From The Wall Street Journal:
In the late 1960s, Dolly Parton got her big break as the “girl singer” on “The Porter Wagoner Show,” a syndicated television program that brought hard-core honky-tonk and down-home humor into the living rooms of America. It may be hard to believe now, but back then Ms. Parton was only the second most flamboyant performer onstage. One of country music’s most magnetic stars, Wagoner had a peroxide pompadour and eye-popping, rhinestone-studded Nudie suits that defined Nashville glitz. Meanwhile, “Miss Dolly,” as he called her, was kept buttoned up in demure outfits despite her natural radiance and zest.
Underpaid and underappreciated, Ms. Parton would later compare her seven-year stint with Wagoner to the time that indentured servants were required to work in order to earn their freedom. It was indeed a raw deal, but it was worth it. It gave her national exposure and performing experience with a peerless entertainer twice her age. It also allowed her to hone her songwriting talent, which had brought her to Nashville in 1964 as an 18-year-old from the Smoky Mountains.
One day, as the Wagoner tour bus headed to the next town, something caught Ms. Parton’s fancy. “We rode past Dover, Tennessee, and my mind started going,” she recalls in “Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics” (Chronicle, 376 pages, $50). “There was this field of clover waving in the wind. So there we were, Dover-clover, and that started me off: ‘The sun behind a cloud just cast a crawling shadow o’er the fields of clover. And time is running out for me. I wish that he would hurry down from Dover.’ ”
The verses that flowed from this roadside epiphany told a story from the point of view of a pregnant girl deserted by her lover and abandoned by her scandalized parents. Alone but still hoping for her lover’s return, she decides to have the baby, which is stillborn. With its Southern Gothic overtones, “Down From Dover” evokes the dark fatalism of the mountain ballads that Ms. Parton heard as a child. Its subject matter was taboo for country radio when it appeared on a 1970 album, so “Dover” was never the hit that she thought it could be. But it remains a favorite of Ms. Parton and many of her fans, and it has enjoyed an afterlife as one of her most covered songs, not only by country singers (Skeeter Davis) but also by campy pop sirens (Nancy Sinatra) and New Wave chanteuses (Marianne Faithfull).
“Down From Dover” is one of 175 Parton compositions over a six-decade career featured in “Songteller,” a lavishly illustrated compendium of annotated lyrics and back-story anecdotes. The songs range freely across genres, from classic country weepers to proto-feminist hits like “Just Because I’m a Woman” to frothy upbeat pop crossovers; from stark acoustic bluegrass and movie-soundtrack blockbusters like “9 to 5” and “I Will Always Love You” to Broadway show tunes. It is only a portion of Dolly Parton’s staggering output of 450 recorded songs.
A pair of timely new studies, by a journalist and a musicologist, both unabashed Dolly fans, trace the thematic threads that run through this canon. Both offer reappraisals of Ms. Parton as a complex and often contradictory artist overshadowed by her larger-than-life image as an entertainer and the proprietor of a multi-media empire. Sarah Smarsh’s “She Come by It Natural” (Scribner, 187 pages, $22) is a bracing personal account that celebrates how Ms. Parton has given a liberating voice to an often ignored segment of the American working class—resilient and independent-minded blue-collar women. Lydia R. Hamessley’s “Unlikely Angel” (Illinois, 286 pages, $19.95) offers a scholarly analysis of representative songs, as text and in performance, to explore Ms. Parton’s creative process.
. . . .
From self-described “Backwoods Barbie” to American Bard may seem a stretch, but there is merit in the argument that, for too long now, Ms. Parton’s formidable body of work has been overlooked for the sake of her relentlessly scrutinized body. As Ms. Smarsh puts it, Dolly Parton has had to “answer more questions about her measurements than her songwriting.”
. . . .
