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Like many country singers of her generation, Dolly Parton’s career began in local television, and TV has continued to be the place to get to know her.
Her big-screen career, which exploded with “9 to 5,” settled to earth with “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” and “Rhinestone” and recovered its dignity with “Steel Magnolias” (suggesting that she was at her best in a company of women), belonged for the most part to the 1980s. (“Straight Talk,” in 1992, is where it all ended.) But Parton, who died Tuesday at 80, had many more years on the small screen before, during and afterward, in variety shows (two of her own), specials, TV movies, guest shots, interviews and music videos, which is where much of America met Dolly — not just the singer, but the self-created package and the person, who were in some sense inextricable, a knowing combination of authenticity and artifice, performer and performance. “The fact that I look totally artificial and the fact that I am totally real inside has made a nice little magical combination,” she told Atlanta TV journalist Monica Kaufman in 1987.
Television is where we’ve seen her change, from a simple country singer and songwriter to a full-service pop star, through various body shapes, makeup regimes, unknowable cosmetic strategies, and ever more elaborate fashions, until she became a sort of spirit, essence of Dolly, the poor girl who dreamed of becoming exactly the star she became, mythic yet homespun, a force for good in a world that will miss her now that she’s gone.
Dolly Parton, a national treasure whose country music career married grit and wit, faith and sex appeal, virtuosity and plastic surgery, has died.
At the age of 10, she was appearing on the “Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour,” sponsored by a local grocery chain, out of Knoxville, Tenn. At 21, in 1967, with the song “Dumb Blonde” on the country charts, she began appearing on the weekly, Nashville-based “Porter Wagoner Show,” becoming at the same time his singing and touring partner after Norma Jean’s departure. “Here’s a little gal that I know you’re going to really learn to love because she’s a fine singer and one of the finest little gals that I’ve ever met,” says Wagoner, a long established country star known for his pompadour and spangly suits. “She ain’t no dumb blonde, though.” With the show syndicated in as many as 100 markets, it afforded many their first glimpse of Parton; it wasn’t necessary to be a country music fan to pass an idle half an hour there, whether or not there was nothing else on TV.
Watching her now back then, young and fresh faced, confident, funny and exquisitely talented, she exhibits the naturalness that would serve her well throughout the years, but one might say, closer to the surface. The wigs are already in place — less fantastic than they’d become, but just as high. (She’s the Moira Rose of country music.) Her clothes are simple but bright, with sometimes a bit of shiny thread or a sprinkling of sequins; décolletage is a thing of the future. The production quality is necessarily simple, but it has the benefit of not getting in the way of the singers or the songs.
By the time she decided to leave Wagoner, after seven years, she had written and recorded “Coat of Many Colors,” “My Tennessee Mountain Home” and “Jolene,” along with “I Will Always Love You,” penned as a goodbye to him. (Having a No. 1 country single and future standard written in his honor did not keep Wagoner from suing her for breach of contract. They would make up, and appear together again on television.) “He was in charge,” she told the Times in 2008, “and it was his show, but he was also very strong-willed. That’s why we fought like crazy, because I wouldn’t put up with a bunch of stuff.”
Parton, who died on Tuesday at 80, was one of the finest singer-songwriters this country ever produced. It’s inconceivable to sum up her catalog in just an LP’s worth of tunes, but this list offers a place to start.
As Parton’s star rose and rose, and she crossed into mainstream pop stardom, that still made room for her to sit with an acoustic guitar in her lap and fingerpick a song about the Tennessee mountains, intentional, she became a figure of curiosity — she cut, in some eyes, a curious figure — and sat for interviews. Barbara Walters, who interviewed her in 1977 and 1982 (after an illness), can seem, in the first instance, like a mother telling a child, “You’re so pretty, why do you tart yourself up so?” Walters asks, with a show of reluctance, questions about hillbillies, adolescent development, breast surgeries and her husband — though the singer’s answers are always gracious. (The second interview is friendlier.)
Best are her “Tonight Show” appearances with Johnny Carson, dating from before her movie stardom. He treats her as a guest, and not as a subject; they’re comfortable with one another, and their conversation — not an interrogation — allows her plenty of chances to demonstrate her wit, rather than interrogatory flow. On a return visit, a guitar in her lap, she sings, “In my bell bottom jumpsuits with my rhinestones all aglow / I became an overnight sensation on the Johnny Carson Show.” (Early on, David Letterman hardly seemed to know what to do with her, asking how much it cost to get into Dollywood. In later years, she presented her Top Ten Pet Peeves.)
Parton led two successive variety shows, in 1986 and 1987, both called “Dolly.” In the first, a big-budgeted half hour show produced out of Nashville, she didn’t like the way it presented her (“The people who didn’t know me who liked the show thought that’s how I was … I didn’t know that woman on TV!”); the second, on ABC, out of Hollywood, with episodes filmed in Hawaii, New Orleans, Nashville and her hometown of Sevierville, Tenn., lasted a season; TV variety had been dead for a year.
As Parton became something more than a performer, a figure who stood for certain qualities, an avatar of glamorous nonjudgmental goodwill, she would appear as herself, or aspects of herself in TV guest shots. She was on “Designing Women” and “Reba.” She was Aunt Dolly to Molly Cyrus on “Hannah Montana” (her actual goddaughter) and guest-starred on “Grace and Frankie” in a reunion with “9 to 5” costars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. She began to produce — she formed her first production company, Sandollar Productions, in 1985 — and to appear in TV movies fashioned from aspects of her biography, her personality and her songs (as in the anthology “Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings,” from 2019, in which her lyrics become starting points for new stories).
Dolly Parton loved LGBTQ+ people, and we loved her — in part because she showed us that our country still loves us too.
