'Music is a great connector': How Dolly Parton became one of the world's best-loved stars
Apart
from her songwriting prowess, the singer – who has died aged 80 – gave
little away about her private life, and presented an almost cartoonish
public image. We examine her enduring appeal.
I
witnessed the Dolly effect first-hand at the Glastonbury Festival in
2014, when she drew one of the biggest crowds in the event's history. It
was an achievement made all the more remarkable by the fact that only
two of the songs she recorded – Jolene and the Kenny Rogers duet Islands
in the Stream – have ever made the UK Top 40. Throw in the
floor-filling 9 to 5, and the showstopping I Will Always Love You, and
she still has just four undeniably famous songs in her vast catalogue:
far fewer than Kylie Minogue, Barry Gibb or other artists to have played
the Sunday afternoon legend slot. Her between-song patter, polished to a
high shine, was the primary source of delight. Festival-goers enjoyed
the music but they loved the person even more.
Getty Images
Parton attracted a crowd of more than 180,000 when she performed at Glastonbury in 2014 (Credit: Getty Images)
Parton's
fame used to have two distinct lanes. One was musical. As a writer and
performer, she sits at country music's top table with Hank Williams and
Johnny Cash. She could play around 20 instruments, including the fiddle,
dulcimer, mandolin and pan-flute. She wrote, by her estimation, around
3,000 songs, 175 of which are featured in a book, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics.
In the early 1970s she was on such a roll that a single session in 1973
yielded both Jolene and I Will Always Love You. "At the end of the day,
I hope that I will be remembered as a good songwriter," she wrote in
Songteller. "The songs are my legacy."
The
other Dolly, the one I grew up with, was a jovial, self-deprecating
talk-show regular and spoofable symbol of US excess. One example of her
pop-culture ubiquity is the 1981 Two Ronnies sketch in which Ronnie
Barker donned a platinum-blonde wig and fake bosom to play "Polly
Parton". Jokes about Parton's chest, many of which she made herself,
became such a trope in British culture that when scientists cloned a
sheep from a mammary gland cell in 1996, they called it Dolly. No wonder
her songwriting chops were often eclipsed.
Dolly Parton was a master of distraction who wore her somewhat cartoonish public image like a suit of armour
In
recent years, however, the two lanes converged, and ascended to a
higher plane of celebrity. Fuelled by her Glastonbury triumph, her 44th
album, 2014's Blue Smoke, became her most successful ever in the UK,
while Netflix followed a drama series based on her songs, Dolly Parton’s
Heartstrings, with a loving documentary, Here I Am, and a seasonal
special, Dolly Parton's Christmas on the Square. The hit nine-part
podcast Dolly Parton's America was predicated on the idea that she was a
uniquely unifying figure in a divided nation. Even now that the
discourse around music is often hotly politicised, Dolly Parton largely
escaped being labelled "problematic". She was worshipped by different
sectors of her fanbase as a pioneering feminist heroine, a business
phenomenon, an LGBTQ ally, a patriotic icon and a cultural ambassador
for the working-class South.
Alamy
Parton combined her country roots with being a pop culture icon (Credit: Alamy)
It
helped that Parton was a black-belt interviewee, fully aware of her
kitsch value, using humorous "Dollyisms" to avoid any controversy and
kept most of her private life and opinions under wraps. She was a master
of distraction who wore her somewhat cartoonish public image like a
suit of armour. "She gives away very little," says her 9 to 5 co-star
Lily Tomlin in Here I Am. "There's a mystery about her." Parton herself
says: "People feel like they know me." Both claims are true. Her Q
Score, which measures the appeal of celebrity brands, was one of the
highest in the world, with one of the lowest negative ratings. Not
everybody loved Parton but very few people hated her. "I enjoy being
loved," she told the Guardian in 2019. How did Dolly Parton become the world's sweetheart?
Right from the start, Dolly Parton was neutering criticism by owning it
Parton's
origin story is the stuff of country songs, including some of her own,
such as Coat of Many Colors and My Tennessee Mountain Home. Born in
1946, she grew up "dirt poor" in a one-room cabin on the banks of
Tennessee's Little Pigeon River with six brothers and five sisters. As a
kid, she used to imagine that the chickens in the yard were her fans.
She became a child star on local radio and TV, recording her first
single at 13 and moving to Nashville the day after she graduated from
high school. There she wrote several hits for other artists while still
in her teens, before scoring her first solo hit in 1966 with Dumb
Blonde. Right from the start, she was neutering criticism by owning it.
Ballads of woe
Songteller
may surprise some casual fans with the bleakness of her early output.
Starting with Hello, I'm Dolly in 1967, Parton's first few albums
specialised in what she called "sad ass songs": empathetic stories about
horribly mistreated working-class women spiced with the bloody
melodrama of the Appalachian folk ballads that had soundtracked her
childhood. Subjects included suicide, miscarriage, alcoholism, drug
addiction, homelessness, incarceration, murder and arson. She expressed
the pain of invisible women in a voice that rang pure and true. In the
heyday of feminist country songs by women who didn’t call themselves
feminists – Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Jeannie C Riley – she sang, in
1968's Just Because I'm a Woman, "My mistakes are no worse than yours/
Just because I'm a woman."
