The music that made Dolly Parton a global icon

And here's a little gal that I know you're going to really learn to love. >> With these words, in 1967, country musician Porter Wagner first introduced Dolly Parton on his weekly TV show. >> Let's give her a great big welcome as she sings a song that she had a big hit on called Dumb Blonde. She ain't no dumb blonde though. Pretty Miss Dolly Parton. How about >> Parton was 21, but she'd been writing her own songs long before she made it onto national television. Don't try to cry. [music] >> Her first was age five and by the time she died last week, aged 80. Parton had written more than 3,000 songs, around 500 of which were professionally recorded. Many of these songs have been playing across airwaves and earbuds in the past few days. So to mark Dolly Parton's life, we decided to run a special bonus episode of the Conversation Weekly, exploring Parton's art, her songs, what influenced them, and how she wrote them. >> [music] >> I'm Gemma Wear from The Conversation and you're listening to the conversation weekly where experts [music] explain how we ended up here. This week, how Dolly Parton's songs made her a global icon. [music] Lydia Hamsley, you're a professor of music at Hamilton College in New York in the US and you're the author of Unlikely Angel, the songs of Dolly Parton. When do you first remember becoming conscious of Dolly? Well, I was a kid back in the 60s when my parents would listen to the Porter Wagner show. They loved country music and she was on in the background for me as a kid and was the girl singer, the one with the funny outfits and the big hair. And so I didn't really take her in too much. But then in 1980 with 9 to5, she stole that show for me. and then watching other films later on like Steel Magnolia's but then around 1999 she recorded an album The Grass is Blue and I was very much interested in bluegrass music and I thought wow what's Dolly doing with bluegrass and I heard so many resonances in her music of oldtimey appalachin or mountain music certain harmonic choices that she makes around the kinds of choices of harmonies of chords also of her expressive ive way of singing felt like she had grown up hearing people singing in a particular way that had such a heart to it and such a power to her voice. But also the storytelling because that's her real gift. you know, a lot of mountain music and balladery and early early country music that she would have grown up hearing, they were stories basically and and she said that that she just always could tell a good story and could rhyme easily and so writing just really came natural. >> So Dolly Parton was born in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and she famously lived in a one room cabin with her brothers and sisters. How did she start playing music? She says that she started playing music probably about the same time she could walk. In fact, there's a great quote that I read of her grandfather, Jake Owens, her mother's dad, saying about Dolly, that thing came here singing, >> you know. So, she started out in the world singing according to him. But she said that she would hear rhythms in the world, the bird calls, the bob whites, you know, the bob white, bob white, bob white, that kind of rhythm and sound. She said shelling peas and having them hit in the bowl and hearing that kind of percussive sound got her I mean she was always attuned to sound. And then as she got a bit older, she found, she's not been specific about it, but I think it was an old mandolin body that didn't have strings on it that she found this thing. And then there was an old abandoned piano, and she had an uncle help her run the strings across the body of this broken mandolin and create just two strings on top of it. And she described it as it's just an old drone. [music] You know, she can just twang away on those two strings and just sing to her heart's content. That would have been when she was about six, seven, eight years old. Then she got a guitar. [music] The story isn't exactly clear which uncle gave her the guitar, but I think it was probably her uncle Bill gave her a little Martin [music] guitar that she started playing on. And he was a musician. He showed her chords and she just took to it right [music] away. So she was very young. >> And how much was music part of the family life in the cabin? >> It was a lot of their lives. I asked Dolly about [music] that and she said that the community was just filled with song. There was song and music everywhere. Fiddle tunes, clog dancing, [music] singing and in church. Singing in church was ginormously important to her. [music] So it was very much a part of her life. Her grandfather Jake played the fiddle. Her mother was a singer, played the guitar. And Dolly said, you know, her mom was always singing. She said something like she sang when she was happy. She sang when she was sad. she sang when she was sick, you know, [music] when she was taking care of the kids and would have been singing those old unaccompanied ballads [music] and hymns, probably songs they might have heard if [music] they'd had access to a radio kind of thing. So, she grew up around music a lot. And her uncle Bill, her mother's [music] brother, was also a musician. Very, very influential. In fact, they worked together once Dolly was an adult and even as a teenager. And what about writing music? When did she start beginning to write her own songs? Oh, >> well, she said she wrote her first song when she was five. It was a song called Little Tiny Tassel Top. Her dad had made a little toy doll for her out of an old corn cob and had used a hot poker and burned in a couple of eyes and I guess the corn silk became the hair. Her mother put together a little dress for it. And Dolly sang this little song that you can find recordings of her. [music] [music] >> She also had said that she had written another song about a soldier going off to war. And I asked her about that because I'd never found it anywhere. and she dug through her archive and rustled around and found that she had written the words down. And I've included those in my book, but