You don’t, I suspect, say no to Dolly Parton, which is why the roll call of names on her new rock album is so ridiculous. She sings Let it Be with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, with Mick Fleetwood on drums and Peter Frampton on guitar; she has Debbie Harry and Stevie Nicks, Joan Jett and Judas Priest’s Rob Halford. And Elton John. It’s not just the ageing greats – Lizzo is there too, on Stairway to Heaven. The album, Rockstar, Parton’s 49th, started with her inauguration to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which she initially felt unworthy of because she didn’t consider herself an artist in that genre. And so, at the age of 77, Parton became a rock star.
We meet in an expensive hotel in London where Parton has taken over the top floor. It is busy with assistants, bodyguards and publicists, though when I’m shown into a room where Parton, queenly, is to receive me – everything timed to the second – we are left alone. Not remotely grand, she is warm and funny, skilled at deflecting awkward questions with a joke. She is also luminous, as sometimes very famous people are, but with her it’s something else. Later, I realise it’s gratitude. “I’ve been grateful for every good thing ever happened,” she says. “God has always blessed me, surrounded me with good people. I pray that every day God will bring all the right things, all the right people, into my life.”
Recording these classic rock songs – the playlist is inspired largely by the favourites of Parton’s husband of nearly 50 years, Carl, “a real rock’n’roll freak” – has been “a big deal for me, and I felt very responsible. I didn’t want to maim them up, and I tried really hard to sing them well and stay as true as I could to the form, but with my voice.” Her version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird is, I think, even better than the original. Her roar of freedom, when you know the legend of her life story – the impoverished girl who grew up in the backwoods of Tennessee, defied all expectations and grew up to be the all-conquering country star – is made for it.
As well as the album, Parton is releasing a new book, Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones, which documents her life and career in clothes and costume (next, she is planning the small matter of launching a TV network). “I’ve been at this so long, I’ve worn some of the most bizarre things – my hairdos have always been so out there,” she says. “At the time you think you look good, then you look back on it, like, what was I thinking?” She laughs, but the book is wonderful, documenting the dresses made from sacks she wore as a child, and her “coat of many colours”, sewn by her mother from fabric scraps, to the most lavish stage costumes. Blond hair that gets bigger and bigger, like a cake rising; jumpsuits in every colour; dresses weighed down with rhinestones and pearls.
Parton has always been sure of her look, even when she was young, a look – as she has said before – modelled on the “town tramp”, a local woman who wore high heels and tight skirts, who Parton would look out for on trips into town. “She was flamboyant. She had bright red lipstick, long red fingernails. She had high-heeled shoes, little floating plastic goldfish in the heels of them, short skirts, low-cut tops, and I just thought she was beautiful. When people would say, ‘She ain’t nothing but trash,’ I would always say, ‘Well, that’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up.’”
Her grandfather, a preacher, and father, a sharecropper, both hated the way she dressed; her grandfather would even physically punish her. “I was willing to pay for it,” she says. “I’m very sensitive, I didn’t like being disciplined – it hurt my feelings so bad to be scolded or whipped or whatever. But sometimes there’s just that part of you that’s willing, if you want something bad enough, to go for it.” She wrote a song years later, she says – The Sacrifice, on her 2011 album Better Day – “and it kind of sums it up. It says, ‘I was gonna be rich no matter how much it cost / And I was going to win no matter how much I lost / Down through the years I’ve kept my eye on the prize / And you ask if it’s worth the sacrifice.’ I think it is, for me.”
She must have had real strength of character as a young woman to defy people, including later in her recording career, when record label executives wanted her to tone down her look. Parton smiles. “I’ve always been true to myself,” she says. “That was what my mama always used to say: to thine own self be true. I put a lot of stock in that. Everything I do, whether it’s my personality, how I conduct myself and business, or whatever, if I do it my way, according to what I understand and believe, there’s a strength in that. You can think, ‘I can stand by this, I can live by this.’” She did care what people thought, she says, “but I never cared so much that it keeps me from being me.”
For many years, Parton’s look seemed like a joke – one she was in on – and it certainly made people underestimate her. “Actually,” she says, “my look came from a very serious place. That’s how I thought I looked best. Sometimes that’s worked for me, sometimes it can work against you. It took me probably years longer to be taken serious, but I wasn’t willing to change it, and I figured if I had the talent, it’d show up sooner or later.”
The town tramp represented something else. When Parton looked around at the women she knew growing up in Tennessee, she saw hard work and drudgery, women worn down by years of child-rearing – her mother had 12 children by the time she was 35. “I did not want that for myself. My mom and my aunts – I grew up with women knowing how to be good mothers, but that was just not what I felt God had in mind for me. Because somebody’s got to entertain those people, to write songs about them. I can write a song as if I had a house full of kids, I can write a song as if I’ve got a cheating husband, even though I never did. But I know what it’s like; I’ve seen it, been around it. There’s no thing in this world that’s foreign to me, that I don’t get or understand.”
Music, she says, felt like a calling. But while she had her mother’s creativity and spirituality, she says she also inherited her father’s work ethic and business mind. “I like to think that I got the best of my dad and my mom. It’s kept me as a businesswoman, knowing what I need to do, not just to get out and sing.” The Parton empire, worth more than $500m, includes a theme park, Dollywood, and her contribution to the world has been immense. She estimates she has written 3,000 songs, of which about 1,000 have been recorded and released (some by other artists), and her philanthropy is world-famous: she has donated more than 218m ooks to children around the globe through her literacy programme, and in 2020 she contributed $1m to kickstart the development of a Covid vaccine.
