In December 1977, Dolly Parton submitted to an interview with ABC Television’s Barbara Walters, much against her friends’ advice. Walters was not noted for her deep love and understanding of country music. She was a notoriously tough cookie, a Boston-born, Sarah Lawrence-educated journalist who had battled scarcely believable sexism to become the first female co-host of an American news programme.
The month before she met Parton, she had interviewed Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin while they were working out the terms of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. It was all a very long way from Parton’s world, and the interview has something of the anthropological exercise about it. Walters looks aghast as Parton shows her around her tour bus, her collection of wigs and her “hand-washable and wrinkle-free” stage outfits (“you really like this?
To me, it seems like horror”), and sits impassively as Parton sings Coat of Many Colours to her: an impressive feat, given the song’s saga of rural poverty and homespun wisdom is the mother of all tearjerkers from an artist never averse to yanking at her audience’s heartstrings. She asks Parton if people from “where I come from” would call her a hillbilly; regards the singer’s outfit with a jaundiced eye and tells her “you don’t have to look like this”. And, most infamously, she enquires: “Do you ever feel that you’re a joke?” “The joke’s on the public,” responds Parton, her smile never slipping.
I’m sure of my talent.” It was a TV appearance that told you a lot about public perceptions of Parton in the years when she surged from Nashville fame to international superstardom – an era when you could turn on British TV and find a Canadian duo called MacLean and MacLean performing a mocking song called Dolly Parton’s Tits – and also told you a lot about Parton herself, most notably that, beneath the wig and the rhinestones, she had rather more in common with Walters than anyone might have thought. Of course she was sure of her talent: by the time she sat down with Walters, she had already written a string of imperishable country standards: not just Coat of Many Colours, but Jolene, My Tennessee Mountain Home, Down from Dover, I Will Always Love You, Little Bird, Kentucky Gambler, Love Is Like a Butterfly, The Bargain Store, The Seeker. Of course she knew exactly what she was doing with her image, based – as she never tired of telling interviewers – on “the town tramp” back in Pittman Center, Tennessee.
A woman whose first solo hit was called Dumb Blonde, she used it both to lure in a certain type of country fan (“rednecks with flat tops who bring women who wear short skirts or tight pants,” as one 1970s journalist sniffily put it) and as a kind of glitzy, fluffy shield. Behind it, she could be subtly subversive. Years before the controversy around Loretta Lynn’s 1975 single The Pill highlighted the issue of Nashville’s sexism, Parton was writing songs of a distinctly feminist bent – Just Because I’m a Woman and When Possession Gets Too Strong among them – even if she always demurred from describing herself as such.
She also had a line in songs that could give more conservative Nashville stars palpitations. Down from Dover was extraordinarily beautiful, but it seemed to simmer with empathic rage on behalf of its protagonist, an outcast unmarried mother, and concluded with a description of her giving birth to a stillborn baby. Her duet partner Porter Wagoner was so horrified that he urged her not to release it: she did, and it was summarily banned by country radio.
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