Any Major Dude With Half A Heart

On Monday, January 19, Dolly Parton turns 80. For some 60 years of that long life Dolly has lived as an instantly recognisable star. Often she has been musically underrated, and served as the butt of jokes that drew on a caricature of the woman — the breasts, the wigs, the rhinestones. But she owned that image, even joked about it herself.

Still, Dolly Parton’s career as a singer and songwriter should transcend the image. As a songwriter she has exceptional clarity and emotional intelligence, compassionate without sentimentality, and often grounded in her own lived experience.

Coming from the Appalachian ballad tradition, Parton is a storyteller and a model of empowerment. One of her masterpieces is Coat Of Many Colors. It is autobiographical but also a meditation on class, love and dignity. Jolene is a masterclass in tension, restraint and psychology. It reverses the usual power dynamics of jealousy by making the rival woman both threat and object of awe.

Parton’s range is astonishing. She can write persuasively about heartbreak (I Will Always Love You), social conditions (The Grass Is Blue, Down From Dover), and humour (Applejack, The Bargain Store). Her genius lies in her clarity and economy. She once said she likes songs that “say a lot with a little”, and that finds expression in her lyrics.

Yet for much of her career, this achievement was underrated, particularly outside country music circles. Parton was too often reduced to her appearance, trivialising a woman of immense talent and independence, in a culture that struggles to take overtly feminine women seriously. The irony, which Parton herself has always understood, is that the persona was a form of control. She leaned into the stereotype to disarm it, always with humour and astute self-deprecation. “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap,” she famously quipped.

She translated that image into her film roles. In 9 To 5 (1980), her character, Doralee Rhodes, is hyper-feminine, underestimated, and routinely objectified — but she is competent, intelligent, morally grounded and ultimately transformative. The film’s feminism is practical, set in workplace realities many women could identify with. Doralee represents a model of womanhood that rejects the false choice between femininity and authority.

In The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas and Steel Magnolias, she again played women whose strength resides in resilience, unconditional kindness and genuine emotion. These roles mirrored her real-life persona: warm, sharp, underestimated and, crucially, quietly but firmly in charge.

Dolly Parton in a scene from the 1980 film 9 To 5

Dolly’s philanthropy has added to a renewal of her image. The Imagination Library, founded in 1995, has distributed over 200 million books to children worldwide, driven by her conviction that literacy is central to empowerment. Her investments in education, disaster relief — notably after the 2016 Tennessee wildfires — and healthcare research are sustained and rarely publicised.

Her greatness resides in the coherence of her life and work. The songs, the image, the humour, the generosity reflect an inherently beautiful soul. Dolly Parton is a global treasure.

Parton’s songwriting genius, and the public perception of her persona, began to change when Whitney Houston’s immense cover version of I Will Always Love You turned out to be a mammoth hit. Soon, Jolene was rediscovered as a work of genius. It features here in the stunning version by the underrated Mindy Smith. Smith had recorded a version of the song for a 2003 tribute album of Parton songs. Clearly Dolly liked that version. When Smith re-recorded it for her fine One Moment More album of 2004, Dolly sang backing vocals.

I Will Always Love You features here in the beautiful 1975 cover by Linda Ronstadt. It’s notable that 13 of the present tracks are from the 1970s (and one from 1968), none from the 1980s or 1990s, and ten from the new millennium.

Parton’s music may be rooted in country, and obviously this mix includes tracks from that genre, but it has proved adaptable. So we have a set of soul singers doing Dolly, including Margie Joseph’s joyous reworking of the ballad Touch Your Woman.

As always, the mix is timed to fit on a standard CD-R, includes home-bluegrassed covers, and the above text in PDF format. PW in comments.

1. Dolly Parton – Star Of The Show (1979)
2. Margie Joseph – Touch Your Woman (1973)
3. Tina Turner – There’ll Always Be Music (1974)
4. Percy Sledge – Here I Am (1974)
5. Bettye LaVette – Little Sparrow (2005)
6. Mindy Smith – Jolene (2004)
7. Teddy Thompson – My Blue Tears (2007)
8. Kishi Bashi – Early Morning Breeze (2021)
9. Norah Jones – The Grass Is Blue (2003)
10. Johnny Cash – I’m A Drifter (Version 1) (rel. 2003)
11. Joan Osborne – Do I Ever Cross Your Mind (2003)
12. Emmylou Harris – Coat Of Many Colors (1975)
13. Linda Ronstadt – I Will Always Love You (1975)
14. George Jones – The Last One To Touch Me (1974)
15. Merle Haggard & The Strangers – In The Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad) (1968)
16. Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood – Down From Dover (1971)
17. Skeeter Davis – Just The Way I Am (1972)
18. Maria Muldaur – My Tennessee Mountain Home (1973)
19. Mary Kay Place – All I Can Do (1976)
20. Katy Southern – Two Doors Down (1977)
21. Rhodes Brothers – 9 To 5 (2020)
22. Patty Loveless – The Pain Of Loving You (2008)
23. Dolly Parton – Backwoods Barbie (2008)

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