Parton may have stopped touring, but her workload hasn’t slowed. She writes songs, she says, all the time, “and I’ve been writing since I was seven years old. I’ve always got something around to write on – chewing gum papers, napkins in a restaurant – I never know when an idea is going to hit me, and I do not like to lose them because usually they don’t come back. I’m sure I’ve lost so many great ideas because I didn’t have pen and paper.” Is it true she wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love You in the same session? She can’t remember if it was the same day, she says, but she recorded them on her same tape of songs-in-progress. “I wrote them in that same period of time,” she says.
It can’t have been easy to have been a young woman in the music industry in the 1960s and 70s. In meetings, she would often be dismissed, but she says she stood her ground. “I would just say, ‘I think I have something that we can all make some money off of, and get over the fact that I’m a girl here, because my mind is on something else.’” Having grown up surrounded by brothers and uncles, “I always knew how to manoeuvre in a crowd of men. I never slept with anybody to get ahead, because to me it wouldn’t be worth it. That don’t usually work in the long haul either.”
She must have experienced harassment. “Oh, I did, but I always knew how to put a man in his place without making him feel bad. If sometimes that don’t work, I’m also strong as a boy – I know how to push you off and get the hell away from you.” She had to fight men off? “I have, but that goes back to being a country girl.” And in her career? “Both,” she says. “And that’s a very uncomfortable situation. I was always able to get away before [a serious assault] would happen, but I feel sorry because some women are not able and some men are that aggressive.”
Parton has always refused to call herself a feminist, even though so many elements of her life point to it: her self-determination; her understanding of women’s lives (her 1968 song Just Because I’m a Woman is about double standards); her self-made millions; the 1980 film she starred in, 9 to 5, and the theme song she wrote for it, a political anthem for working women.
“I think words and titles just have such connotations,” she says. “When I think about a ‘feminist’, you think about women that are anti-men, and you think of women that have been so mistreated, they have to make some sort of a statement. I’m all about women, I’m all about empowering women, but I’m all about empowering all people – love and respect and uplifting [them].”
Equal pay for equal work is something she can get on board with; Parton is nothing if not a talented businesswoman. “If you do something great, you should be recognised and paid for it. So if that makes me a feminist, yeah.” Is Dolly Parton admitting to being a feminist? She laughs. “That title just never seemed to fit right with me, although there’s not a feminist out there that don’t say, ‘Dolly Parton does her job, a good example of what a strong woman can be.’ I’m all about living an example rather than preaching it.”
It’s all part of Parton’s famously apolitical stance. Why did she decide, early on, not to do politics? “Because you’re going to lose half your audience,” she says. “Even within my own family, especially the last few years since Trump and Biden, all that, it’s like we can’t even go to a family dinner any more. Especially if people are drinking – they get in a damn fight at the table.” She is dismayed at how polarised politics has become. “Don’t get so trapped where if you’re a Republican, you got to be this way, if you’re Democrat, you got to be that way. You’re not allowed to think nothing else. Well, how crippling is that? I’ve got as many Democrats as I do Republicans as fans, and I’m not going to insult any of them because I care about all of them. I ain’t that good a Christian to think that I am so good that I can judge people. That’s God’s job, not mine. So as far as politics, I hate politics. Hate politics.”
Doesn’t it become harder, though, not to take a stand? She does speak out when she feels she wants to, she points out – her new album features a track called World on Fire, though it’s a broadside at politicians in general, the world over. “I tried to say what I was thinking about all of it – can’t we rise above, some love, step up and make a change?” She looks momentarily exasperated, but she’s still smiling. “Whether it be about the world being on fire with hate and greed and climate change or whatever, you’re not even allowed to say you believe in certain things because you’re going to just lose a whole bunch of people that are so set in their ways, they wouldn’t believe it.”
Her refusal to get political is not, she insists, hypocritical (she has been criticised for making it as a business decision, with an eye on the bottom line). “It’s just that I see both sides of everything. I think people can change their views on a lot of things if they would open their eyes wide enough, or be willing to accept, ‘Well, maybe I’m wrong.’ But most people won’t change their mind because it makes them look weak and it’s like they have to stick with it. And that’s just stupid to me.”
At what point – as the podcast series Dolly Parton’s America put it – does her silence become potentially harmful? What would it take for her to speak out on something? Take last year’s ban on abortion in her home state, Tennessee. “I do not speak to that,” she says when I bring it up. “I try to steer away from the things that I know I don’t need to be talking about. But I have my own views on everything, of course I do.” I can’t imagine that anyone as compassionate as Parton, or as feminist – she laughs at this – would support the ban. “Well, I’m not saying. That’s out of my league. I’m a singer, I’m an entertainer.”
Dolly Parton’s America positioned her as “the great unifier”: in a country as divided as the US, precisely because she hasn’t laid down her opinions in public, she can be all things to all people. “I don’t know,” she says. “This is amazing to me how people look to me, that’s a big responsibility. There ain’t nobody that good. I’m not all that. I make a joke – I’m not even all there.” She laughs. “I try to just be a decent human being, try to use love as my great tool and weapon. I try to leave my heart, my eyes, my ears open, and my mouth closed, when I know it’s not the right thing to be doing.”
Parton has the vantage point of age. “I’m almost 78 years old. When you get older, you see everything, you’ve been through everything, and you can take a new spin on something that might have been right for you 10, 15 years ago.” She has no regrets, she says. “My joke [is that] if I have any regrets, it’s that I got caught with some of the stuff that I had no regret about.” I don’t know how true that is – of course she won’t tell me, she says with a laugh – but I suspect Dolly Parton has always done what Dolly Parton wants. “Whatever I do,” she says, “it feels like the thing to be doing at the time.”
Behind the Seams by Dolly Parton (Ebury, £39.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Rockstar is released on Big Machine on 17 November and can be pre-ordered now.
