What Dolly Parton Built
A few years ago on my birthday, someone gave me a set of Dolly Parton-themed drink coasters, part of a collection of (mostly pink) kitchen sundries and assorted doodads that Parton had curated for Walmart. I leaned my favorite against the bathroom mirror; it’s been balanced there ever since. The front features a black-and-white portrait of Parton regarding herself before an illuminated vanity, fussing with her hair, which was—it goes without saying—blond, voluminous, impossibly firm. She was so beautiful. I liked seeing Dolly there every day as I initiated my own ad-hoc beauty regimen, which, regrettably, often consisted exclusively of piling my hair into an untidy bun. Dolly’s deep interest in cultivating carnal beauty never seemed shallow to me (though she often churned her insecurities into punch lines), or even chiefly concerned with aesthetics. It was always consonant with her art. “If I’m gonna have any looks at all, I’m gonna have to create them,” she once said. She was talking about makeup and plastic surgery, things she felt no shame in loving, but it’s hard to read that quote and not also think about what it means to be a visionary—to invent a whole world from nothing.
She understood that beauty is intoxicating precisely because it’s hard to hold. Yet songs can do the holding: stop time, keep it still. The body of work that Parton left behind—the body she left behind—is so staggering in its gorgeousness and verve. In 1969, Parton released a song called “Little Bird.” It’s the final track on Side A of “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad),” her third solo album, released by RCA Victor. It’s a great record, hardscrabble and honest and charming; Parton was just coming into her own as a writer and solo performer. All the tropes we now associate with country music—the idea that the genre boils down to “three chords and the truth,” as the songwriter Harlan Howard once put it—were beginning to crystallize. Parton was such a crucial engineer. Her writing contained enormous warmth and tenderness; unlike some of her erstwhile male colleagues, she possessed an almost uncanny capacity for empathy. Anyone can tell a story, but it takes a pure heart to make it mean something. “Little Bird” opens with a lament for the unstoppable passage of time:
Parton’s voice was already such a marvel: round, crisp, rippled in a way that feels elemental, like the surface of a pond after a rock is tossed in. “Little Bird” is a minor song in her discography, less than two minutes long. Yet it’s the first track I thought to play when I heard the news of her passing. It’s a song about longing, and making peace with the immutable fact of our own mortality: “Then sing me a song as you fly me along, on our long last journey above,” she sings. Her voice rises on the final word, but it doesn’t sound like she’s grasping at something. It sounds, to me, as though she’s being carried.
