Remembering Dolly Parton

0:00Propel Fitness Water. With Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. Sierra has all the best active and outdoor brands you need. From athletic stuff, like a full-court pickup game, swish, to athletic-ish stuff, like a half-mile stroll. Get those steps in. And for morning hikes up the mountain trail, good pace. It's a nighttime ghost choice from the camping chair. What a twist. Whatever level of active, Sierra loves it all. Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all.

0:42From athletic to athletic-ish, Sierra's got it. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling, just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

1:17This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Nomi Fry. And I'm Vincent Cunningham. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Now, you may have noticed a slight difference in the rhythm of our intro today. Usually there's a third chiming voice offering their name, too. As clear as a bell. That's right. Alex Schwartz is homesick today. So it's me and Nomi. She misses you. I'm sure you miss her. But there's a big thing happening. Last week, we lost one of the most beloved figures in really recent memory, Dolly Parton. News of Dolly's death was announced in a video from her family.

2:03And within minutes, it felt like a wave of love and admiration was breaking. Everywhere you looked, there were tributes to Dolly Parton. How did you, Nomi, how did you hear about the news? And what have you been seeing in the days since then? Well, I heard it through one of my group chats. There was a link shared from TMZ that said Dolly Parton had died at 80 years old. And, you know, it just kept coming from there. I mean, it was like a total outpouring in a way that, like, it didn't surprise. I mean, obviously, I knew that she was a beloved figure, but it really felt like seismic. Do you agree?

2:44Yeah, it was. Just like the mount and the tenor of the tributes? Instantaneous. Yeah. And, you know, we all, of course, had the sense that she was very, very beloved in her life. I've never heard a bad word said about her. Yeah. And still, it was shocking, the volume. There were digital signs on the Long Island interstate. You know, Jolene, don't speed. I will always love safe driving. I mean, just like everybody, every establishment you went into, every sort of situation that— Like the music was blasting immediately in like coffee shops. So yeah, just the real kind of like coast to coast, everywhere in between, horizon to horizon, kind of like a sweeping response of grief and love to this piece of news.

3:33Grief and love and a kind of joy that she ever existed. There was just a sort of, just a kind of sharing of people's favorite moments. So in that vein, we are talking today about Dolly Parton and what accounts for this immense sense of appreciation that has taken hold in the culture over the last week. When it comes to Parton's life and work, of course, it's impossible to be exhaustive. There's just too much to cover. So what we're going to do is call up three of our favorite, most illustrious New Yorker colleagues who are going to help us build a picture of who Dolly Parton was and what her legacy inevitably will continue to be.

4:12We will hear from the great Katherine Schultz, who wrote Dolly Parton's Postscript, as we call it here in The New Yorker. From the music critic Amanda Petrosich, who has agreed to the frankly impossible task of picking the three, just three out of a catalog of thousands, essential Dolly Parton songs. And finally, we'll talk with Lauren Michelle Jackson, who is such a great thinker on the topic of celebrity and fame. We'll talk with her about Dolly's absolutely singular status as an icon. So that's today on Critics at Large. All things Dolly Parton.

4:56Is there one piece of Dolly Parton's work that is especially near and dear to your heart? A song, an album, a movie? Well, I think, you know, this is like many people. One Dolly Parton text that I always enjoy going back to is 9 to 5, the movie she starred in with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 1980. And I watched it several times over the years, and I watched it again only a couple nights ago with my daughter in tribute to Dolly. And it's just like such a delight. The theme song, you know, was just like rollicking and exciting. And then the movie is such a kind of Looney Tunes comedy that has like heart and also kind of an ideological bent.

5:48It's just like such a delight. And Dolly is just like such a sweetheart in it. I'm afraid I got a little carried away. I'd just like to apologize to you. Oh, don't you worry about it, Mr. Hart. I've been chased by swifter men than you, and I ain't been caught yet. Shall we get back to our letter now? Well, yeah. Doralee, the, you know, put-upon secretary, who does her best until she snaps. Look, I got a gun out there in my purse. And up to now, I've been forgiven and forgetting because of the way I was brought up. But I'll tell you one thing. If you ever say another word about me or make another indecent proposal, I'm going to get that gun of mine, and I'm going to change you from a rooster to a hen with one shot.

6:30Don't think I can't do it. What about you, Vincent? My favorite Dolly Parton work of art, which I'm sure we're going to talk about, is the 1974 song Jolene. It's just brilliant. It's the minor key, the repetition of the name Jolene. It's just such a work of real, true, recognizable human emotion. And it's like Mount Rushmore to me. It's so good. Yeah. Okay, let's get into it. We're starting out hearing from Katherine Schultz. Katherine is a staff writer at The New Yorker and, as we said before, wrote The New Yorker's postscript, which is what we call obituaries, basically, for Dolly Parton. Hi, Catherine.