that's a real morbid song about a young woman. Now, Dolly's not even 10 years old yet, but a morbid song about a young woman whose soldier boy has gone off to war and I don't know if he's been killed or that she just can't take it, but she ends by taking her own life. She says something about the river calls and here I come. Dolly said that what would happen is that she would listen. She was always listening to conversations and she would hear adults talking about things like that. Oh, did you hear about that girl over in the other holler who jumped in the river, you know, and Dolly would hear these things and make songs about them. So, she was precocious for sure. Also, around the time she was 10, she was singing a lot of music in church and she also began singing on the radio in a local station there in Seir County. And so she was singing songs that she didn't write. She was like internalizing the way that music worked beyond just her little sing songy things. And she then just became more adept at creating a formal structure that we would recognize as a song. >> So she grew up in the mountains and Appalachin music really shaped her life in early stages and her music she started writing more of it. Where do we hear that most in her music? >> Yes. Well, the easiest place to go for that are those three albums. The Grass is Blue from 1999, Little Sparrow from 2001 and then another called Halo and Horns that I think is 2003. Especially Little Sparrow. She says that that music on that album is not blueg grass music so much as blue mountain music. It's got blueg grass in it, but she's actually digging a little more deeply in that. and she has several songs on that that are either old mountain songs that she's singing herself or more likely they're songs that sort of channel that old timey mountain music through Dolly's own song workshop if you will. The song Little Sparrow itself is basically a reworking of an old ballad which people might know as Fair and Tender Ladies. [singing] and she uses a little bit of the words, a little bit of the music, but it's definitely a dolly song. >> It's a lot about the chords and the harmony. There's a kind of um we call it in music a modality. There's a mode to the song. It uses notes in the scale that we don't think of as the typical doas lato scale, but that have other notes that create a kind of what people have called as a kind of lonesome sound, a kind of mournful sound. It sounds haunting a lot of times to people. Dolly called it that lonesome drone. But then of course when she goes bluegrass, I mean that's straight up bluegrass where you hear the three-finger banjo picking styles, the fiddle playing mandolin. So sometimes it's about instrumentation, sometimes it's about the harmony, sometimes it's about the vocal style. She has an amazing song on Halos and horns called These Old Bones. >> These old bones will tell you story. These old bones will [music] never lie. These old bones will tell you shortly what you can't see with your eye. These old bones I shake and rattle. These old bones [music] I roll. >> And that one's interesting because she's telling a fabulous story about a a girl who grew up abandoned and an orphan. Her mother had to give her up because she was unmarried. And she sings in the voice of this old mountain woman. And Dolly actually uses two different voices in the song. So you hear her singing as the young woman in her light usual dolly sound and then when she sings in the voice of this old as she calls her witchy woman in the mountains who turns out to be her mother. That woman has a completely different voice. It's raw sounding. It's harsh to some people's ears. But Dolly says she's channeling her mother. And she also talked about being in the studio singing that and feeling like she and her mama were singing together almost as a duet. >> So we talked about mountain music. What other influences did she have? >> Dolly talks a lot about how she has a lot of affinity with Irish music and a lot of these songs like Barbara Allen. This ballad Barbara Allen dates back and goes back to the UK and to England, Ireland, Scotland. And in fact, Dolly plays up the Irish connection on several of her albums, having Irish musicians play along with her. So you get the Irish instruments, which she wouldn't have grown up hearing, of course, but she's making that connection. Dolly also was very much influenced by gospel music in the church that she grew up in. It was a Pentecostal church. I asked her once about a particular song, Wayfairing Stranger. [music] It's an old folk hymn. >> [music] >> way. >> I could hear vestigages of that in [music] about four of her songs. And I asked her, "What does that song mean to you?" And she said, "Oh, that was such an important song for her." She remembered hearing it in the church. She told the story of once in the middle of a church service, an old man, she said, just dressed kind of raggedy, just stood up in the middle of the church and just started singing Wayfairing Stranger. And Dolly said it was the most beautiful, most lonesome, most fabulous sound that she had ever heard. [music] And that song got in her bones, in her body, I think, because it comes out in a [music] lot of different songs that she wrote. No more tool. [music] >> What does she tell you about her songwriting process itself? She's written such, you know, iconic songs, Jolene and I will always love you on the same day. What does she tell you about how she goes about it? She said that she thinks of her songwriting as her workshop. And I was really intrigued by that idea. You know, we think sometimes of these great songwriters is they just sit down or pick up a guitar and boom, out comes a song. It's there. And in some ways that happens for Dolly. She's very instinctual as a songwriter. I don't think she really puzzles about it when she starts. She sparks ideas, a turn of phrase, a little snippet of a melody, and then, oh, what can I do with that? And she'll work around it and everything. She can come up with the song, but then she's not done. She goes back and tweaks things, changes words, changes melodies. I think of