In fact, the lyrical content at the heart of “Songteller” shows the wide sweep of her oeuvre, a blend of darkness and light with natural affinities for the scorned and the misunderstood. There are outcasts and misfits of all sorts: hermits, prostitutes, winos, orphans, clairvoyants, gamblers and, not least, resourceful women of all stripes, but mostly poor and rural, in every conceivable predicament. Wordplay and O. Henry-like plot twists abound. No subject is off-limits: suicide, insanity, lust, faith and doubt, adultery, depression, illegitimacy; there is even a song called “PMS Blues.”
. . . .
Some of Ms. Parton’s best-known tear-jerkers, such as “Me and Little Andy,” about an abandoned girl and her puppy seeking refuge in a storm, have been savaged by critics through the years. (“As heinous as any of her past offenses against good taste,” wrote one.) In fact, these songs, concert staples still beloved by fans, reveal Ms. Parton working in the tradition of the sentimental Victorian-era parlor tunes with which, we learn, her mother serenaded her.
Ms. Hamessley supplements her close readings (and close listenings) with incisive comments from Ms. Parton, who sent responses via cassette to the author’s inquiries, mostly about her native Appalachia’s folk roots. When asked about the early 19th-century hymn “Wayfaring Stranger,” whose stark melody re-appears in a number of her compositions, the now 74-year-old Ms. Parton dredged up a childhood memory of an old man at a local church in faded overalls who stood up mid-service and sang it impromptu: “It was the saddest, most beautiful, most lonesome thing I’d ever heard,” she tells Ms. Hamessley.
. . . .
By the time of her 1973 nostalgia-drenched album “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” her boss Wagoner had had enough. As her producer, he controlled much of what she recorded, often in slick arrangements that went against her wishes. For him, the money was in love songs. “Dolly, nobody gives a shit about ‘Mama’s Old Black Kettle,’ or ‘Daddy’s Working Boots,’ ” he told her. “Who cares?” Her response was “Jolene,” her biggest hit yet, garnering her new fans outside country music, and it wasn’t long before she broke free from Wagoner and went solo.
For Ms. Smarsh, a Kansas-based freelance journalist and author, Ms. Parton’s tumultuous relationship with Wagoner is only too familiar for the women Ms. Smarsh herself grew up with on the Kansas plains. Through the years, and even after Wagoner’s death in 2007, Ms. Parton has played down and publicly forgiven the abusive treatment at his hands. Ms. Smarsh puts back the hurt and sting.
“Parton had left home for the lights of Nashville and found success,” she writes. “But, in some ways, she was just as trapped as she would have been as a knocked-up kid in a shack in Sevier County. . . . She wound up professionally and contractually bound to a man who fancied himself her husband, her father, her owner. . . . What she’d stepped into was the wealthier, show business parallel of a life she’d meant to escape.”
Bristling with sharp insights and righteous anger, “She Come by It Natural” is a moving account of how Ms. Parton’s music has helped “hard-luck women” make their own escapes from deadbeat men and dead-end lives. Women like Ms. Smarsh’s Grandma Betty, who survived a string of abusive husbands and helped raise Ms. Smarsh even as she juggled low-paying jobs. “When I was a kid, Betty would put one of Dolly’s tapes in the deck of her old car while we rolled down some highway,” she writes. “It’s the only music I remember her singing and crying to in that emotionally repressed Midwestern culture and class.”
. . . .
That mountain girl had left on a bus with her guitar and three paper bags full of dirty clothes, the hooting laughter of her high-school classmates ringing in her ears after she had announced on Graduation Day that she was headed to Music City to make it big.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)
PG is a sucker for stories about people who started with nothing and worked their way up. Dolly Parton certainly qualifies for that category.
Here’s a copy of an album cover from Ms. Parton’s “My Tennessee Mountain Home” album, released in 1973. Ms. Parton was born in a one-room cabin. The photo on the album cover is of a later family home, presumably a better one, where she spent much of her time growing up. She was the fourth of twelve children in her family. The last two children, twins, were born when Ms. Parton’s mother was 35. Ms. Parton’s father was illiterate.