Getty Images
Parton took on a more glamorous image and more commercial material in the mid-1970s (Credit: Getty Images)
Parton
really hit her songwriting stride in the mid-1970s, when her
controlling mentor Porter Wagoner, a Nashville singer and impresario 19
years her senior with whom she sang as part of a duo, encouraged her to
develop a more glamorous image and more commercial material. Jolene was a
radical twist on the "cheating" genre, making the narrator desperate
and helpless rather than vengeful, and entranced by the woman who
threatens to ruin her life. It has since been covered by hundreds of
artists, including the White Stripes and Miley Cyrus (Parton's
god-daughter), and was one of Nelson Mandela's favourite songs. I Will
Always Love You turned her split from Wagoner into a timeless break-up
song, later made famous by Whitney Houston. The Bargain Store is an
expertly extended metaphor about a woman whose life is piled high with
broken dreams, painful memories and things in need of mending.
Parton shrewdly decided that if she was going to be a punchline, then she was going to write it herself
Parton
was enough of a draw to headline the annual country festival at Wembley
Arena in 1976 but the following year she transformed herself into a pop
superstar with her first US platinum album, Here You Come Again. This
crossover phase rolled on into the 1980s with her starring role and
Oscar-nominated title song in the workplace satire 9 to 5 and Islands in
the Stream. Like most of her pop hits, that wasn't one of her
compositions – her celebrity was overtaking her songwriting.
Alamy
Parton stayed close to her 9 to 5 co-stars Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda; the film was later made into a musical (Credit: Alamy)
"People thought I had sold out," she told Rolling Stone in 1980.
But those pop albums "got me where I wanted to be". The journalist
agreed: "If ever somebody figured out the American dream and made it
work, it's Dolly Parton." That's when she hit the talk-show circuit with
a vengeance, responding to depressingly predictable jokes about her
breasts by cracking better ones: she once quipped that when she burned
her bra, it took the fire department three days to extinguish the
flames. In retrospect, the tittering misogyny is appalling but Parton
shrewdly decided that if she was going to be a punchline, then she was
going to write it herself.
Even
before the hits dried up in the '90s, Parton was turning herself into a
heavyweight brand, opening the Dollywood theme park in Pigeon Forge,
Tennessee in 1986. She had another memorable movie role in Steel
Magnolias while, behind the scenes, her company Sandollar Productions
was responsible for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
She also became a beloved philanthropist, funding scholarships, wildlife charities, hospitals and a literacy programme
that has given away more than 100 million books to children. After a
back-to-her-roots bluegrass phase, Parton made a successful effort to
revive her sales, starting in 2008 with the self-referential Backwoods
Barbie: "I'm just a backwoods Barbie in a push-up bra and heels/ I might
look artificial but where it counts, I'm real." It's a good line but to
younger fans, the fact that authentic talent can coexist with
presentational artifice doesn't need spelling out like it did in the
days of second-wave feminism. Her reputation was practically
bullet-proof.
Alamy
Parton
combined a love of glamour with an ability to skewer herself; she has
said “I look fake, but my world is real to me” (Credit: Alamy)
Parton
remained publicly apolitical at a time when it would seem impossible to
be apolitical. In Dolly Parton's America, she shut down political
questions: "I don't do politics. I have too many fans on both sides of
the fence." The easy explanation is that she put business before
principle, but for Parton those two instincts weren't in opposition. She
was by nature a bridge-builder and unifier, with a talent for smoothing
troubled waters.
Until
2018, one of Dollywood's main attractions was the Dixie Stampede, a
dinner-theatre spectacle which divided the room into North and South
before bringing both sides together. In 2017, Slate’s Aisha Harris, who
is black, published a critical piece headlined Springtime for the Confederacy.
Harris called the Dixie Stampede "the Lost Cause of the Confederacy
meets Cirque du Soleil. It's a lily-white kitsch extravaganza that
play-acts the Civil War but never once mentions slavery." With Parton's
blessing, Dollywood's management promptly reinvented the show by
dropping the Dixie label and the blue-and-grey uniforms. When
conservative fans protested that she was erasing history, as if the
Civil War had involved stunt-riding and unlimited lemonade, Parton
responded that she just didn't want to make anyone feel bad.
Parton celebrated understanding and forgiveness as a means of transcending rancour and shame. Her inclusivity was limitless
Parton
did politics in her own way. In 2005, she outraged some of those same
fans by writing a song for Transamerica, a movie about a trans woman,
and donating another to Love Rocks, a LGBTQ benefit album. She prefered
bringing people in to calling them out. It's perhaps the same reason
that she acted in a feminist manner yet recoiled from that F-word. It's
why, in 1980, she insisted that 9 to 5 wasn't "women's lib", yet
staunchly defended Jane Fonda against people who had never forgiven her
for her strident anti-war activism. In her life, as in so many of her
songs, Parton celebrated understanding and forgiveness as a means of
transcending rancour and shame. Her inclusivity was limitless.
