At 77, Dolly Parton is justly being celebrated, along with her more established virtues, for an ability to unite disparate groups. She has, it’s claimed, an equally strong fanbase in the Trumpian “Rust Belt” as among the gay clubbers of New York City, to pick two of America’s polarised stereotypes.
Her London visit to promote a new rock-influenced double album and a book is proving just how broad that Parton cultural spectrum is. Gathered in a grand hotel last week to cheer her on and, ostensibly at least, to ask some searching questions, her admirers included a contingent of social media “influencers” in their 20s, dressed in tank tops, UK charity-shop shabby chic and man-buns. Alongside them sat hoary representatives of the British music press, some of them diehard country-music listeners.
Ever since Dolly Parton’s America, the popular podcast she inspired, took hold of audiences four years ago, details of her funding of Covid vaccine research and charitable gifts of books around the world have created a fresh image for the star. The Dolly we have now is just as soft and bubbly, but she has some harder ethical edges glinting beside the rhinestones.
Yet anyone hoping for a clear political line is going to be disappointed. Parton is too clever for that. Her opening line to Britain’s press was a jokey reference to her shiny pink and silver “rock” get-up. “My legs won’t bend in these boots,” she said.
Highlights of her long career so far have included the great “early, sad songs” she wrote: Jolene, Love is Like a Butterfly and I Will Always Love You. Then came the Kenny Rogers years, screen success in 1980 with 9 to 5 and the opening of the Dollywood theme park. A relative trough followed in the 90s before Parton was reborn, after her 1999 induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, as an all-inclusive icon, culminating in her triumphant 2014 Glastonbury performance.
The new album Rockstar is emphatically not what it says on the tin, but the rest of Dolly still pretty much is: reliably winsome and whip-crack smart. She has recorded the 30-track behemoth to please her husband of 57 years, Carl Dean. A fan of heavy rock, he is notoriously shy and retiring, not to say almost nonexistent in any celebrity sense. He does feature, though, as a prop in some of her anecdotes, rather in the manner of the late Dame Edna Everage’s “Norm”.
“When Carl, who is a quiet guy, said he liked the songs, it meant a lot. I wanted to please him, to be honest, more than anyone else,” Parton said last week, adding how much she had enjoyed collaborating with a range of stars from Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon to Rob Halford from Judas Priest. Only Mick Jagger slipped her net. “I wanted him to do Satisfaction with me. I ran him around like a high school girl after a jock.” Their schedules did not align.
The lyrics of her new single, World on Fire, go about as far as we can hope towards a didactic intervention from Dolly. “What you gonna do when it all burns down? Still got time to turn it around,” she sings, flanked by flames and heaving dancers in the video. It is a clarion call for action, but what action is harder to tell.
“I have feelings about the shape the world is in. We should all do better because this is the only world we have got,” she has said. Yet Parton also claims the lyrics don’t refer to the political situation “because I’m not political at all – I have feelings about things and I wanna make people think, not make any major statements.”
Asked if the song was possibly a more literal comment on climate change, Parton swiftly broadened things out again. “I felt led to do it. I think it’s all crazy. It’s no more about climate than it is about hate, about greed, about lack of acceptance and lack of love. Or about lack of trying. That’s what gets me.”
Perhaps her most dexterous move came when she somehow dispelled the notion she is a campaigner, while also confirming it: “I don’t carry signs,” she said. “I’m not an activist. I’m not a feminist – and yet I am all of that.” What really worries her, she added, is the thought of “all the other civilisations that have got too big for their boots and destroyed themselves”. Boots again.
But this is serious stuff and Parton is walking a tightrope, with or without those boots. It’s something she is practised at, balancing her longstanding support for gay rights with her traditional religious convictions. This woman, performing since she was a poor teenager straight from a cabin in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, has total stage discipline. Any apparent vagueness on matters of policy is calculated, as she repeatedly evangelises about the importance of caring and of being true to yourself. It is not so much that she fears alienating part of her international audience, but that she desperately wants to get things done. Division, she clearly holds, is the devil’s work.
And in an age of celebrity philanthropy, Parton has done much more than most. Her Imagination Library started up as a response to the illiteracy of her father, Robert Lee Parton, and has now resulted in 200 million books go out across the world, 50 million of them to the UK, she says.
Even dressed up as a Las Vegas cowgirl rocker, Parton is not so far from an extravagant Oscar Wilde or a Noël Coward, although more benevolent in intent. She is packed up to her blond curls with funny one-liners. How do you keep working so hard? “I have to keep working. I’d be dangerous if I didn’t have things to do.” What is your beauty regime? “Good doctors, good makeup and good lighting,” or alternatively, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” What about your fitness routine? “I do my diddly squats. I hate exercise like I hated school. If I see something I want I eat it. I’m a hog. I still have a farmer’s appetite.” She even has a good line ready to cover the formulated way she behaves in public: “Find out who you are and then do it on purpose, and do it with a purpose.”
But, amazingly, Parton is as quick-witted off-script, even in front of a press who are looking for an impromptu news line. Asked if she would ever countenance an AI version of herself, she replies: “Any intelligence I have is artificial anyways. In fact everything I have is artificial.” She would ultimately be fearful, she adds, of leaving her soul down here on earth, trapped on stage for ever.
Parton has long given up touring, but she promises she “ain’t going anywhere any time soon”. For the woman now immortalised in the phrase “What would Dolly do?” the big question is always “what’s next?” Well, first is the new book, Behind the Seams, which focuses on her outlandish costumes, then there’s a filmed version of her co-written novel, Run Rose Run, due out next year, in which she promises to feature. She also hopes, she says, to sing on Elton John’s next album and to create a television show where she can talk about her life, in lieu of a longer biography. Beyond all that, she wants to put together a gospel album: “I want to leave some kind of message, so people will have something to lean on.” It seems certain then that, AI Dolly or no AI Dolly, the soul of this country singer will one day leave a legacy.
