Dolly Parton: “How in hell did I get all that done?”

Originally published in Uncut Take 206 [July 2014], Uncut dodges the handlers in Nashville to get under the skin of the most heroic and hardworking woman in Country. “I’m begging of you, please…”

A place tourists rarely see

Five miles north of downtown Nashville, way past the Ryman Auditorium, the Country Music Hall Of Fame, Johnny Cash’s Museum and all the blinking neon honkytonks of Lower Broadway, is a place tourists rarely see. Two exits past the spot where three super-freeways converge is a nondescript stretch of road, dull and treeless, with fast-food chains and budget accommodations for nearby Opryland.

Despite the cheery signage, there’s an air of resignation hovering above the We Buy Gold/Music City Pawn/Cash City storefronts, pre-pay dry cleaners and rundown nail salons, all uneasily housed in the grossly misnamed Grand Central Parking Center. It’s a perfect location to hide something in plain sight. Like Dolly Parton, one of country music’s most recognisable and beloved stars.

For the past four days she’s been ensconced behind a reinforced 6 ft chain-link fence that surrounds North Star Studios, a 125,000-sq ft complex owned by the Christian Broadcasting Network. A guard in a concrete gatehouse screens visitors, and there are surveillance cameras on high poles watching for anything untoward. Eight satellite dishes are arranged in a rough constellation in an empty field, like oversized oyster shells, their ears cocked skyward to catch, one supposes, emissions from Mars. Or transmit them.

Over the past 24 hours, she’s logged in 80 interviews

Click. Click. Click. Click. The distinctive sound of high heels bounces off the dark tile floors, ricocheting off the low, cavernous ceilings. I quickly turn to see Dolly Parton surrounded by a half-dozen people dressed in sombre colours. None of whom are saying a word to her, or to anyone else, for that matter. Except for the soft clatter of Parton’s five-inch heels, the group walks in abject silence. Her eyes look forward and she doesn’t speak to anyone as she takes small, careful steps. Nor is she smiling. Hell, I haven’t even seen photos of Dolly not smiling. We’re running early. In fact, almost two hours early, which is a little intimidating.

But Parton has got this promotion thing down to military precision (she’s nicknamed the Iron Butterfly). Over the past 24 hours, she’s logged in 80 interviews, by satellite hook-up, by phone, and in person. By day’s end she’ll have completed 31 more and filmed a video for the title song for her new LP, Blue Smoke.

Not that she’d ever complain, but you can see the teeniest bit of weariness behind those eyes of indeterminate colour. “Even though I do these interviews day in, day out,” she confides to me later, “it’s like looking at you and the way you say it, and the tone of voice you say it makes me have a whole different delivery, makes me add more to something I’ve said before. It takes on new meaning for me.”

The mark of a real pro

Dolly Parton greets Uncut on a brilliantly lit soundstage. She is mic’d, I am not. The mark of a real pro is, despite conducting the interviews in front of almost two dozen people, giving it an intimacy and a folksy charm that makes you feel in that moment that you are the only person in the world that matters.

She watches me as I walk toward her, a little like a jungle cat assessing prey, her manicured talons – more lethal fuchsia than mere red – folded benignly in her tiny lap. She sits like a schoolgirl, perfectly erect posture, slim legs crossed demurely, the ankle displaying a lot of lean leg, and ending in a pair of clear five-inch heels, the kind Cinderella must have worn.

Parton was raised 207 miles east of here, in Sevierville, Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children of a dirt-poor tobacco farmer and his wife. She got her start when her uncle Bill Owens heard her sing as she washed dishes, and started bringing her to country fairs and churches to perform.

She got her first guitar at 10

She wrote her first song aged five and began appearing on local radio and TV shows at nine. She got her first guitar at 10, and by 13, when most girls were thinking about football stars and lipstick colours, she had already recorded her first single, “Puppy Love”, for a small Louisiana label Goldband Records, and had appeared on the Grand Ole Opry.

She was on a Greyhound bus the day after she graduated high school, and she was signed as a songwriter for Combine Publishing, and then a recording artist for Monument Records. After hearing one of her early recordings, the misleadingly titled “Dumb Blonde”, Porter Wagoner sought her out for his syndicated TV show, setting her on a course that would eventually result in more than 3,000 songs written, 26 No 1 hits, 100 million sales and eight Grammys.

