For the past year and a half Dolly Parton has been experiencing a renaissance. The 75-year-old singer has broken every possible glass ceiling in her life, and somehow in the past year she has gained worldwide glorification that has crossed the borders of America, thanks to a particularly successful podcast – “Dolly Parton’s America” - which tried to dismantle her enigmatic figure. Along with working as a philanthropist (she donated $ 1 million last April to a modern company to develop the corona virus vaccine), and the growing understanding that her appearance is not something to be ridiculed (she always made sure to do so first), Parton became a feminist symbol of a strong woman who cares. To herself the trajectory of her life. In honor of her birthday today (Tuesday), we dived deep into the character of one of the most intriguing and talented women in music, whose songs have entered the soundtrack of our lives – whether we knew about it or not.
Dolly Parton
(Photo: AP)
Dolly Rebecca Parton was born on January 19, 1946, the fourth of 12 children of poor parents who lived in a tiny hut in the famous Smoky Mountains, in the state of Tennessee in the southern United States. She started writing songs at the age of five, got her first guitar at the age of eight and first appeared on local radio at the age of ten. After graduating from high school she moved to the country music capital, Nashville, and began making a living from writing and singing. In 1967 she released her first album Hello, I’m Dolly and in the same year she joined country singer Porter Wagoner in filming his musical TV show The Porter Wagoner Show, in which she first sang her hits Jolene and I Will Always Love You. After several years of working together, the two parted ways, and Parton began a successful solo career to this day.
Dolly Parton
(Photo: AP)
Most of us are familiar with this tear-jerking song thanks to Whitney Houston’s epic rendition of the soundtrack to “The Bodyguard,” but it was Parton who wrote I Will Always Love You from the heart in 1973 to the same Porter Vogner when she wanted to say goodbye to it professionally. At that time he was already a musician living on the glory of the past and she, for her part, is a rising star who overtakes him in the square. To break free from the intense work with him, Parton did what she knows how to do best – sat him in the office listening to the new song she wrote, in which she says modestly (and vice versa) that if she stays by his side she will just stand in his way, but she will always love him. Wagoner started crying and told her it was the best song she had written. “Well, you’re the one who inspired him,” she replied, moving on. Along the way, that poetic letter of dismissal became Parton’s main asset, putting millions of dollars in her bank account.
Parton met her husband, Carl Dean, outside the laundromat on the first day she came to Nashville at the age of 18. They started talking, and Parton was mostly impressed from Dean’s point of view. “When we talked he looked at my face – a rare thing for me,” she recounted in the past, “he seemed genuinely interested in me.” Although Dean does not like the spotlight and many mistakenly think that Parton is single (the two have no children), their married life has been going on for 55 years. “My first thought was that I was going to marry this girl,” he said in a rare interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2016, “My second thought was ‘God, she looks good. And that was the day my life started.’
Since moving to Nashville at the age of 18 until today, Parton has not stopped writing and composing at a dizzying pace, and even across the network are unable to determine how many songs she has actually released. In 2016, she told the British Guardian that she had written “at least 5,000 songs”. As an American Iron Flock asset, Parton has received official recognition from the industry at a variety of events. In 1999 she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and in 2001 into the American Songwriters Hall of Fame, in 2005 she was awarded the National Medal of the Arts in the United States and a year later won the prestigious Canadian Arts Center Award. Over the years she has been nominated for 50 Grammy Awards (and picked up ten wins) and twice for Best Academy Award (for the songs Nine to Five from the film of the same name in which she starred alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, and Travelin ‘Thru from the movie “Transamerica”).
On October 15, 2019, the “Dolly Parton’s America” podcast aired and shocked the media world. The induction, led by journalist Judd Aboumrad, managed to incorporate in-depth investigations, fascinating interviews and heart-to-heart conversations with Parton herself, who agreed to be interviewed thanks to her personal connections with Abumrad’s father – a Lebanese doctor from Tennessee who treated her after a car accident. The award-winning podcast explores Parton’s personal history and cultural impact on the United States through its songs, career moves and external appearance. Highly recommended is the episode about the song “Jolene” (is it actually a lesbian love song?), The episode that goes back to the little hut that grew up in the dark Smoky Mountains and the episode about Porter Wagoner, where Parton shakes the hearts of listeners.
The star of the skirts
(Photo: AP)
In 2017 American news sites were thrilled to hear that there was a seminar called “Dolly Parton’s America” at the University of Tennessee, which explores Parton’s music with the local history of Tennessee and the Appalachian culture. As can be understood, the name of the seminar gave the title to the popular treatise on Parton, and one of the chapters in it was even recorded during his lesson, in which the students discussed the status of the “Hillbills” (inhabitants of the Appalachian Mountains and Ozarks), and whether there is another place for a southern accent.
