Until her passing on Tuesday, Dolly Parton may have been the only living person truly worthy of that old-fashioned designation, "America's Sweetheart." Her immense musical talent guaranteed her top-tier standing in country music and propelled her into a level of mainstream success that only a handful of her peers would match. Her charm, depth, beauty, sense of humor and radiant goodness made her a star across seven turbulent decades.
She was, as many tributes published since her death have noted, the one person whose presence everyone welcomed, no matter what hostilities their politics or social status otherwise inspired. Parton was our favorite aunt, our imaginary president. She was also the composer of a career's worth of indelible hits that emblematized America's cultural life, and particularly the changing experiences of women, in ways that place her in an elite category: a songwriter whose greatest works, considered together, are their own version of the American songbook.
The story of this country as told through Parton's best-known songs begins in the mid-1960s, when many aspects of the country she knew and loved so well were in flux. She didn't write her first charting country single, 1967's "Dumb Blonde" (that was Curly Putnam) but it set the tone for her amiable, uncompromising version of women's liberation, distilling the frustration of countless underestimated women in the home and the workplace into an actionable rallying cry.
This was one aspect of Parton, the adventurer whose insistent self-respect would carry her beyond any limitations others tried to impose on her. The other, the keeper of home truths, surfaced in 1971's "Coat of Many Colors," an expertly embroidered portrait of Appalachian rural life that also stands as one of the most powerful reminders of poor people's dignity to ever grace the airwaves. With those two singles and others that quickly followed, like 1972's cozily erotic "Touch Your Woman" and the same year's pastoral "My Tennessee Mountain Home," Parton — the rare Nashville songwriter who wrote her greatest songs alone — established the multifaceted world view that made her music so mobile, such a popular well for other artists to tap for inspiration, and so insightful about America.
Parton's legend was secured in 1973, when she released "Jolene," a song that transcended its moment by perfectly capturing the primal intensity of insecure romantic desire. With a melody redolent of a century of folk ballads and, as Parton told NPR in 2008, a chorus "even a first-grader or a baby could sing," this true-ish tale of rivalry among women is fluid enough that a man could take it on, as Jack White did in The White Stripes' 2001 version. "Jolene" is a murder ballad whose victims all survive, a cry of revenge in the face of betrayal that puts a woman in charge and unexpectedly creates a bond between two rivals. Beyoncé's version of the song on her Grammy-winning country album Cowboy Carter, blessed by Parton, heated up that eroticism to show that "Jolene" is as much about one woman appreciating another as about the murderous restrictions of monogamy.
"Jolene" was, in fact, one of the less dramatic songs Parton wrote in her gothic mode, a style that allowed her to expose many of the burdens women endure under patriarchy; her early songs that never made it to the Top 40 dared to broach topics like emotional abuse, stillbirth, forced institutionalization, a birthmother's grief and a pregnant, abandoned lover's suicide. Her deep knowledge of the dark lent substance to the songs that expressed her belief in transcendence. The masterpiece that she released the following year showed her rising upward with unrivaled grace. Like "Jolene," the majestic "I Will Always Love You" is ripe with particulars and anchored in the country realm of adult dreams and regrets, but is open-ended enough to invite myriad interpretations. Parton wrote it as a forgiving farewell to Porter Wagoner, the duet partner who had helped launch her career but also tried to restrict her when her genius took her beyond their partnership.
"I Will Always Love You" was a hit for her in 1974 and again in 1983, as part of the soundtrack to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, where it served as a lament about the forbidden (though ultimately triumphant) romance between the madam played by Parton and Burt Reynolds' local sheriff. The song reached its full potential, of course, in the hands of Whitney Houston, whose sublime 1992 version exposed the damage done by arbitrary divisions between Black and white radio formats, crossing into every corner of pop to become the definitive expression of the era's blockbuster-besotted grandeur. "I Will Always Love You" is the musical equivalent of Star Wars, an epic that encompasses many epochs. Houston could soar within it because Parton imbued it with a musical and sentimental purity that made room for the enormity of her expressiveness.
Even as Parton secured her status as a writer of timeless tunes with these megahits, she remained the quintessential modern woman chronicling her times, via her own songs and ones written by others. The hits that took her from the 1970s to the '80s form a vivid portrait of the power-suited working woman who enjoyed her pleasures with men from whom she demanded freedom and equality. "Here You Come Again," written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and her own "Two Doors Down" are jaunty artifacts of the era of swinging and the pill, while "9 to 5," along with the comedy film classic whose soundtrack it graced (and in which Dolly starred), became the era's working woman's anthem. These songs made Parton not just the era's most adorable embodiment of American values but a global icon, culminating in her duet with Kenny Rogers, the Bee Gees-authored "Islands in the Stream." Parton's vivacious touch on that song is the electricity that carries it beyond genre and makes it a definitive example of global pop.
After the 1980s, Parton remained musically prolific while easing into the exalted yet somehow always accessible position she maintained until her death. She won a new generation of fans at the turn of the 21st century by returning to the bluegrass that inspired her as a child and continued to build a discography that would ultimately include more than 50 solo and collaborative studio albums, and remain as eclectic as it had been in the beginning.
Continually taken up by would-be protégés to whom she was characteristically generous, she kept winning hearts on stages with the likes of Sabrina Carpenter, Lainey Wilson and Post Malone. Her final album, Rockstar, celebrated a 2022 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame that Parton had greeted, at first, with great skepticism. In the end, though, America's sweetheart took on that quintessentially American musical form with the same let's-get-it-done energy she'd applied to every challenge she'd faced. "I just went for it," she told NPR. Luckily for every last American, we could always follow wherever she went.
If you, like us, cannot get enough of Dolly, head to the NPR app for a Dolly Parton playlist from our archives, or check out the NPR Network podcast Dolly Parton's America.
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