Parton
could walk this political tightrope because she displayed good
intentions in everything from her songs to her philanthropy, and her
fans fundamentally believed in them. "I've never seen the devotion her
fans have for her in anyone else," Fonda says in Here I Am. "It's quite
extraordinary." In her teaser video for A Holly Dolly Christmas Special,
Parton said: "I think that music is a great connector, just is that
universal language that everybody enjoys. Right now, during this time,
it's important to put as much love, as much light, and as much joy, as
you can out there to the people."
In
2020, she released a new song called When Life Is Good Again to raise
spirits during the Covid-19 pandemic. The song positioned her as a
healer, promising not only better times to come but a better, warmer,
kinder way of living with one another, summed up by this quintessential
Parton lyric: "Let's open up our hearts/ And let the whole world in."
Perhaps it was a sappy sentiment – but when it came from Dolly Parton,
the great includer, you knew it wasn't just moonshine.
Russia has no warships left in the Mediterranean for the first time in more than a decade
Beyond Ukrainian strikes that have significantly degraded the Black Sea Fleet, the remaining warships are now being forced to escort critical oil tankers to prevent them from being seized.
According to NATO officials speaking to The Telegraph, the vessels have been pulled out to escort Putin’s sanctioned oil tankers a priority Moscow now considers more important than projecting power at sea. With Western countries seizing Russian commercial ships and describing the moves as sanctions enforcement, Putin sees those tankers as vital economic lifelines that must be protected.
The strain runs deeper: Ukrainian strikes have heavily damaged the Black Sea Fleet, Turkey continues to keep the straits closed to Russian warships, and reliable access to Syria’s Tartus base has been lost after the Assad regime was toppled in 2024. The result, officials say, is a surface fleet in “shambles” or stretched too thin, that simply cannot cover both missions at once.
Rolls-Royce completes $1 billion Indiana investment to expand U.S. engine production for B-52, C-130J, MV-75 and MQ-25 programs
Rolls-Royce has completed a $1 billion
overhaul of its manufacturing, assembly and engine-test operations in
Indiana after a decade of investment. The project is the company’s
largest investment in the United States and expands capacity for several
major American military aviation programs.
https://youtu.be/rbWbBkwppE8?si=NeZmLye080Rcfvie
The
work modernized advanced manufacturing across the Indianapolis campus
and added new ground-test facilities. Rolls-Royce also established an
altitude test facility in West Lafayette.
“This billion-dollar
investment is about more than buildings and test cells — it is about
delivering for the American warfighter, on time and at the standard our
customers expect. We made this investment because it was the right thing
to do for U.S. national security and for the future of Rolls-Royce,”
said Adam Riddle, president of Defense and chief executive of
Rolls-Royce North America.
The Indiana operations will support
future engines for the U.S. Air Force’s B-52 strategic bomber and the
U.S. Army’s MV-75 Cheyenne. The campus also builds and tests engines for
the V-22 Osprey, U.S. Navy MQ-25A Stingray and C-130J.
Rolls-Royce
said Indianapolis produces more of its defense products than any other
company site worldwide. The operation employs about 3,500 people,
including a workforce represented by the United Auto Workers, and
supports thousands of additional supply-chain jobs in Indiana.
“The
engines built in Indianapolis power the aircraft our warfighters depend
on, and this investment strengthens the American defense industrial
base at a moment when we need it most. Rolls-Royce is proving that we
can manufacture the most advanced military technology in the world right
here in Indiana,” said Indiana Senator Jim Banks.
Rolls-Royce has
invested more than $1.5 billion in U.S. facilities and nearly $2.5
billion in research and development over the past decade. The company
said its American operations contributed $6.2 billion to the national
economy in 2024 and supported more than 30,000 jobs across 26 states
when research spillover was included.
The company estimates that
every dollar invested by the U.S. government in Rolls-Royce returns
about four dollars to the American economy. The Indianapolis campus also
houses LibertyWorks, an advanced propulsion research organization
supported by a $75 million, 10-year alliance with Purdue University.
An ex-business owner who turned private trader applying technical analysis to trade major FX pairs and indies, commodities and KL futures. He used to write a weekly column in a Chinese daily on local futures markets. A self confessed stern supporter of the Far Right and nothing apologetically about it.
Tun Marvin is not an investment advisory service, nor a registered investment advisor or broker-dealer and does not purport to tell or suggest which securities you should buy or sell for themselves. I may hold positions in the financial instruments discussed here. You understand and acknowledge that there is a very high degree of risk involved in trading all financial instruments. I assume no responsibility or liability for your trading and investment results. Factual statements on this blog site are made as of the date stated and are subject to change without notice.
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