Gingerly stepping over thick black cables and picking my way around her staff, publicists, photographers, stylists and makeup people, I note that there are no hangers-ons in a Partonian universe. Everyone has a function, the purpose to ensure everything works like a well-oiled machine.

Parton is all business today

Behind us is a backdrop with a remarkably lifelike vista of downtown Nashville, even though we are 20 minutes away. But even more remarkable is Dolly herself. Her waist couldn’t be more than 20 inches, and is made to look even smaller by her nipped-in Meyer lemon-coloured jacket. Underneath she’s wearing a black blouse that extends far down over her perfectly manicured nails, rather like someone suffering from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, or something Conor Oberst might wear under his hoodie.

Her small hands are bedecked with an oversized black cocktail ring and rather modest diamonds, and her skirt is no more than strips of black chiffon that skim her legs when she walks, a little like a cheerleader’s culottes. It’s the same outfit she wore a month before on the Today show, the toprated US morning show, announcing FireChaser, the latest ride at her theme park, Dollywood.

Parton is all business today. You can tell because she’s not exposing any cleavage, two of her best assets restrained in a good bra and a high neckline. But you can tell more by the style of the wig she’s wearing, always a dead giveaway of her mood and intention. Today it’s rather shaggy and flat, with a few wayward spiky bits that makes you think of Joan Jett’s hair circa 1977. In a good way. None of that “the higher the hair, the closer to God” stuff.

“I pray that God will let me shine with his light”

“Nice boots!” I hear as I climb up two small steps to a platform in the center of the soundstage, momentarily blinded by two huge lights aimed at a pair of black leather club chairs placed at a 45° angle to encourage conversation. As if the two of us are having a friendly chat and not looking at two cameras pointed at us.

Between us is a small red table. I tell myself not to get swept up in her golden glow and forget my journalistic impartiality, but it’s hard. I remember what the late film critic Roger Ebert said when he met her at the premiere of 9 To 5: “I left the room in a cloud of good feeling.” He asked fellow critic Gene Siskel what he thought. “This will sound crazy,” Siskel told him, “but when I was interviewing Dolly Parton, I almost felt like she had healing powers.”

“Do you?” I ask her.

“I pray every day and certainly every night before I go onstage,” Parton tells me. “I pray that God will let me shine with his light. And to let me be a blessing and not have people idolise me, because I do not like the idol stuff,” she says resolutely, leaning forward in her chair. “If they see a light in me, I want them to think it’s the light of God. And even if I don’t get to heaven, if I can help somebody else head in a better direction, that makes me happy.”

She looks straight into your eyes

If anyone is going to heaven, it’s Dolly Parton. She already looks like an angel you’d put atop the Christmas tree, all creamy alabaster skin and dancing eyes. Add all the good works. Creating 3,000 jobs for Sevierville with Dollywood, employing almost every one of her relatives. Then there’s the 70 million books she’s given away to children through her Imagination Library. She seems too good to be true.

But after five minutes in her presence, you no longer even consider she’s not genuine. It’s the way she looks straight into your eyes when you ask a question. It’s the little gestures she makes, like a small bird. It’s how she calls you by your name. If it’s a trick, I no longer care. It’s why so many people truly love her. On a recent visit to QVC, the shopping network, for a live show and to sell her CD, the host told her no less than 17 times how much she loved Parton. She gets that a lot.

“Just suppose that you don’t like someone you meet. Does that ever happen?” I ask, not so innocently.

“Well, of course I don’t like everyone,” she says in her high honeyed voice. “But I know we’re all God’s children. I try to go right to that God light in everybody, even if I don’t think it’s here. If a person don’t look right. Or they’re not acting right. I know that there’s that little spark in there.”

“Sometimes you just physically and emotionally can’t hardly keep up…”

So what do you say to yourself when it’s hard to find?

“Sometimes I just say, ‘Gee, doesn’t he have nice eyes?’ And be done with it.”

You have been in the spotlight for so long, is there a small zone of privacy in your life?