her as an artisan as well as an artist that she's crafting these songs. One great example that I can give you is the song Jolene that I was able to see the original lyrics in her handwriting when she was first writing the song. I got them to send me a really good copy that I could look at. And she's reworking words in Jolene in a way that is surprising. You know, in that song, she's singing from the perspective of a woman who's in love with this guy and Jolene's going to take him away. [music] sleep and there's nothing I can do to keep from crying when he calls your name. [music] >> Well, we make all kinds of assumptions about this guy, but think about the song. She never says they're married or that he even knows she's alive. I mean, maybe she's watching this guy from afar and she's in love and Jolene's kind of moving in, right? That's the beauty of Dolly's songwriting is that it's ambiguous enough that you can make it your own. After the break, why Dolly [music] Parton was so universally loved. Every week, Michelle Graten offers you a ringside seat to the latest in Australian politics with interviews and insights from political insiders. On the Conversations Politics with Michelle Graten podcast, we cut through the spin and get to the substance with independent analysis of the issues that really matter. Stay informed. Search and follow Politics with Michelle Graten wherever you get your podcasts. Lydia, in the wake of Dolly's death, people have been talking about her as a secular saint. How did she go from being that country girl on the Porter Wagner show to being this global icon? I think that the saintliness, all of that, I think begins to come about in the 1990s when she's making films and I think you've even television shows. There's a show called Designing Women where she plays an angel and then many other shows where she's often playing an angel. So, she kind of works her image to be that kind of angelic being. And I think people really respond to that goodness in her. I think also the fact that she's so overdone, overdressed, over made up, you know, everything is a sort of a mask, it protects her, but it also means we can kind of project a lot onto her and create what we want from Dolly. And what she's given us is a sense of hope, of kindness, of generosity, optimism. And of course, all this is happening as she is becoming more and more known for her philanthropy. So her angelic figure is now matching. But what's interesting about it is that the more people would project almost a religious feeling onto Dolly. And she even said at one point, "They just seem to want to touch me." Almost like a laying on of hands. You know, she would always say, "You shouldn't be worshiping me." These are her words. You should ship that on up to God. that I'm just here trying to do my best work and I'm sending that up to God. And she would also talk about it in the sense of people, if they did feel that way about her, she hoped that it would distract them from doing bad things. She wants people to live their best lives. And and she said many times in interviews that what she wants is to be able to use her gifts to make the world a better place, to uplift people, and then she'll say, "And have fun doing it." She's enjoying her work. This is not drudgery for her. So yes, that's about helping people find their dreams. And you know, a lot of her songs, the optimistic ones are about that, about don't give up, you can keep trying. And one of her many lines is you can have all the dreams you want, but you have to put legs on them and wings on them. >> And people have talked of her as the one figure that everyone in America can agree on. How was it that she was able to unite what is quite a disunited United States? >> Yes, that's the question everyone really is grappling with and part of it is that she never made any overt political statements. She said once that she learned early on to keep her mouth shut about that stuff. But what I always say is if you want to know what Dolly actually thinks about an issue, listen to her music, listen to her songs because she's telling you there what she believes. But then how that works across this wide divide is that first off it's through song. It's through story. She's not saying something like I believe women should have abortion rights or rights to their own bodies. She would never say that. And I don't know what she believes about that. But what she does say, she writes in songs, songs about women who are abandoned, ostracized, having unwed pregnancies in the oldfashioned term, and how unfair and how miserable that was and how lonely those women were and how wrong it was. So, she makes her statements really strongly. But they're in these songs and they're in a story that once you put a face on an issue and a story, then it's not just some thing out there to vote yes or no on. It's just somebody else's problem. Dolly gives you a real human being in her story that you think, "Yeah, that person was treated badly. That wasn't right." So, I think I think that's what she was able to do was tell stories about real people in a way that everyone could empathize with. Well, Lydia, it's been great chatting with you about Dolly's life and legacy. Thank you very much. >> Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks for having me. >> That's it for this week's special episode of The Conversation Weekly. You can read more reaction to Dolly Parton's life from experts around the [music] world on the conversation.com. We'll put some links to those stories in our show notes. This week's episode was written by me, Gemma Wear, [music] and Isabella Podwinsky was the executive producer. Sound mixing is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by [music] Nita. Ashley McGee is our head of editorial innovation and Misha Ketchel and Steven Khn are our editors chief. The conversation is a nonprofit news outlet dedicated to sharing the work of academic experts with a wider audience. [music] If you like what we do, please consider supporting us at donate.thecon conversation.com. Thanks for listening and we'll be back [music] later in the week.