I don’t really follow pop music or country and western very much, but Dolly Parton was always something special – separate from it all, in a way. She seemed absolutely indomitable. Coming from a large family in a mountain home and being brought up in poverty, she broke through to have this incredible career and you couldn’t help feeling fond of her.
How she did it I don’t know, but nothing seemed to faze her. I was always impressed by her perception of things. Like in Jolene, the carelessness of someone taking someone’s husband “just because [she] can” is really clever.
Dolly could see stuff and then write about it in ways that nobody else could. A few years ago, someone sent me a book called The Pack Horse Library, about women in the Appalachians in the 1930s who rode pack horses or mules in this wilderness country and took library books to all the isolated cabins with huge families, who wouldn’t normally get near a library. In modern times, Dolly has done exactly the same thing, but on such a massive scale, posting books to children around the world.
She wasn’t just a big-bosomed singer of great songs – and she wrote so, so many great songs – but a fabulous human being. I think we’re all really rather privileged to have been able to see her. I wouldn’t talk like this about any other pop singer, but as a singer and a person she was in a class of her own.
It’s a sad, sad day, but people will always think of her and smile. She was a plain-clothed prophet. She transcended all misconceptions of what a Christian is, what an American is, what an artist is or what an ally is.
She came from a southern, Christian, country and western place and she never wavered in her support of the LGBTQ+ community or the Black community – all those that have suffered at the hands of those with a far-right mentality. I believe in the divine timing of things and I think that, in her departure, there’s a gift, too, because I can’t think of anyone who had a more cohesive effect on people than Dolly Parton. Her exaggerated physical presence – her hair and her boobs and her hips and her clothes – was a caricature, one we sometimes laughed at.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