“My life is good,” she counters. “I’ve managed that really well. When I’m home, I’m really home. When I’m with my husband, I’m totally with him. We have our life. If I’m with good friends, if I’m get a sister night with my sisters, we plan it and we love it and we spend all that time just being us and doing what we do. We laugh, we cry, we do whatever. But I manage. It’s like you have to, because this is what I do. I’ve dreamed myself into a corner, so I have to be responsible for all of the things I’ve dreamed and I’ve seen come true. I’ve been blessed that my dreams come true. But there’s a big responsibility. It’s wearing. Sometimes you just physically and emotionally can’t hardly keep up…

“I never think of myself as a star”

“You can’t say no, exactly. It is how it works, and even when you’re sick you can’t take the time to be sick, you have to plan around that. You have to manoeuvre. It’s like anything else you do. How I look at my business and how I’ve conducted my business. I have to conduct, just like I say when I’m home, I’m home. But just like, even when you start having ailments you’ve got to say, you know what, I’ve got to set aside some time to take care of that. I’ll go as far as I can… so you just have to plan everything. But, this is what I do.

“I never think of myself as a star. I think of myself as a working girl, always have. That’s why I never had any ego problems. I’m thankful and grateful. And I look at the body of work I’ve done sometimes and I’m just shocked by it. I think, ‘Lord, how in hell did I get all that done? In this many years.’ But I did it.”

“A lot of people my age have given up, but not me. I plan to be doing this for my entire life.”

Parton wrote nine of the 12 songs that appear on Blue Smoke, many of them not of recent vintage.

“The Cherokee word ‘shaconage’ meant land of blue smoke”

“Songs usually demand to be written, but in this case, I had a lot of songs in the can. ‘Blue Smoke’ I wrote years ago, and I used to do it onstage, as it was just a fun song to do. A lot of fans remembered it, and kept saying, ‘Why don’t you ever put that out?’ So when we got ready to do this, I thought, ‘Blue Smoke’, that’s a great title.

“I guess a lot of it comes from the Smoky Mountains… the Cherokee word ‘shaconage’ meant land of blue smoke, that’s what they called the Great Smoky Mountains. And when I did my bluegrass album, The Grass Was Blue, I was going to travel with a bluegrass band, and at one time I was going to call them Blue Smoke.”

Parton has been known to write a song a day, but sometime they need a little help. So what does she do to shake the songs loose? “I do some of my best work when I’m reading. I always keep a notepad nearby. While one part of my mind is reading, another part of my mind is doing something else. And yet I never lose the story. But I’ll just stop. I’ll work for 10 or 15 minutes doing something entirely different.

“I fast and pray for a few days”

“Then I cook. And I love to get in the kitchen when I’m getting prepared to write, because if I’m in a good creative mood, my food is spectacular. If my food is spectacular, my writing’s going to be spectacular. But really, one of my favourite things to do in the world is to have time set aside, like two or three weeks, to say I’m just going to go write. Go up to my old mountain home. I fast and pray for a few days to get myself kind of in a spiritual place, even get through the headaches and everything with the fasting ’til I get kind of – yeah, I hate to fast. But once I get into the writing, then it starts to be creative and then I can cook.

“Years ago,” she continues, “I used to wake, it was almost like, it was just a thing. I would wake up at three o’clock every day. But now that I’m older I’m waking up earlier and earlier. I go to bed early, but I get up really early because I love the mornings. That’s my time. Nobody else around, everybody asleep, all the energies have died down and I feel, like, God’s just waiting to come there.

“I’ve said before I think about God as a farmer, and he’s always throwing stuff out. And I want to be one of those early people that get some of that stuff before it gets picked through. I always feel like the world is settled about that time. So I have a clearer direction… Yeah, well, see, we have our time. That’s my time, anywhere from like midnight to 6am.

“I’d invent God if there wasn’t one”

“I’ll get up, I’ll do my spiritual work, I’ll answer mail or I’ll call in messages, and I always do my affirmations, my spiritual work, my reading, my Scriptures. But I always do that, then a lot of times I write songs, especially if I’m writing for something, just like when we wrote a lot of stuff for Blue Smoke, some of the new stuff. That’s when I work on it. In the wee hours, because it’s quiet.” There’s a pause, then she says, “I am very spiritual. I’m not religious at all but I totally believe in that. I can’t imagine anyone not believing in something bigger than us. I’d choose to believe it even if it wasn’t so. I’d invent God if there wasn’t one, too.”

Funny, that’s what they say about Dolly Parton.