(Credit: Timothy Wildey)
Thu 3 July 2025 23:00, UK
While you probably shouldn’t take any notes on social etiquette from David Brent, there’s an episode of The Office where he jokes about Dolly Parton in a way that lands completely differently than it did back then. “If you want the rainbow, you’ve gotta put up with the rain,” he quips. “Do you know which philosopher said that? Dolly Parton.” If you know the scene, then you also know what he said next.
The crux of the joke is that Parton isn’t typically associated with being a profound wordsmith or someone with something deep enough to add to meaningful conversations. This extends to her appearance, too: Parton has always been the butt of the joke when it comes to people you might consider reputable or credible musicians, and it’s rooted in the one thing most women face in the industry.
To the point where, in Parton’s world, the people in her vicinity who could actually speak about her without becoming derogatory were limited, with apparently only Tom T Hall respecting her enough to talk solely about her artistry in conversations when her name would come up. As he once recalled in American Songwriter: “When I first got to Nashville, somebody said Tom T Hall and Kris Kristofferson at the time were the only two people who could describe Dolly Parton without using their hands.”
This is also why, in the late 1970s, when Parton planned a special interview with Barbara Walters (controversial enough to be akin to Piers Morgan in today’s field), people told her she’d be making a grave mistake. Parton was already the subject of humiliation among tabloids and audiences alike, so sitting down with Walters was a sure fight Parton wouldn’t walk away from.
“When I decided to do my first Barbara Walters special, a lot of people warned, ‘Oh, you’re crazy to do that! She’ll chew you up and spit you out,’” Parton wrote in Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “Nothing could have been further from the truth. Barbara is a very insightful person. Once she realised I was real, that my insides weren’t as phoney as my outsides, she got completely into it.”
(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Against everything anyone could have expected, though, Parton held her own with complete dignity, even when Walters’ questions turned offensive and she started poking at her style choices and the image she’s creating for herself. “You’re very beautiful, you don’t have to wear the blonde wigs, you don’t have to wear the extreme clothes, right?” Walters asked at one point, to which Parton responded with absolute grace.
“It’s certainly a choice,” she said. “I don’t like to be like everybody else. I’ve often made this statement that I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable, that’s the easiest thing in the world to do. So, I just decided that I would do something that would at least get the attention, and once they got past the shock of the ridiculous way I looked and all that, then they would see there was a part of me to be appreciated.”
When pressed about the sort of impression her image gives and whether she’s aware people make jokes about her, Parton said: “I’m very real where it counts.”
In all fairness, Parton could have immediately lost her cool and called Walters out in a way that probably better reflected how she actually felt about such suggestive and pointed questions, but keeping it focused on her character and art set a good example for musicians constantly in the swarm of vulturistic journalism, not just then, but today too. Parton already knew what others thought, but explained how the joke’s on them, because it’s she who’s in control and already ten steps ahead, not them.
So, while it’s easy to get annoyed at Walters and any other egotistical journalist for herding their subjects into corners with weirdly inappropriate questions, sometimes they’re a blessing in disguise. As Brent was getting at, people say Parton’s nothing more than a service for the male gaze, but that’s the real joke here: those who dance in the flames of vanity and misogyny without any heart for music that counts.
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