Now turning 60, Dolly Parton has revived her music, her fortunes and her busty blonde spirit, writes Derek Scally
Dolly Parton turned 60 this week and her face turned 30, but the Queen of Country is still as fresh as her music and her self-deprecating jibes. A decade ago she turned her back on Nashville after it turned its back on her, but now the five-foot-nothing busty blonde, once described as the "quintessential truck-stop fantasy", is at her best.
Dolly Rebecca Parton's biography couldn't be more perfect material for a country song if she had made it all up. She grew up in the Appalachian mountains in a small wooden cabin without running water or electricity with her parents and 11 brothers and sisters, living the kind of dirt-poor-but-happy life she would later mine for the hits My Tennessee Mountain Home and Coat of Many Colours.
By the time she was 10 she was singing on the local radio station and she made her first appearance at the Grand Old Opry aged 13; two years later she adopted her trademark buxom blonde look. After leaving school in 1964, Parton moved to Nashville and, on her first day, met an asphalt-paving engineer named Carl Dean at the Wishy Washy Laundromat. They married two years later and, 40 years on, Dean remains the most mysterious spouse in show business.
Parton's recording career had an inauspicious start, with the single Happy Happy Birthday Baby hitting No 108 in the pop charts, but her first album, Hello I'm Dolly, produced two top 20 singles in the country charts in 1967. The same year she was asked to join the syndicated country music television programme hosted by country star Porter Wagoner, starting a seven-year collaboration that established her as a country music star.
In 1974, Dolly went solo with Jolene after an acrimonious break from Wagoner, an experience that resulted in one of her most famous songs, I Will Always Love You. By the time of her first acting role, in the 1980 film 9 to 5, Parton had drifted into what she later called a "half-assed so-called crossover career" with diminishing success. She turned her attention to business and in 1986 opened the Dollywood theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, as an investment of the song royalties from the publishing rights she wisely retained.
As she battled problems with her health and weight, as well as musical stagnation, her business empire expanded to include a production company that financed her chequered film career and some hit television series such as Buffy.
BY THE 1990s Parton's music career was effectively over, blacklisted by the Nashville radio stations and record companies who felt she couldn't hold her own against "new country" arrivals such as Shania Twain.
The Parton legend tells how she retreated to her mountain cabin where she fasted and wrote songs that would rescue her music career. Her new original material runs the gamut from sprightly love songs to the depths of human misery. These songs, like their singer, are beyond irony, exhibiting qualities a critic once described as "painfully real and deeply artificial". What make it all work, though, are Parton's musical talent and her firm belief in the earnestness of what she is singing.
On top of classic country material, the new bluegrass albums contain covers of everything from Cole Porter's I Get a Kick Out of You to Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. What has the potential to be a travesty turns out to be a highly entertaining romp, held together with breakneck bluegrass banjos and tight harmonies from singers including Maura O'Connell.
Parton's career revival mirrors that of Johnny Cash. He was encouraged to return to his musical roots and the recording studio in his final years by producer Rick Rubin, who is now performing the same miracle on Neil Diamond. The difference is that Parton revived herself. "This music felt right, it felt good, like it used to be always in the early days before I had any of the other tricks and the glamour and all that," she said recently. "I had to get rich in order to afford to sing like I was poor again."
In an era of fake Pop Idol music, and fake George W Bush cowboys, there's a timely irony in Parton, with her plastic face, breasts and hair, being rediscovered for her authentic music. After four decades, 100 million records, 25 gold and platinum records and seven Grammy Awards, Parton has become a cultural icon. Decades after the drag queens caught on, a wider audience finally gets the point of Dolly Parton.
"For years, a lot of people didn't get the wink," she said recently. "They didn't get that I was winking at myself, too." But wink or not, some things are there to be enjoyed, such as the Prime of Miss Dolly Parton.
Dolly Parton's latest album, Those Were the Days, is released on Sugar Hill Records