How Dolly Parton Crossed Over Into Hollywood and America’s Hearts

Dolly Parton was perfect for her breakout decade, the 1970s. Color TVs outsold black-and-white sets for the first time in 1972, the annus mirabilis in which she composed “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You,” allegedly on the same day. With her huge yellow hair, chambray-blue wardrobe, and sunshiny radiance, Parton was engineered to beam straight through the screen into every American home. Both of those songs became number-one country hits, in ’73 and ’74, respectively, and Dolly, Porter Wagoner’s girl singer no more, became America’s rhinestone superstar.

The 70s were also the last golden age of an American monoculture, when most of us experienced the same programs, movies, and records at the same time. Country crossover wasn’t so much crossover as happy coexistence. Roy Clark could show up at Felix and Oscar’s New York apartment in The Odd Couple to demonstrate his virtuoso pickin’ skills and be summoned to Burbank to sub in for Johnny Carson as a guest host of The Tonight Show. Cliff Arquette’s hayseed character Charlie Weaver reliably occupied the lower left corner on Hollywood Squares. Hee Haw, the variety show Clark co-hosted with Buck Owens, thrived on TV in first-run syndication — it’s where this writer, like millions of other impressionable kids, first saw Parton perform “Coat of Many Colors,” her affecting song about the coat her mother sewed for her “from a box of rags that someone gave us.” Young Dolly wore the coat proudly to school, only to be ridiculed by mean kids who laughed at the sight of it. Dolly, unbowed, told off the poverty-shamers by saying she was actually rich, because of “the love my mama sewed in every stitch.” You couldn’t not be moved or besotted.

Of all the artists flying the country flag in this era, Dolly was the most transcendent, rivaled only by the great Johnny Cash. (Whereas Cash was known for his gravity and underrated comedically, Parton was known for her levity and underrated artistically.) Dolly was simply irresistible to everyone, no matter their background or cultural prejudices. Even the rock snobs at Rolling Stone loved her, flying her to New York in ’77 for an extraordinary photo shoot in which Annie Leibovitz paired Parton with an emerging Austrian bodybuilding star. While a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger stood with legs wide apart and biceps flexed, Parton, a pink bow in her hair, joyfully posed in front of him, her hips obscuring his naughty bits, her ginormously bewigged head blocking out his, eclipse-style.

Parton, conversely, seemed to embrace all comers without wariness. In her successful bid to achieve crossover pop stardom, she sublimated her writer’s ego and turned to two old Brill Building hands, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, for “Here You Come Again,” which shot to number three on the Billboard Hot 100. When the Bee Gees were lying low in the post-disco backlash of the early 1980s, she and Kenny Rogers took their song “Islands in the Stream” to number one. On Dolly, her short-lived 1976 variety show, she gamely performed with collaborators both likely (e.g. Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, later to rejoin Parton for their triumphant 1987 album Trio) and perhaps not so much (e.g. The Hues Corporation, of “Rock the Boat” fame, and KC and the Sunshine Band).

In 1978, a writer named Colin Irwin, of the British publication Melody Maker, described the process of having his snide-journo defenses dissolved by Parton in real time:

For ten minutes I just gawp, unable to comprehend the vision, but she — obviously well-acquainted with such a reaction — accepts it gracefully, perhaps even with relish, and rattles on… “Been a hectic day but ah’m pretty used t’that nahw an’ ah enjoy meetin’ new people cos ah get a lota ideas for songs because of certain personalities that ah meet. Mahbe ah’ll wraht a song ’bout yew. Ah’ll call it ‘Laughing Eyes.’”

Sigh. I think I’m in love.

Unquestionably, she manipulates the press.

And yet you still love her. Because she admits it. Where others of the ilk make you cringe with their synthetic sincerity, Dolly is disarmingly honest about it all, constantly sending herself up, mockingly talking about her wigs and her figure. She admits that her bizarre stage act and her appearance are merely means to an end, and you can even forgive the weepy sentiment of so much of her material, born out of the stifling poverty in which she was brought up.