7:16Good morning. Hey, Catherine. So good to see you. You too. How are you guys? Good. Great. And maybe this is a bit of BTS about the process sometimes at The New Yorker. As it sometimes happens, minutes after the news of Dolly Parton's death, you, Catherine, had already texted your editor to say that you wanted to write her postscript for the magazine. So I guess we should start by asking just why you were so eager to write this lovely piece. I'm normally very reluctant to raise my hand for last minute assignments because I am typically an extraordinarily slow writer and I know my limitations. So I try not to volunteer for things that involve Swift turnaround.

7:55But I love Dolly and she's a hero in this household and a hero of my whole life. She had a great fan in the form of my father, who was, you know, a Jewish refugee who grew up from his teenage years on in Detroit. You know, not what you think of as like core country music audience. It wasn't coal country. It was very far from coal country. It's hard to scramble in a very different way, but very far from coal country. And that was, you know, part of what Dolly did was made a whole bunch of people fall in love with country music who didn't actually identify pre-existingly as country music fans. It just felt like the kind of thing that I knew so well and so deeply, obviously not as a human being, but as a body of work, as a figure in the world, that it didn't feel like the kind of heavy lift of, well, how will I do all the research and the reporting?

8:46I felt like I actually have a lot to say and I'd really like to say it. I mean, yeah, that's one of the surprises for me is how many people have so much to say that, like, there is this preexisting heroism and this preexisting intimacy. What is it, like, in your estimation that people respond to so strongly with her? I mean, you know, it's an interesting question. Speaking for myself, I think it's kind of the whole package, right? I mean, what's interesting about Dali is you could take any piece of the life and it would stand on its own two feet. It's, you know, the songwriting and the musical career just all by itself is jaw-dropping.

9:24I mean, decades upon decades of incredibly successful, funny, charming, moving music that reached generations after generations of people. You know, if that were your whole life, you'd think, I mean, amazing, right? We should all live such a life of creative genius and of bringing joy to people's lives in this way. But, of course, there was also Dolly Parton, the quite brilliant entrepreneur, right? An almost Oprah-level figure in her capacity, both for a kind of social savvy and for a business savvy. You know, plenty of celebrities loan out their names, as it were, you know, put their brand on other brands and sort of expand their personal fortune that way.

10:06But Dolly was quite different than that. She actually was the mind behind most of the enterprises she got involved in, most famously, of course, Dollywood. But I think for me, the thing that moves her over into the category of, you know, the ready word one reaches for is saint, right? The thing that moves her over into the category of— Culture hero, yeah. The cultural hero, exactly, is her incredible generosity, right? I mean, this is someone who came from nothing and might reasonably have felt the instinct as, you know, generations, for instance, coming up through the Great Depression to hoard everything they had, right?

10:44And she had the absolute opposite instinct, which was to give as much away as she could and to give back as much as she could. And she, you know, it's cliched to say, oh, never forgot where she came from. But, you know, remembering is one thing and doing is something else. And I mean, this woman gave away 300 million books and counting to American children and in countless other ways made her generosity known and palpable and important in every community that reached out for help, basically. That to me is the real legacy. Catherine, can you maybe walk us a little bit through Dolly's origins? Sure, I'd be happy to.

11:26So Dolly Parton was the fourth of 12 children born to a very kind of hardscrabble family, right? Barely above subsistence living. Her father, at the time she was born, her father was a sharecropper in Sevier County, Tennessee, meaning he didn't own the land. They owned essentially nothing. But it was a very, very hand-to-mouth living. And she writes about it really wonderfully. I think another kind of underestimated feature of Dolly, she was in a great way a self-mythologizer, but she was a great writer. There's good reason to believe she actually did write at least the first of her own memoirs.

12:08And she sounds just like she does in her song. She's quick-witted and comic. She has a wonderful kind of funny flair to her. But she writes quite frankly and beautifully and movingly about her upbringing and about the poverty of circumstance and the wealth of joy and family and community. and one aspect of that joy, of course, was music. You know, she had an uncle who was a gifted musician. Her mother sang all the time around the house and kind of brought, in this very Appalachian way, had brought this kind of old English and Welsh tradition of ballads and kind of homespun music into her life.