From the country to the professor
(Photo: AP)
Parton has never brought children of her own, but she is the godmother of one of the most famous women in the world – Miley Cyrus. It all started when Cyrus’ father, country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, warmed up Parton on her tour in the early ’90s, and even starred in her 1993 hit, “Romeo.” “We’re both country kids,” she once said in an interview, “we always had fun talking about it, and when Miley arrived I said she must be my godmother.” Over the years, Cyrus Jr.’s career has been closely linked to that of Parton – from the godmother’s appearance on the popular Disney show “Hannah Montana”, through Cyrus’ great cover to “Jolene”, to their collaboration on the Christmas album that Parton released last December .
When Israelis fly to the United States, usually for a bar or bat mitzvah trip, they visit Disney World or Universal Studios Orlando, but miss one of America’s most successful theme parks – Dolly Parton’s Hollywood, which opened to the general public in 1986 in her home state of Tennessee. For Parton fans this is a place of pilgrimage, which besides roller coasters and a host of facilities also includes a perfect replica of the cabin where she grew up as well as Dolly’s Dixie Stampede – an entertainment and dinner show, during which the American Civil War between North and South soldiers is staged. In 2017, she removed the word “Dixie” from the show after many complained that it was a word with negative connotations that glorified the pre-Civil War South American and encouraged the memory of slavery. “It was innocent ignorance,” Parton said in response, “when they said ‘Dixie’ was an abusive word, I thought, ‘Well, I do not want to offend anyone. It’s business, and we’ll just take the word off.'”
“When everything fails, I go for a boobs joke,” Parton has said in the past. Whether in interviews, speeches or even in the biography books about her, the giant musician has never been ashamed to talk about her outward appearance, which she is careful to cultivate to this day – from the tips of her nails to her lush blonde hair. But mostly she does it to get ahead of a cure for Mecca and be the first to laugh at herself, instead of others doing it for her. “I know my style has become a joke,” she said in a book about her, “not stupid, not blonde.” “I’ve used this phrase before, but I hope people have already realized that there is a brain under the wig, and a heart under the boobs.”
Neatly groomed and also knows how to laugh about it
(Photo: AP)
Remember a year ago you made collages on the phone to show the world what you look like on social media? Well, Parton, who was 74 at the time, started this viral frenzy in what became the “Dolly Parton Challenge,” proving that seniors can break the Internet, too, and not thanks to the “Shabbat Shalom” blessing they made her forward in the Westap. “Find the woman who can do anything,” Parton (or at least her PR) wrote under a collage that featured her tailored to LinkedIn, stately to Facebook, creative to Instagram and a Playboy bunny to Tinder. The whole world immediately jumped at the opportunity for self-flying, which proved, for the who-knows-how time, that Parton is a pioneer in everything and anything.
While the Trump administration failed to properly deal with the corona virus in the United States, it was Dolly Parton who came to the aid of the entire world and donated no less than $ 1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, one of the places where the modern company’s vaccine was developed and tested. As in the case of the successful podcast on it, here too Jad Abumrad’s father, Dr. Naji Abomrad, who works at the prestigious medical center, came into the picture, and probably left an amazing impression on the great musician and philanthropist.
Believes in vaccines
(Photo: AP)
Another example of Parton’s good and giving instinct can be found in her venture “Good Night with Dolly,” in which she read to children bedtime stories. During ten YouTube episodes that aired last April, the peak of the corona outbreak in the world, Parton sat in front of the camera and in her gentle and soothing voice read childish classics like “The Blue Locomotive Can” and more. The project is a direct continuation of the “Library of Imagination” project that Parton founded in Tennessee back in 1995, which provides books for children free of charge. Over the years the venture has expanded to the entire United States, and from 2006 onwards has spread to Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Ireland.
Despite her country image, Parton is loved by the United States more or less by everyone: Republicans, Democrats, whites, blacks, straights, and TBKs. Can’t connect to it? The New York Times justified its collective attraction to it with the mystery that surrounds it, its avoidance of politics and its ability to speak to any segment of the population. “Even after five decades of fame,” they wrote, “Parton is still an enigma that embodies multiple paradoxes: she Love God and also the gays; It is authentic and artificial; And she is sexual and sweet at the same time. ”
There is no one who does not love her
(Photo: AP)
From time immemorial, Parton’s music has dealt with women and femininity, and especially those who needed to be thrown at them: the weak, the poor, the adolescents who got into unwanted pregnancies, those who betrayed them and those who worked full time, from nine to five. Still, Parton does not like to define herself as a feminist, even though her entire career path proves otherwise. “I do believe in proving a point and getting it,” Abmourad Jr. said when asked by him in the first episode of “Dolly Parton’s America” whether she is a feminist, “but I do not believe in cross-referencing an entire group, just because some people made mistakes along the way. The word ‘feminist’ is like saying ‘I hate all men’ “. Parton’s remarks in the indictment caused a stir, and in an interview with Time magazine a few months later she softened her position: “I guess I am a feminist if I believe women should be able to do whatever they want,” she said, “and when I say feminist, I just mean I don’t have to go out with signs… I just feel like I can live with my femininity and show that you can be a woman and still do what you want. “
With Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, her friends in the movie “9 to 5”
(Photo: AP)