“Coat Of Many Colors,” for example — which she has often cited as her favorite song — reconstructed the Joseph story in the Bible, but was also based on a traumatic experience she herself had as a child. How can anyone with a heart knock that?

The great monoculture of which Parton was the apogee began to fall apart with the advent of cable television in the 1980s and was eventually atomized completely by the internet. Today we live in a world where someone named Ella Langley can occupy the upper reaches of the Billboard charts alongside someone named Lil Baby, the fans of one having no idea of what the other’s music even sounds like. But Dolly kept on Dollying, decade after decade, holding us all together when very little else did.

At the dawn of the 80s, she effortlessly translated her talents to film, starring alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5 and writing and performing its infectious title song. In 1986, she formed a production company, Sandollar Productions, with her former manager, Sandy Gallin, a gay, Jewish, very tan show-business macher. “Nobody could quite get how the Christian Southern girl and New York Jewish boy could have so much in common,” she told the New York Times when Gallin died, in 2017. “But it was real. My husband didn’t love to travel, and Sandy was gay and did.” Together, Parton and Gallin produced the Father of the Bride movies and the millennially revered Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series.

With Gallin’s help, she also launched the theme park Dollywood, situated just outside her native Great Smoky Mountains, in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. There, she turned her heritage, warts and all, into a celebration, complete with a museum of Partonian artifacts literally called Rags to Riches: The Dolly Parton Story. (It has since evolved into a formidable multimedia complex called The Dolly Parton Experience.)

Unlike certain other claimants of Appalachian background, Parton related her stories of hillbilly hardship without grievance. Over and over, she chose positivity. She often related the story of how taken she was, as a small child, with the scarlet woman of her little town, “with this yellow hair piled on her head, bright red lipstick, red nails, and high-heeled shoes. I thought she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. I used to say to my mama, ‘Oh, she’s so pretty!’”

When Dolly’s mother derided the woman as “trash,” Parton recalled, “I just thought, ‘That’s what I want to be when I grow up: trash!’”

Opry-style humor aside, Parton took her platform as an odds-beater seriously. Convinced that her sharecropper father’s illiteracy prevented him from realizing his dreams, she founded a nonprofit called The Imagination Library that mails free books to children every month from birth to the age of five. Founded in 1995, the program has distributed more than 300 million books.

Lee Parton was still alive when The Imagination Library was founded. “I had the idea to do something special for him,” Parton said in 2018. “In the bible, where it talks about ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ I don’t think that necessarily means just to obey them. It means to bring honor to their name if you can. So I got my daddy involved in this program. I wanted him to feel like he was part of something special. He took such pride in the fact that the little kids called me ‘The Book Lady.’ He was prouder of that than anything.”

How can anyone with a heart knock that?

Parton was studiedly apolitical yet anything but gutless. In 2020, in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, she donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to seed the research that led to the development of the Moderna vaccine. In her words and deeds, she supported gay rights and marriage equality, arguing for the latter with the characteristic zinger, “Why can’t they be as miserable as us heterosexuals in their marriages?”

Coming from someone else — really, anyone else — these pro-queer, pro-vax, and pro-literacy stances would likely have been critiqued in some quarters as “woke.” But you never hear anyone carping on TV or social media about “Dollyweird.” Parton was a uniter. She commanded a wonderfully anachronistic monocultural respect, attributable to all the goodwill she had accumulated and the positivity she never stopped projecting.

We’ll truly never see Dolly’s like again, though you can see certain individuals modeling themselves in her likeness. Sabrina Carpenter paid explicit homage to Parton’s comic-blond-minx persona by inviting the woman herself to record a duet, 2024’s “Please Please Please,” complete with a caper video that finds the pair sweetly harmonizing while a man they’ve abducted lies bound in the back of their pickup truck.

Sabrina is no Dolly, which isn’t a knock but a comment on the impossibility of any new artist ever enjoying the level of admiration and adoration that Parton did for most of her life. But it’s great that Dolly remains, fifty-plus years after “Jolene” and the glory days of Hee Haw, an aspirational model. Her motto was, “Dream more, learn more, care more, and be more.” She more than lived up to it.