At 77, country legend and global treasure Dolly Parton remains an unstoppable force – this autumn she’s releasing a fashion book and her first ever rock album, writes Emma Higginbotham
The expression ‘rags to riches’ could have been invented for Dolly Parton, the perennially perky singer, songwriter and philanthropist who rose from the gloom of a tiny Tennessee shack to the bright lights of the world stage, thanks to her grit, talent and sheer adorability.
Although strictly speaking, it wasn’t rags that Dolly first wore, it was sacks. Literally flour and animal feed sacks that her mother trimmed with lace in a desperate attempt to make them look pretty. It didn’t stop the scratchy material irritating Dolly’s delicate skin, “but there’s a saying,” she says. “‘Beauty knows no pain’.”
The memory is a fitting start to the 77-year-old’s new book. Called Behind the Seams, it tells the story of the pint-sized country legend’s life and career through her outlandish outfits, from the rhinestone-encrusted polyester jumpsuits of her early days to the skimpy see-through number she’s sporting on the cover of her upcoming album, Rockstar.
Admittedly, her fashion sense isn’t to everyone’s taste. Dolly has always complemented her big boobs, bleached bouffant hair and teeny-tiny waist with gaudy clothes (her words) that cling and sparkle. But she couldn’t care less what anyone thinks. “It makes me laugh when people call me a fashion *icon*. I always say I'm more like an *eyesore*, because it never, ever crossed my mind to be fashionable, and I never was fashionable. As long as I’m comfortable in what I’m wearing, and I think it looks good on me, then that’s my style.”
Yet despite her extravagant appearance and dizzying success – think 11 Grammys and record sales of more than 100 million – Dolly insists she’s no diva. “I’m too grateful, too thankful,” she tells Weekend. “I appreciate everything good that’s ever happened to me, and I appreciate every single person that’s ever helped me along the way. When you work with a humble heart, I think God appreciates that as well, and so I never think of myself as a star. I’m a working girl.”
Born in January 1946, Dolly Rebecca Parton was the fourth child of tenant farmer Robert Lee Parton and his wife Avie (who’d had 12 children by the age of 35), and grew up in Sevier County in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. They were epically poor. As well as those dismal sacks, Dolly was inevitably clad in hand-me-downs, “but I tried to make them look special. Even as a child I was fascinated by clothes.”
She’d jazz up her look with whatever she could find – squishing honeysuckle blossoms to make perfume, stuffing flowers and feathers into her hair, and staining her lips, cheeks and nails with berry juice. A struck match was useful for beauty spots, and flour was a poor but adequate substitute for face powder. “I just wanted to be different,” she writes. “I wanted to be seen.”
Looking different famously backfired on one occasion, when her mother sewed her a winter jacket using scraps of different fabrics. In her 1971 hit Coat of Many Colors (“my own favourite among the thousands of songs I’ve written”), Dolly describes how she was mocked mercilessly by her school friends. “When I went home and cried about it to Mama, she explained how it was made with love, and that there was a unique beauty to it that money couldn’t buy. In the end, I loved that coat even more than before. It came to signify many life lessons: how it’s okay to be different, how it’s wrong to make fun of people or bully others, how the love of family sustains us through tough times. Funny how such important ideas can be conveyed through clothing.”
Aged five, Dolly was writing her own songs. Aged 10, she was regularly singing on a local country music radio station and, by her teens, was spending all her radio earnings on make-up. She recalls stealing the shoulder pads out of her grandma’s coats to stuff her bra (“or I’d borrow them, let’s put it that way”), and begging her mother to make her skin-tight, low-cut clothes. Her father and preacher grandfather were horrified, but Dolly was happy to have her “ass whupped” to wear them anyway.
“I’ve told the story many times that I patterned my look after the town tramp, a woman who walked the streets of Sevierville with her tight skirts and her high-heeled shoes and her red nails and her red lipstick and her peroxided hair. I thought she was beautiful, but everybody said ‘She’s trash!’ I laughed and said ‘Well, if that’s trash, that’s what I want to be when I grow up!’ She introduced me to how I wanted to look.”
Shortly after her 18th birthday, Dolly packed her bags and moved to Nashville in search of country stardom. Within weeks she’d both met her future husband, Carl Dean, after getting chatting outside a laundrette, and signed with Monument Records, who flattened her hair and tried to make her wear ‘chic’ clothes that she loathed. Two years later she’d married Carl and moved to record company RCA, who also tried to tone down her gaudy look. “[With] that big hair and my flamboyant clothes and my boobs sticking up, a lot of people said ‘Dolly, you need to dress down. Nobody’s ever going to take you serious because you look more like a hooker than you do a singer’. I said ‘Well, tough. This is who I am. They’ll get used to it’.”
And they did. By the time she started singing with country star Porter Wagoner, who’d hired her for his TV show, Dolly had more than 200 towering wigs, and a hairstylist to keep them looking tip-top. She quips that when people asked how long it took to do her hair, she’d reply “I don’t know, I’m never there”. Even by Dolly’s standards, those early wigs were faintly ridiculous: “When I look back at pictures of myself in the 1960s, I laugh out loud,” she writes. “I wonder, ‘Oh my Lord, what was I thinking? Was my hair bigger than me?’.”
