my Aunt Dorothy Jo, my mother’s sister” Dolly told me in a 2000 interview, most of which has not been previously published. “She played the banjo and the guitar, and she was a Pentecostal preacher, so she used to sing at our church.” Dolly recalled a maternal great grandmother who would smoke a corncob pipe, play dulcimer, and sing by the fire. Indeed, her mother’s family, the Owens, was the wellspring of music in Dolly’s young life. An uncle bought Dolly her first guitar when she was seven, and her Uncle Bill Owens mentored her into the business. (One can hear this legacy on the fascinating 2024 album Smoky Mountain DNA: Family, Faith And Fables, which features numerous Parton and Owens family members singing traditional songs)
“When you know those people so well, you know what they’re singing about and why,” Dolly said. “It’s like, ‘Is their husband off running around with another woman? Or is this baby going to make it?’ I think that’s one of the intriguing things about that mountain music – that old-world music. People brought their songs over along with all that sorrow about being uprooted from home. There’s just automatically a sorrow in those songs and in that kind of singing. And I think that’s just embedded in me. So when I do get a chance to sing songs like that, before I know it, I will become my mother. I will become an aunt.”
Uncle Bill got Dolly a single on a small label and a one-song performance on the Grand Ole Opry at age 13 (where she first met Johnny Cash). Soon she could work a microphone and play to the camera. She moved to Nashville a day after graduating from high school in 1964, and that’s when Dolly and The System got to tanglin’. Monument Records boss Fred Foster, fresh off his success with Roy Orbison, endeavored to position her as a pop singer. He urged her to curtail her natural vibrato and dressed her mountain holler tones up with orchestral backing. “Dumb Blonde,” a Curly Putnam song that became Dolly’s first charting record (and first act of charming dissent), featured harpsichord and cooing background singers.
Dolly’s ace up her sleeve was her writing. Her song “Put It Off Until Tomorrow” became a standout for Bill Phillips, with Dolly singing harmony. Its success gave her some leverage when Porter Wagoner, the smooth, rhinestone bedecked Missourian more or less took over her career, making her his duo partner on his television show and producing her in the studio for RCA Records. The partnership, sometimes strained, was a net win for her profile, but it taught Dolly a lot about her vision.
“He was real good, but he was real bossy,” she told me. “He wanted the control whether he should have had it or not. So that’s why sometimes we bashed heads. By that time, I was writing some very serious songs, and some of them just begged for certain things. When I write a song I hear it a certain way in my head. And if I don’t hear it that way when I put it down, it drives me crazy forever.”
While it took her until 1971 to score her first solo No. 1 (“Joshua”), Dolly’s star was high and bright when she parted ways with Wagoner in 1975, about the same time she had a historic run of success with “Coat of Many Colors,” “Jolene,” and the rootsy “Tennessee Mountain Home.” Her song “I Will Always Love You,” written as a parting thought to Porter, cruised to No. 1, and when Elvis Presley tried to extract a song publishing credit from her as a tribute for cutting the song (his manager’s common practice) she said no. He cut it anyway.
In the following decades, Dolly would look increasingly to Hollywood and the pop charts as the barometer of her success. Much of her music from the late 70s into the 90s, by her own admission, was fashioned to keep the business fires stoked and feed the fickle radio beast. Dolly’s most popular songs, like her career blockbuster “9 To 5,” brimmed over with her vivacious personality, but the arrangements were busy and generally derivative of whatever fashions were sweeping pop music at the time.
Dolly explained those sounds as the natural outpouring of a restless experimenter and an instinctive entrepreneur. “I was starving to death in Nashville having one hit record after another. They were selling like 60,000 copies,” she said. “People thought ‘Jolene’ was a million-selling record, and it wasn’t. I had a band on the road. Clothes. And I thought, ‘I’m not making any money.’ I had to make some changes, because this is the music business. My personality was such that I could be whatever. My personality wants to be town and country.”
Periodically, she would land on an especially potent mix of collaborators, roots music repertoire and production, notably the Trio album of 1987 with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. Working with the audio genius George Massenburg and a stellar mix of Nashville and LA musicians, Dolly made one of the great Americana albums of all time. With twining voices, they sing folk icon Jean Ritchie’s “My Dear Companion,” Linda Thompson’s soaring and melancholy “Telling Me Lies,” Dolly’s own charming “Wildflowers” and possibly the definitive version of “Those Memories,” written by Nashville Bluegrass Band singer/banjo player Alan O’Bryant. The album was one of Dolly’s biggest hits in a while too, and a Grammy winner. The sequel Trio II, also excellent, came along more than ten years later.
All that said, The Grass Is Blue will always feel to me like the iconic album of Dolly’s career, the one that best told her story as a musician above all. Made when she was 53 years old, it tied her past to her future. Not that she became a bluegrass circuit staple like Ricky Skaggs, but she toured widely with acoustic hot shots and made two more albums for Sugar Hill that have been seen as a string band trilogy. They could form their own Dolly-grass genre. Her pop career seemed to have invested her mountain songs with a measure of craft and ornament (she called them “curlicues”) not found in most other female bluegrass singers. Her sustained notes don’t just hang there; they move and shade in ways that deepen the meaning of the songs and keep the listener in an intoxicating state of suspense. Her articulation is pristine, something she credited to being a songwriter and thus highly conscious that if the words aren’t clear, the song dies. Those records are high, lonesome, and glamorous all at once. I will always love them, to borrow a line.
Dolly’s traditional and neo-traditional music might not have had the impact or the intrigue it does without her wide-ranging explorations and her global reach. It’s magical that “The Grass Is Blue” and “Smoky Mountain Memories” (a favorite of mine from her 1994 live album Heartsongs) come from the same artist who crooned “Islands In The Stream” with Kenny Rogers and boogied to the funky, synthy 1980s textures of “White Limozeen.”
“I have not always been true to the music,” she said, “but I have always been true to me, and me is a lot of colors. My moods want me to do certain things, and I’ve just had to try them, because if I didn’t, I would always wonder. I have absolutely no regrets. I listen back to some of the records I’ve done, and I think, ‘I don’t particularly like that now,’ but I know why I did it at the time and the adventure of it. You just never know what’s going to work.”
