Now, we’ve lost Dolly Parton, which is a wake-up call to stand up for the values she stood up for—in music and in life.
Your feed is already all-Dolly, all-the-time, so there’s not much more to say. She was an iconic woman whose sense of personhood was so strong, she could be a comfort to any artist and anyone. She was a queer icon by being an ally. Yes, that included trans folks, and “standing up for everybody.” She supported children’s literacy. She invested royalties in the Black community. Want to dress in drag like Dolly? She supported that, too.
All this is to say that this is the opposite of a lot of the race-to-the-bottom individualism and division around us. Dolly was resistance.
And she was, maybe this isn’t said enough amidst all the personality talk, a consummate musician.
Drew Daniel, aka The Soft Pink Truth, has this nice little montage of her talking about singing acapella.
It’s hard to imagine a larger-than-life personality also being underrated, but — we’ll see how the memorials go this week — I think Dolly’s musicianship was often underrated. And maybe that’s the story, that you can be uncompromising in values and what you give back, in selfhood, and in musicianship, all at once.
Yes, she could hold her own with Chet Atkins. The fingernails were fine.
And there was this almost vaudeville-style bit she did, if you don’t know it, that was always a favorite. That’s the real challenge, maybe to us as electronic musicians, too. It’s not a trick. It’s a bit, but it’s real. That sums up Dolly as well as anything.
Dolly Parton’s America was a great piece of music journalism from WNYC — journalism delivered as a podcast.
I don’t want to just join on the bandwagon here, so I’ll say — it is worth listening to. I do also hope we do more of this kind of storytelling about musicians, sung and unsung. They may not be on Dolly’s scale (or have their own Dollywood), but we should absolutely keep seeking out artists with values. The ones who give back.