{"id":1171950,"date":"2026-08-27T08:32:45","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T08:32:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1171950\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T08:32:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T08:32:45","slug":"tribute-rob-sheffield-on-why-we-will-always-love-dolly-parton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1171950\/","title":{"rendered":"Tribute: Rob Sheffield on Why We Will Always Love Dolly Parton"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tDolly Parton<\/a> knew how loved she was. It wasn\u2019t an accident \u2014 it was always part of her plan. Even as a girl, growing up dirt-poor in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, she planned to grow up into a star everyone would know. The country queen wore the whole story of American music on her shoulders like a coat of many colors. That\u2019s how she became the most universally beloved of American singers, a sequined superstar who also happened to be a ferociously original genius. \u201cI was telling my own stories, speaking my own feelings,\u201d Parton told Rolling Stone i<\/a>n 1975. \u201cI\u2019m a pretty bold person.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s why the whole world is in shock at the news of her death<\/a> on Aug. 25, at 80 \u2014 Dolly had been treating reports about her health with all of her customary humor. She was cracking jokes about it just the day before. It\u2019s hard to imagine a world without Dolly Parton. But thanks to her music, that\u2019s not a world we\u2019ll ever see.<\/p>\n

\n\tPeople fell in love with her self-proclaimed \u201cBackwoods Barbie\u201d image and her larger-than-life personality. Yet behind the glitter, Dolly was the toughest, most soulful of songwriters, fighting to make her way as a woman in Nashville, pouring her heart into the tortured genius of songs like \u201cJolene<\/a>\u201d or \u201cDown from Dover.\u201d She\u2019s like Aretha Franklin or Brian Wilson or Stevie Wonder \u2014 a visionary with an endless imagination for how far American music could reach. We\u2019re grieving for Dolly now because she represents the best in us.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m a workhorse that looks like a showhorse,\u201d Parton told Rolling Stone\u2019s Chet Flippo <\/a>in 1975, not yet 30. She refused to compromise her artistic voice, even when she was a young rookie with everything to lose. \u201cI realized in my teenage years how seriously I was taking myself as a songwriter,\u201d she said. \u201cMy songs are like my kids, and I expect them to support me when I\u2019m old \u2014 and some of them are. I feel that way about it because when I write a song, I\u2019ve left something in the world today that wasn\u2019t there yesterday. It\u2019s something that will live on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tNo American songwriter ever wrote about poverty so bluntly, with so much detail. She zeroed in on details like the way her daddy\u2019s hands bled after work, or how it sounds to a little kid when the wind blows snow through the cracks in the wall. She refused to water it down, in her tales of starvation, heartbreak, stillbirth, and over and over, wronged women who make the fatal mistake of trusting a man. The hard times in these songs are always harder on her female characters, and Dolly chose not to let the listener back away from that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s how she grew up, and she never sentimentalized the past she sang about, in still-shocking tales like \u201cIn the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad).\u201d She claimed her ground as a female singer-songwriter, in a Nashville where it was practically down to her and Loretta Lynn. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to be domestic,\u201d she said in her 1977 Rolling Stone cover story.<\/a> \u201cI wanted to be free. I had my songs to sing, I had an ambition and it burned inside me. It was something I knew would take me out of the mountains. I knew I could see worlds beyond the Smoky Mountains.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Remembering<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Remembering<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tIn the internet era, the world fell in love with the myth that Dolly wrote \u201cJolene\u201d and \u201cI Will Always Love You\u201d on the same day. Dolly used to demur politely and remind interviewers that she didn\u2019t remember it that way. But eventually she shrugged it off and stopped correcting people \u2014 always the shrewdest of businesswomen, she treated it as an asset. (By 2017, she\u2019d begun telling the tale this way herself. Hell, it was a good story.) But the fact that people were so eager to believe it, that says a lot about what we craved from Dolly. There was something so strong about the image of that smiling, always smiling, country queen who hid her rage and pain behind the sequins, crafting these deeply personal songs.