Dolly went solo in early 70s, scoring multiple Grammy nominations and sell-out tours, and writing bangers including karaoke favourites Jolene and I Will Always Love You. On stage, she wore her signature bell-bottom jumpsuits (“My big ‘ol bell-bottoms were ringing louder than most”), made from swimwear material and adorned with buttons, braid, sequins and rhinestones, with billowy chiffon overlays. Her mission was to dazzle the audience: “When you’re under the lights, you want to feel important. Isn’t a star supposed to shine? And it makes me feel like I’ve got more to give, makes me want to try to live up to my shiny clothes. You have to put on that personality and add a little more sparkle to everything you do.”
By the 80s, Dolly’s wig collection had almost doubled. When people asked how many she had, she’d reply 365: one for every day of the year. “Sometimes I was lost under all that hair,” she recalls. “Carl said that I was so small that from a distance I looked like a Q-tip. He’d just see this white head of hair on this little stick of a person. But I just loved it.”
Inevitably, the big screen beckoned. Dolly’s first role was as feisty secretary Doralee Rhodes in 9 to 5, which became the second-highest grossing film of 1980, and *that* title song won her two Grammys and an Oscar nomination. She went “from one extreme to another” in 1982’s The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and recalls feeling perfectly comfortable dressed as a brothel madam. “Miss Mona was much more my style,” she writes.
By the end of the 80s, Dolly was a colossal star. She’d recorded classic duet Islands in the Stream with Kenny Rogers, hosted her own TV show with guests including Oprah, Hulk Hogan and Miss Piggy (wearing a matching Dolly outfit, naturally), and starred in weepy classic Steel Magnolias. She’d also opened theme park Dollywood in her hometown, which became Sevier County’s largest employer.
By this time her preference was for heavily beaded gowns. So heavily beaded, in fact, that some weighed up to 20lbs. “After looking like a country singer in the 1970s and then a Hollywood star in the 1980s, I went for a little bit of both in the 1990s. And, of course, I’d be taking those rhinestones right along with me into the 21st century. I’ll never stop wanting to shine!”
But at what price? “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap,” is one of Dolly’s famous one-liners, yet there’s no mention about how much she spends on all this finery, from the 2006 Oscars dress that took 30 people 465 hours to make, to her dazzling rainbow dress that glitters with 10,000 rhinestones.
Still, Dolly’s so ridiculously generous that you can’t baulk at it. Through her philanthropic Dollywood Foundation, she’s donated millions of dollars to everything from college scholarships to children’s hospitals, and perhaps most famously The Imagination Library. Inspired by her father, who couldn’t read or write, the scheme gives free books to children every month until they’re five, to encourage a love of reading. Since its launch in 1995, she’s gifted nearly 214 million books worldwide, including 50 million in the UK.
The sunny singer has a particularly strong fan base over here, despite the fact that, incredibly, only two of her records (Jolene and Islands in the Stream) have ever charted in the UK Top 40. Back in 2014, when she played the Sunday afternoon legend slot at Glastonbury, Dolly pulled in one of the biggest crowds in the festival’s history – a crowd who, according to The Guardian’s five-star review, enjoyed her between-songs banter every bit as much as the music itself.
She’s adored as an LGBTQ ally, an environmental champion and a vaccine hero: during the pandemic, Dolly donated $1million to Moderna, and a viral video shows her smiling through her covid jab – administered via a sparkly peep-hole sleeve.
At home, Dolly says she still wears those sky-scraper heels (“so I can reach into my cabinets”), and is always “Dollied up”. Yet you do get the feeling that her outfits are more costumes than clothes. Although she’s seemingly open about everything, and constantly shows Ned Flanders levels of positivity, nobody’s seen her husband for years, and her private life is rarely mentioned. There’s a hint of tougher times when Weekend asks what she’s most proud of: “I’m proud of all of it. I’ve paid my dues for a lot of it, it’s not always as joyful as we often make it seem. There’s a price to be paid for everything, but I wouldn’t change my life in any way.” Nothing at all? “Well I guess I don’t always have as much time as I would like to have with my loved ones, to get to do some of the simpler things in life. I think the time would be the only thing, but it’s been worth it.”
As Dolly’s octogenarian years approach, she’s showing absolutely no signs of slowing down. In fact she’s branching out. After 48 studio albums, next month she releases Rockstar, her first ever rock album, collaborating with the likes of Elton John, Joan Jett and Stevie Nicks. “I really wanted to pull out all the stops, and boy, did I ever get some rock stars to join me! I even got a Beatle – Paul McCartney! Rock is not just a sound, it’s an attitude. Doing things your way, being a rebel. And that’s why I think I’ve always had some rock and roll in my soul.
“I’ll never stop working,” she concludes. “Even if I physically couldn’t work anymore, my mind would still be working. I have no intention ever of stopping.”
Behind The Seams: My Life in Rhinestones by Dolly Parton (Ebury Press) is out now
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in October 2023 (c) Waitrose