She finished her education at Sevier County High School, graduating in 1964. Within a week she was in Nashville, trying to earn a living from her musical talent. Here’s a copy of her graduation photo.
For those who are interested, last year there was a 10 part podcast called “Dolly Parton’s America”, that would make an excellent primer/intro to the three books mentioned in the post. I highly recommend it.
Do I have the right link, or is there another series?
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly-partons-america
Yes. You should also be able to listen to it on most major platforms (I did on Stitcher). I thought it was very good.
One of the many reasons I admire Dolly Parton is the “Imagination Library” she created that gives free books to preschool children. (The organization provides the books, local organizations cover mailing costs.) My grandkids were so excited to get their books in the mail once a month.
“Down From Dover” … Its subject matter was taboo for country radio when it appeared on a 1970 album, so “Dover” was never the hit that she thought it could be. But it remains a favorite of Ms. Parton and many of her fans, and it has enjoyed an afterlife as one of her most covered songs …
This is perfect. A while ago I was talking with other writers about not being afraid to write “B-sides.” Some writers have it in their heads that they should gear all their efforts into writing stories they expect to be commercial successes, or award winners.
But some stories you know either will have a more niche audience, or can’t readily slot into a specific genre. Write them anyway. Publish them anyway. Put your heart into them, write them with the same skill you’d use for your “commercial” stuff. It may happen that a new genre appears that your story will fit into (which happened with a trunk story of mine), and it may happen that you are the one starting a new genre.
Regardless, I see no reason why singers can have B-sides, and movie directors can have B-movies, but writers “shouldn’t” have B-stories. Do as Dolly did, and write your “Down from Dover.”
The OP says Parton’s songwriting has been overlooked in favor of her measurements, which is sad if true. That may say more about the media covering her than her influence, though. The slow (33-rpm) version of “Jolene” popped into my YouTube feed one day; I never heard any version of that song before. On YouTube alone I see so many people covering “Jolene” — the White Stripes? — or pitch-shifting the slow version so Dolly’s voice comes through. Fans love her work enough to engage with it in various ways, and that’s a reward, too.
Actors do “B” movies, too.
The smart ones, anyway. But in their eyes the “B” flicks are the commercial blockbusters that provide the money to do theater or Indie movies on the side, often uncredited. Bruce Willis at his peak was notorious for his “small” roles that he used to remind eveybody he was an actor first and a movie star second. Actors don’t think of them as “B” movies, though, but as passion projects.
I like that term.
(Some stories need telling, if only to annoy folks into actually *thinking*.)
With pen names it’s hard to tell which authors have been doing “B” stories (Rowling did, until unmasked) but it’s not unheard of. Asimov always said that writers should always have something to say with their story, otherwise why bother. The inverse strikes me as a bit more important: if you have something to day, tell the story. In the Indie age, you can put it out and let it find its audience–big or small–over time.
So yes, absolutely, Indies can and should do passion projects.
There’s no gatekeeper to stop them.
Asimov always said that writers should always have something to say with their story, otherwise why bother.
Because consumers don’t give a hoot what some author thinks about anything? They just want a good story.
Same with actors. Who cares what they think?
Are you saying that’s how you think, or are you saying you believe that’s how _other_ people think?
After an article about how Dolly Parton – a WRITER – wrote so many songs dealing with difficult subjects, and how her writing has affected so many people, I don’t understand how you come out of that with “Who cares what they think?”
I don’t understand how you come out of that with “Who cares what they think?”
It’s easy. I’m commenting on the Asimov cite in the article.
But specific to your questions,
1. I don’t care what some novelist thinks about anything. Maybe they think great thoughts. Maybe they don’t. I don’t care. All I am looking for is a good story.
2. I think many people share my ideas.
3. I suspect many novelists don’t. Who cares?
Read again.
The comment isn’t about readers but about authors.