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tNo star has ever needed a comeback less than Dolly Parton. It isn\u2019t even a case where young generations keep discovering her, because she\u2019s always been out there in the open, with songs that the whole world knows and sings, but countless other buried treasures on her albums, songs that still only the hardcore fans know. As deep as you care to dig with Dolly, there\u2019s always more. Her catalog is full of essential deep cuts like \u201cNickels and Dimes\u201d on All I Can Do, \u201cEvening Shade<\/a>\u201d on My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy, \u201cDon\u2019t Let It Trouble Your Mind\u201d on In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad), or \u201cEarly Morning Breeze\u201d on Coat of Many Colors.<\/p>\n

\u201cJolene\u201d is rightly her most famous song, where she begs another woman not to steal her man. It was a Number One country hit in 1973, yet it already felt like an ancient folk standard, one that had always been there in the air. (I first heard it on that quintessential low-budget TV train wreck The Gong Show \u2014 but I was transfixed by the story and those high notes.) It\u2019s painfully emotional, with a stoic sense of heartbreak that goes back to her tough Smoky Mountains childhood. \u201cJolene\u201d has just gotten more and more iconic over the years, inspiring remakes by everyone from Beyonc\u00e9 to Miley Cyrus<\/a> to Zac Brown. I remember the shock of hearing Jack White sing it in 2000, in the White Stripes\u2019 early bar-band days, just trying to live up to the song\u2019s unflinching spirit.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tDolly summed up the kind of star who belongs to everybody. She was always visible her whole life, going back to her school days. \u201cI had a lotta stories told on me, a lotta lies, just because I looked the way I did,\u201d she recalled in 1977. \u201cI always was big in the boobs, small in the waist and big in the butt. I just grew up that way and I had that foxy personality, too.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe mainstream media and the world of late-night talk shows often had trouble getting past the image, seeing her as a lovable show-biz entertainer rather than a fiercely driven songwriter, or as she put it, \u201csongteller.\u201d But Dolly never pretended she didn\u2019t love the glitz \u2014 it was her artistic creation. \u201cThe flashy clothes and jewelry and all the gaudy appearance. I guess I did invent that part of me. I was always fascinated with fairy-tale images. Half of a show is the lighting and the shine and the sparkle. Stars are supposed to shine, and maybe I just want to be a star.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe took pride in that personality \u2014 but she always had a lonesome spirit at heart, and you can hear it in her voice. \u201cI mean, I was real outgoin\u2019, real friendly, I think it was scary to people. But I never felt I belonged. Never belonged in my whole life, even as a little kid. I was just different, and so I never really found my place till I moved to Nashville and got in the music business. That was my real place, so I fit in. I was born restless, I really was.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom the beginning, Dolly always wanted everyone to sing her songs, and everyone did, as fast as she could write them. Patti Smith did \u201cJolene\u201d on the Horses<\/a> tour, in between her Velvet Underground and Pete Townshend covers. Tina Turner did a scorching \u201cThere\u2019ll Always Be Music\u201d in 1974. Stevie Nicks covered her tunes in the early days of Buckingham Nicks. Merle Haggard always sang her songs with the nasty bite they deserved, especially his bitter remake of \u201cIn the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad).\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJerry Garcia idolized her from the start \u2014 the Grateful Dead used to play her minor 1969 hit \u201cTomorrow Is Forever,\u201d keeping it in the first-set rotation for years. In a 1970 interview with Playboy, the reporter is surprised when Garcia raves about her as \u201cmy favorite girl singer.\u201d But he insists on playing the skeptical interviewer a Dolly record \u2014 The Fairest of Them All, from 1970, a downcast album even by her standards, with \u201cDaddy Come and Get Me.