If Carrie Bradshaw’s narration of “I couldn’t help but wonder …” was the cultural voice of the early 2000s, then the voices of American men working for public radio are the 2010s equivalent.
In his popular new podcast Dolly Parton’s America, Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad interrogates Parton’s history and her enduring appeal, particularly in the context of Trump’s America. He melds archival tape and his own interviews with the country singer, and talks to her fans and country music experts, to explore why the 73-year-old is still so beloved across age, race, economic and geographic lines.
While listening to its first six episodes, I couldn’t help but wonder: “Why now?”
By the time I was born, Parton had already earned millions from writing I Will Always Love You 26 years earlier; she’d starred in the film 9 to 5, Jane Fonda’s call-to-arms for women in the workplace; and established a theme park in her name and image. For every generation since the baby boomers, Parton has always been in our consciousness, whether as a punchline or a headliner. Despite this endurance, over her 50-year career, she’s perhaps never been more prominent in pop culture than she is right now.
Along with Abumrad’s podcast, this year also saw her jubilee performance at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, which airs on Tuesday on the US network NBC, and Heartstrings, a new series dramatising the stories behind some of her songs. It’s on Netflix, where last year she served as a guardian angel and road map for the title character in coming-of-age film Dumplin’. And the musical version of 9 to 5, for which Parton wrote the score, arrives in Australia in 2020, 11 years since it made its stage debut.
Between watching her on Oprah as a young girl, crying over Lorelei’s “Dolly-inspired” karaoke on the Gilmore Girls as a teenager (something I’ve replicated, beat for beat, many times since) and seeing her live on the Blue Smoke tour in 2014, Dolly has marked milestones in my life – and as her name starts popping up all over the place, I realise the same is true for just about everyone with ears and a heart. She’s managed to achieve the rare feat of appealing to audiences across generations, bridging racial, political, religious and class divisions through her music and personal narrative. And the messages of inclusion and understanding – tucked just beneath the rhinestones and Catskills jokes – are her way of unifying, while keeping everyone on-side. As the author and sociologist Tressie McMillian Cottom wondered while watching Heartstrings: “Has anyone ever understood her brand better?”
Country music and its fans have never needed the recognition of top 40 pop radio, but the crossover potential in 2019 is greater than it has been since Taylor Swift traded her acoustic guitar and slammin’ screen door for a synthesiser and New York City loft. In January, Kacey Musgraves accepted the Grammy for album of the year for her record Golden Hour. Through her career, Musgraves has made the intersection of country sounds, southern values, self-aware internet memes and pure camp pageantry seem effortless and inevitable. Then came Lil Nas X, riding in on the Old Town Road with his viral track about horse-wranglin’ while wearing Wranglers on his booty. The shadow Parton casts is long and artists like these are dancing in the shade, writing their way to prominence and fame, but always with a knowing wink.
More than her music and legacy, though, it’s Parton herself who persists as a personality – or enigma – for the public to observe or idolise. While Abumrad and a suite of Heartstrings directors are telling her story for the moment, Parton has, for decades, been an active participant in crafting and cementing her own mythology.
Twenty-five years after an amusement park first opened in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee – in the same area that Parton grew up, one of 12 children in a two-room cabin in the Apalachian mountains – she took it over and transformed it into Dollywood. It now serves as much as a testament to the southern way of life as it does a memorial to the woman who’s still very much alive to oversee it; as well as museums of artefacts and souvenirs from her career, the park is home to Dolly’s Home-on-Wheels (her tour bus) and Dolly’s Tennessee Mountain Home, a replica of the place with newspaper for wallpaper where she’s said her siblings would often wet the bed they all shared on purpose because it was all that kept them warm. Past poverty and present success collide in Parton’s biography and the bombastic version of it, reincarnated for visitors’ entertainment.
A fascinating element of Parton’s public persona, and one explored in detail on Dolly Parton’s America, is her aversion to speak out about politics. Her nephew (and bodyguard) refers to her signature side-stepping of pointed political questions as her “Dollitics”. This is what she did in 2017, while presenting an Emmy with her 9 to 5 co-stars Fonda and Lily Tomlin, who took the opportunity to call out President Trump. Parton’s go-to when faced with a situation that could alienate either her conservative or liberal fan bases? A failsafe joke about her boobs.
It’s a disappointing reality for some, but one which demonstrates that, for all her reinvention and staying power, she’s in many ways a holdover from a past cultural climate: one when an artist’s political leanings didn’t dictate their success or failure, and silence held more benefit than speaking out. If she were to write a song like 9 to 5 today, Parton would likely be praised for her braveness, labelled a voice of the #MeToo era or offered lucrative brand endorsements off the back of her authenticity. On the flipside, if she were a new artist answering “no” to the staid question “are you a feminist” – as she’s done when Abumrad and others have asked it – it’s hard to imagine her being so adored by so many of my generation.
As Sarah Smarsh – whose contributions to the podcast are highlights – wrote in the Guardian in 2017, Parton comes from “a place where a woman’s strength and independence is more about walk than talk”; a place where the label of feminist doesn’t stick to her polyester blouse but the values that underscore it have never been up for debate.