12:50So from very early on, she started singing at age six. You know, her professional debut was in her grandfather's church, the church being the other, like, deeply formative influence in her life. So she began singing in church. She quite quickly, by like, you know, 10 years old, was singing for the local radio station. So, you know, she started that at age 10, and by 13, there she is at the Grand Ole Opry, being introduced by Johnny Cash. She was truly, maybe more than anything else, just a natural-born performer. She just loved it. Speaking of that sort of English-Welsh mountain tradition, one of my favorite, you know, now there's all these clips running around the internet.

13:32One of my favorite clips is her in Ken Burns' country documentary. And she starts to sing like a little snippet of one of those mountain ballads. I never shall marry. If he should stay there seven years more. I've got to finish it. He took his hands both out of his pocket. His fingers were... And it's like she's immediately inhabited by it. You're talking about this love of performance. She's immediately like, you can just feel her whole sort of ancestry rolling through her in this amazing way. In the piece, I hope you don't mind if I quote you to you. It will make me cringe, but go ahead. You say that, you know, she's part Betty Boop, part Annie Oakley, part Abraham Lincoln.

14:23And then there's another part that right after that you say something that I really want to ask about. And it's about sort of maybe the construction of a persona and how this interacts with our, you know, our enjoyment of a figure. Those closest to her presumably knew some other Dolly, less rehearsed and likely deeper. The rest of us just got the surface, but who could feel cheated? The surface of Dolly was the point. like the surface of diamonds. I would just love to hear you talk maybe about the sort of the allure of her persona. Yes, she had this generosity, this personal relationship to other people that you had to kind of know more about her to know, but just seeing her on television was its own experience.

15:05It really was. What did you make of that presence, that persona? Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly right. And maybe, you know, in the years to come, as people feel like they have done right by her desire for privacy and the moment has come to share more stories, maybe we'll hear more about other things about Dolly Parton. Because, you know, one assumes there was some intense interior private part, in part because the persona was so polished, right? There was no way into it. It was a perfect entity. I think she understood how people saw her, right? Especially in those early decades. How could she not?

15:49Setting forth in the world as this incredibly ambitious young musician who also happens to be this kind of bombshell blonde, right? I mean, not the kind of looks you could overlook, right? And she made very early a very powerful choice, which was to just absolutely and completely step into that, right? You have a range of options in that moment. One is to buy out of the game entirely, because how maddening to be this incredibly gifted singer and this incredibly gifted songwriter. And all half the world, three quarters the world wants to talk to you about is like your breasts, frankly, your looks and these things that are utterly irrelevant to who you actually are and what you're actually capable of.

16:32That is like so frustrating. Dolly said, okay, you know, here I am. I have this incredible surface. I have this surface people keep reacting to. I am going to step into it and change it and polish it and refine it and make it even more impossible to overlook so that I get to be in control. That's tough. I would love to hear what that experience was actually like for her. And she, in a way, to her credit, decided just never to say. She just did the things she loved to do. Could we talk a little bit about the specifics of her philanthropy? So, yeah, I mean, her philanthropy was capacious and occurred on many fronts, some of which I'm sure will be forever unknown to us.

17:22She was not a particularly showy giver. but she did establish the Imagination Library which, you know, this is a program that will send any child in this country regardless of circumstances, regardless of income regardless of anything at all any child in this country will get a free book every month up until the age of five when they begin kindergarten and you can watch me I can actually barely speak about it without tearing up you know, when my first daughter was born And there were two things in the hospital that made me cry. And one was information from the National Diaper Bank, because you just think how heartbreaking to not have the most basic resources to take care of them.

18:03And the other was information. It was literally a sign up, like sign this baby up right now for the Imagination Library. And, you know, it was incredible, right? Like you have a new baby in this mind just ready to like absorb the whole world. And there is Dolly Parton with an institution she created to make sure that that kid will be invited into the just magnificent and vast world of books and stories and language. And she did that because her father never learned to read. And she wanted to do what she could to make sure that was never any other child's fate, which is a dream anyone could have.

18:42But, I mean, 300 million books. That is really something. Yeah, that is. Um, before we go, I'm just wondering if there's a song that's been on your mind in the days since she died? Sure. I mean, I could never pick a favorite, right? There's just so many, and they're so wonderful, and they're so different. But it is interesting, you know, I have been, since she died, I have been listening nonstop to the same song, which one of her later albums, Backwoods Barbie, there is a song on that album called Better Get to Living. And it is about exactly what the title says, you know, Better Get to Living, right?

19:20Like, life is short. None of it is a guarantee. None of it should be taken for granted.

19:41Thank you so much for being with us today. Catherine. Yeah, thanks for having me on. It was a ton of fun. I hope you're all just listening to Dolly Around the Clock. Same.