\u201d By Side Two, Garcia, Robert Hunter, and the reporter are all sitting in Jerry\u2019s living room, every one of them in tears. (That final triptych \u2014 \u201cMammie,\u201d \u201cDown from Dover,\u201d \u201cRobert\u201d \u2014 would melt a stone.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cCoat of Many Colors<\/a>\u201d was the song she called her favorite, about a mama who sews a coat out of rags. She wrote it on Porter Wagoner\u2019s tour bus, scrawling it on the only paper available, the boss\u2019 dry-cleaning receipt. (Wagoner had the receipt framed.) Dolly gave the world many long-suffering mamas, but they\u2019re not all saints. In \u201cTravelin\u2019 Man,\u201d on the same album, she plans to run away with that handsome salesman \u2014 but he runs off with her mama instead. The punch line: \u201cThat travelin\u2019 man was a two-time lover \u2014 he took my love and then he took my mother!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tShe wrote \u201cI Lived So Fast and Hard\u201d for men to sing, in 1968 \u2014 Porter Wagoner, and later Mel Tillis \u2014 yet it\u2019s not hard to hear Dolly as the female narrator, with the hook \u201cI\u2019d lived as much as any man before I was 21.\u201d It could have been her answer to Haggard\u2019s \u201cMama Tried,\u201d which came out just a few months earlier. She gave him \u201cKentucky Gambler,\u201d a Number One country hit. \u201cI love to write songs for men,\u201d Parton said in her book Songteller. \u201cAnd it\u2019s a good thing I do because back then, there weren\u2019t that many women in the country music business to write songs for.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI Will Always Love You<\/a>\u201d was an oft-covered standard before Whitney Houston discovered it, via a Linda Ronstadt record. (Check out Alex Chilton\u2019s version.) But once Whitney got hold of it, it was hers, body and soul. In The Bodyguard, she hears it in a country bar on the jukebox with Kevin Costner, as sung by John Doe of the L.A. punk band X. It\u2019s a perfect Dolly paradox that she could bring all these strains of American music together.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe was always current, in every era. In the Eighties, she was fond of sharing makeup tips with Boy George. \u201cI love the way he does his eyes,\u201d she told Rolling Stone. \u201cAnd he loves how I do mine.\u201d She sang sultry duets with her longtime friend Kenny Rogers, purring \u201cIslands in the Stream<\/a>\u201d like a pair of sassy seniors in a post-coital glow. They kept singing to the end, as in their 2013 duet \u201cYou Can\u2019t Make Old Friends.\u201d They were never a real-life couple, but as Kenny told Rolling Stone in 2014, \u201cWe just flirted with each other and loved every minute of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe scored one of her most famous hits in 1980 with \u201c9 to 5,<\/a>\u201d ubiquitous since the week it came out. But she parlayed it into a deeply weird (and underrated) album, 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs \u2014 her concept album about class struggle and fighting capitalism. She covers Woody Guthrie for \u201cDeportee\u201d (on immigrant workers), Merle Travis for \u201cDark as a Dungeon\u201d (coal miners), Mel Tillis for \u201cDetroit City\u201d (the assembly line). She tops it off with a feminist rendition of \u201cHouse of the Rising Sun,\u201d to remind everyone that this song has always been about poor girls and the evil that men do. It\u2019s practically Dolly\u2019s Sandinista!, yet she serves it all up with a smile.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the Nineties, she got back to her rustic roots, peaking in her excellent 2001 bluegrass album Little Sparrow<\/a>. But her best hit of the era was her sleaziest and funniest: \u201cRomeo,\u201d a 1993 line-dance hit with Billy Ray Cyrus (he plays Romeo) and Nashville stars Pam Tillis, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kathy Mattea, and Tanya Tucker. In real life, Dolly was godmama to Billy Ray\u2019s just-born baby Miley, but that didn\u2019t stop her in \u201cRomeo.\u201d The ladies all spend the song catcalling Billy Ray \u2014 Dolly growls, \u201cI\u2019m old enough to be that boy\u2019s lover!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAt the end of the video, she walks off arm in arm with Billy Ray. \u201cI am so flattered that you would choose me over all these young beautiful girls,\u201d she says. Then she adds, \u201cBut after all, it\u2019s only right \u2014 I am paying for this video.