He was talking about an author’s *motivation* to tell a specific story. One short comment that speaks volumrs, typical of a writer who often wrote short-shorts.
The matter of what a reader wants (or gets) out of a story is entirely separate.
In the creative fields there is always a certain amount of tension between self-expression and the purely commercial form of “writing to market” practiced by the Porter Wagoners, Kevin Feiges, and BPHs; “the same, but different”, “People want love songs”, and “the money is is effects spectaculars”. The latter may (or not) bring in the bucks but creatives create. And everything they create becomes a piece of themselves, whether they like it or not.
Having something to say is about being true to yourself, not just the checkbook.
Which is entirely the point of the OP.
Ms Parton wrote DOWN FROM DOVER and likely most of her other works because she had something to say and wanted the composition out into the world, regardless of whether it proved commercially fruitful, critically acclaimed, or ignored. It was an expression of her creativity and her will. She had something to say and she said it. Very Asimovian.
Read again.
The comment isn’t about readers but about authors.
He is indeed speaking of authors. And I am speaking of consumers, consumers who buy the authors’ product.
Asimov asks why an author would bother if he doesn’t have something to say. How about money?
A producer makes a product consumers wants, and makes money. The consumer gets what he wants, and pays money. Everyone but the folks sitting in the moral peanut gallery are happy.
And let’s not forget the correspondence from authors over the last ten years. Most seem far more concerned with sales and royalties than being true to themselves or anyone else.
I suspect authors who do tell us how true they are to themselves might disagree. But who cares what they think?
Not everybody writes *solely* for money.
In fact, writing *solely* for money is where “the same but different” comes from. Along with the subsequent glut and crash. How well are all those magic school and sparkly vamp clones doing these days?
Look at the top performers in every creative field and they got there doing it their way, not copying those that came before. Which is good because we’d be still reading James Michener knockoffs or maybe John Jakes historicals. Readers are a fickle bunch and chasing “what sells” will leave you two years behind forever.
And in case you haven’t noticed Dolly Parton is far richer doing it her way that Wagoner ever was chasing the lowest common denominator. She found her own audience that responded to her visions and narratives and it turned out to be bigger than the gheto Wagoner tried to bury her in.
Passion project is a better term, and going forward that’s the one I’m going to use. It gets to the heart of the issue, because people aren’t machines. Sure work-for-hire can be fun, writing-to-market can be fun; either of those can pay the bills. But the point of being creative, is to create.
I’ve been watching comics vloggers, and sometimes the name of an editor pops up, Jim Shooter. Apparently he was ruthless about purging comics that sold less than a particular threshold, I want to say ~$100k. And that’s fine if you employ a lot of people who want to buy groceries, and pay their mortgages with their paychecks. He was part of a company, and had a duty to that company. Writers as lone wolves don’t have those same constraints.
We talked before about Diana Gabaldon changing her genre in order to be true to the story she wanted to tell. If a writer has something to say, sometimes it must be “said” in a particular way, in order to be true to the story. If that way results in “Sandman” (niche) rather than “Superman” (mainstream), so be it. The lack of gatekeepers nowadays is a glorious thing,
+100.
To each their own. It’s all about priorities.
But the best and most enduring results come from the passion projects. They’re the ones that almost always stand out from the crowd of lowest common denominator sameness.
Underneath the flamboyant performer is a genuinely nice and caring woman. With an amazing voice.
And brains.
Lots and lots of brains.
Oh, yes.
You don’t write that many songs without brains.
Not if they’re *good* songs.
(Some music genres don’t require good songs.)
Hah! Flashback to the time my cousin and I heard “My Milkshake Brings All the Boys to the Yard” blasting on the speakers at a store.
“Is that all it takes to write a hit song? Jamie, we could do that.”
But Dolly Parton is one of the people I cite when I’m explaining the music business, and how the singer-songwriters can make bank. As opposed to those who only sing. When Whitney Houston died, Parton made money from stations playing “I’ll always love you” because she’s the one who wrote it.