It was 1974. I was trying and failing to make my way in the world. I had spent every dollar I had on my first car, which threw a rod the first time I took it out onto the highway. I worked a temporary job for a week so I could buy an old Volkswagen bug that some guy in the neighborhood had built from spare parts. The paint on that car was mostly red—except for the hood, which was blue, and the right rear fender, which was a non-specific shade of green. All of it was shot through with rust.
I knew that vehicle was a risky proposition, but he only wanted fifty bucks for it and I’d only earned sixty. I needed a car for a job interview across the bay, so I bought it. I really, really needed that job.
The interviewer’s face made it clear that I wasn’t going to get it. The VW’s little engine was making a threatening sound as I made my way home down back roads, headed toward the bridge in the oncoming dusk. It began to rain, which is when I discovered that the windshield wipers didn’t work. And then Dolly Parton’s voice came through the tinny radio:
“If I should stay, I’ll only be in your way ...”
I pulled off the road and cried.
That was not my first encounter with Dolly Parton. Raised on rock and roll, I had discovered country music as a teenager in upstate New York when Merle Haggard sang “Mama Tried” on a network TV variety show. The following week, George Jones sang “A Picture of Me (Without You)”. I would sing country music for the rest of my life.
I lived for the broadcasts I could catch from WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia, late at night, when the “radio bounce” off the ionosphere was just right. Porter Wagoner and Dolly (his “girl singer,” as they were called back then) were my favorites, and that led me to her solo records.
She could write, she was smart, she was funny—and she could tear your heart out with her voice. None of the obituaries I’ve read this week have mentioned the song that first hooked me on that voice. Like many of her early songs, “My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy” is about a young woman who makes the wrong choices and descends into tragedy. It’s a tale as old as the hills, as old as the songs passed down through the generations that lived and died in those hills. But she made it seem fresh. And the way she sang them! The melisma when she sang the word “mountain”—it felt like you could fit a whole dictionary in those two syllables.
Were those songs melodramatic or emotionally over-wrought? I guess you could say that, although nowadays any criticism of Dolly would be treated as heresy. But I had spent most of my then-short life shutting down my emotions. Songs like Dolly’s forced them back open.
Besides, she never played the victim for very long. Songs like “Dumb Blonde” and “Just Because a Woman” were subversively feminist, even if the coastal elites had never heard them. “This dumb blonde is nobody’s fool,” one said. “My mistakes are no worse than yours just because I’m a woman,” said the other. And “To Daddy,” with its twist ending …
By 1974 I had already seen Porter and Dolly play a country music package show in London’s Wembley Stadium and a concert in Berkeley. (I can’t remember where they played that show, but I do recall that a few members of the Grateful Dead waited on line with us to get Porter and Dolly’s autographs.)
A friend and onetime bandmate of mine texted me yesterday when the news of her death came out. “You helped me realize what a force of nature she was,” he wrote. I’ve been a Dolly Parton evangelist for a long time—one of millions, as it turns out.
People on the left are honoring Dolly today for her embrace of marginalized groups, for her warm spirit and her charitable works (including distributing books to poor schoolchildren). John Nichols reminds us that, in the words of The Nation’s headline for his piece, “Dolly was a proud union sister.”
That she was, but she was also that rarest of creatures: an American who seemed to transcend left and right in the very best of ways. Politics? Dolly practiced the politics of love. People loved her because she seemed to love them. Love was her most radical quality. It was her most Christian quality, too. Her love was made radical by the breadth of her embrace. Poor, lonely, White, Black, LGBTQ, Christian, atheist, Jew, Muslim: nobody seemed to be outside the circle.
(When Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens was detained by US immigration and denied entry in 2004, he was on his way to Nashville to record his song “Peace Train” as a duet with Dolly.)
Her radical acceptance extended to people that might have seemed to exploit her. I was struck by this exchange with interviewer Jad Abumrad, who pointed to a picture of her with Porter Wagoner. As Abumrad puts it, “Mr. Wagoner in his pimp jacket has his arm around her as if he owned her.”
“Well, it’s more complicated than that,” Dolly replied.
“... When he hired me as a singer, he was just hiring what he thought was a ripe, pretty little girl. But I was a serious writer. He didn’t know that. I was a serious entertainer. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know how many dreams I had.”
How many women have felt the proprietary embrace of a man who didn’t know “how many dreams she had”? And how rare for any human being, having been mistreated, to be so empathic in return?
It raises the question, however naïve: could a true politics of empathy change the world? We’ll probably never know. Dolly Parton may have been the last unifying force the American community will ever see. She may have been the last true American.
I hope not. Everybody loves Dolly Parton, and everybody knows how to cry. In fact, everyone who has struggled in this life knows exactly how I felt when I sat and wept in my “Car of Many Colors,” one rainy evening on a back-country California road all those long years ago.
I’ve made a Spotify playlist of some songs Dolly wrote and sang, leaning on heavily on the early country years.
Very nice piece, Richard...she was truly a special individual.
You could have written from reverence. You wrote from love. Thanks for the reminder.