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tShe also built Dollywood, a uniquely American shrine to herself and the dreams she made come true. Dollywood, where I once spent a week for a family vacation, remains \u2014 bizarrely or not \u2014 one of the happiest places I\u2019ve ever been. She\u2019d bought up the territory in the Smoky Mountains, the land where she\u2019d grown up in desperate poverty, and turned it into an amusement park commemorating her life. Every inch of the place was Dolly-themed. The big thrill ride was Thunder Road, based on the 1950s Robert Mitchum thriller, just because it was the first movie she got to see as a little girl.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe piped-in music was all Dolly, all the time: It\u2019s where I heard her then-new version of \u201cIn the Pines,\u201d a song I\u2019d just learned from Kurt Cobain. The Parton Family Singers took turns on the stages, near a re-creation of her childhood shack. A museum displays the actual coat of many colors. (Or a clever replica.) The whole town was a monument to the hometown girl made good. The local park had a plaque saying that Dolly built it for the kids to play. The radio station was WDLY; guess what they played. From another star, this might have seemed egotistical, but with Parton, it all glowed with her limitless warmth and benevolence.<\/p>\n

\n\tDollywood was the exact opposite of Graceland, down the road apiece in Memphis. It\u2019s like she took a look at Elvis\u2019 mansion, with its aura of tragedy and death, and decided to create her own version \u2014 but a winner\u2019s version, built to celebrate her life, with her own money, while she was still around. It\u2019s a palace built by a woman who came from nothing but got everything she wanted, inviting visitors to come celebrate everything she escaped, everything she achieved, everything she grew up to be. There\u2019s no other place like it.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn your way out of the Dollywood parking lot, you drive under an arch with the farewell inscription: \u201cI Will Always Love You. \u2014 Dolly.\u201d I suspect that nobody has ever driven under that arch without believing it.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe was never far from the public eye, whether she was doing an album of rock classics<\/a> (nice \u201cStairway to Heaven\u201d) or duetting with Miley at the Grammys, with BTS in the audience dancing to \u201cJolene.\u201d A quintessential Dolly moment, from the 2006 Oscar ceremony: She was nominated for Best Song, \u201cTravelin\u2019 Through,\u201d from the pioneering trans documentary Transamerica<\/a>. What I\u2019ll never forget is how she cheered and smiled when Three Six Mafia won instead of her, for \u201cIt\u2019s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.\u201d She sent them a note congratulating them on winning it for Tennessee.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tIt says everything about Dolly Parton that she made her final public appearance<\/a> near Nashville, but not onstage or on TV \u2014 at a truck stop on I-65, in June. She showed up at the Tennessean Travel Stop, which was getting renamed in her honor. Naturally, she had her own stake in the business, which sells her brand of coffee. (You will not be surprised to hear that it\u2019s called Cup of Ambition.) \u201cI could not be prouder,\u201d Parton told the crowd. \u201cI\u2019ve spent my whole life traveling down the road.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDolly traveled that road her whole life \u2014 even when it must have been a harsh and lonely one. But she made it a welcoming place for all, even when she was refusing to lie about all the hard times she saw there. In her music, she built an America where so many people could feel at home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dolly Parton knew how loved she was. It wasn\u2019t an accident \u2014 it was always part of her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1171951,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8817],"tags":[748,18847,393,4884,42616,1620,16,15],"class_list":["post-1171950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sheffield","tag-britain","tag-dolly-parton","tag-england","tag-great-britain","tag-miley-cyrus","tag-sheffield","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117166550486621445","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1171950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171950\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1171951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1171950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1171950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1171950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}