19:57In a minute, The New Yorker's Amanda Petrasich. Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

20:16sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes. Sierra has all the best active and outdoor brands you need. From athletic stuff, like a full-court pickup game, swish, to athletic-ish stuff, like a half-mile stroll. Get those steps in! And for morning hikes up the mountain trail, good pace to nighttime ghost stories from the camping chair. What a twist. Whatever level of active, Sierra loves it all. Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all.

20:55From athletic to athletic-ish, Sierra's got it. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

21:32We've been talking about Dolly Parton's life, and now we're going to be turning to her music. And we're getting help from an expert on this one. This is our beloved colleague, Amanda Petrasich, who writes about music for the magazine. Hey, guys. Can you hear me? Yes. We can hear and see you. It's a miracle. Welcome back. Oh, my God, I see your cat. Oh, yeah. He's usually very present on Zooms. Hopefully, we will not have to quarantine him elsewhere. No, I want him to be more present. Thank you so much for coming on. You are a dear friend of the pod, and I know you have a lot to say about Dolly.

22:14You know, there's the persona, the character, the entrepreneur, you know, the philanthropist, all of those things. But of course, she is first and foremost a musician. As a musician, what would you say makes her unique? It's funny because she's obviously beloved in this sort of massive, almost overwhelming way as we're seeing now. But I do think Dolly is low-key, like a little slept on, as it's insane to say, but a little bit slept on. You know, her musicianship is, in some ways, you know, can feel kind of incidental to her life and her personality and her charm and her wit. But I feel like her storytelling, you know, storytelling is so crucial to country music as a genre.

22:58It is sort of the engine on which the whole thing runs. And Dolly had such a unique and I think empathetic voice as a writer and also voice quite literally as a singer. There's this sort of lovely kind of ripple in her voice, a warble that I think only comes really from the holler. You know, it's like a real kind of country sort of tension and texture to it. And I think in the eulogizing we're seeing of her, I would love it if that, you know, if her skill and kind of acumen as a writer and as a performer took up a little more space in that conversation because I do think she was such an extraordinary musician.

23:37Yeah, it's so funny. I've been thinking, trying to figure out where I put her voice specifically. I was thinking about two people. I was thinking about Diana Ross and the Brazilian kind of, you know, again, culture hero, Caetano Veloso. Like people who are not vocal athletes, but it always sort of cuts through the tapestry of the song where they're really delivering songs in a way that is unforgettable. Yeah. And it's funny, too. There's like a little irony there, I think, in the bigness of her life and the bigness of her presentation. And then the relative smallness of her voice, and I mean smallness in the most complimentary way possible.

24:19I think she was an incredible singer. But there is something very sort of warm and tender and human in there that kind of works as an interesting contrast to, you know, the hair and the makeup and the rhinestones and the glam. To me, the tension between those things is so compelling. Yeah, that's such an interesting point, that contrast. And you know, Dolly Parton released some 3 ,000 songs over the course of her life. And today we ask you the frankly impossible task of bringing us three songs to talk about with us today. And I know it's hard, and yet I also know that you're up to this challenge because I have trust in you.

25:05So what are we going to go with first in this three-song track list that you've prepared? Sure. I think impossible not to start with Jolene. Yes. Which is, of course, probably Dolly's most iconic song. She recorded it in Nashville in 1973. It was a huge hit the following year. Jolene, Jolene, Jolene I'm begging of you, please don't take my man You know, she tells the story that she wrote this song after she realized her husband, Carl, was spending a lot of time at their local bank. Not the local bank. I know. Who among us has not lost a man to the local bank. He seemed, I guess, you know, beguiled by this sort of fair-skinned, red-haired teller.

25:55Your smile is like a breath of spring. Your voice is soft like summer rain. And I cannot compete with you, Jolene. He talks about you in his sleep. And there's nothing I can do to keep from crying when he calls your name Jolene. You know, she has a lot of almost this sort of, this sort of like throbbing, almost sort of sore admiration for this woman. Because Jolene is not the villain of the song. This sort of gets me every time I listen to that tune and I've heard it a gazillion times in my lifetime, which is remarkable to me. I think it's much easier, arguably much more fun to kind of villainize a romantic rival.

26:42But it takes incredible empathy to do what Dolly's doing here. And that's the thing that always gets me about Jolene. It's that Dolly, she's scared, but she's not angry. And that's why, you know, like Beyonce famously included a cover of Jolene on Cowboy Carter. And, you know, Beyonce can kind of do no wrong in many ways, but she tweaks the lyrics so that it becomes more confrontational and more aggressive. And it's sort of like, I'd love to see you try.