Usually when we say someone has the voice of an angel, we mean that they don’t quite sound human — that they have an airy, clarion, pristine falsetto hovering far above mortal concerns. Dolly Parton, who died Tuesday at age 80, had the voice of an earth angel. She knew all about the dirt and the muck and the ugliness, the shame of poverty, the chill of sorrow, the burning throb of a jealous heart. That meant she also knew precisely how best to soothe those pains in song, composing her own homemade balms for whatever ailed.
Her voice was angelic not because it possessed some kind of divine perfection or unattainable beauty, but because it seemed to be personally invested in the well-being of anyone and everyone who listened to it, illuminated from within with an almost otherworldly benevolence. How many singers in the history of popular music have told us some variation of “everything’s gonna be all right / it’s gonna be OK”? When Dolly did it, though, as on her soaring 1977 single “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” the sentiment somehow transcended cliche. Dolly made you believe.
To speak of her in the past tense still feels wrong. Dolly Parton was an American icon who seemed taller than death itself, a Paul Bunyan in a beehive wig and rhinestone stilettos. That stature came in part because she wrote her legend over and over, wittily but with a savvy control over her own image, in the so-called Dollyisms that she peppered throughout interviews, stage banter and public appearances.
And so we know from her own lips that her parents were so poor that they paid the doctor who delivered her in cornmeal, and that their one-room cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains had “running water, if you were willing to run and get it.” We know, too, that if she had it her way she would have lived well past 80. Once, when she was asked how she’d like to be remembered in 100 years, Parton quipped, “I want ’em to say, ‘God, don’t she look good for her age!’”
The most enduring parts of Parton’s legend were the ones she captured in song. Some of her most beloved compositions elevate key scenes from her life into modern-day folk tales, animated in vivid, almost cinematic detail. “Coat of Many Colors,” from 1971, recalls a time in her youth when her mother stitched rags together to make a coat that the other schoolchildren mocked: “I couldn’t understand it,” the adult Parton sings, still aching, “for I felt I was rich.” The beautiful redheaded bank teller who flirted with her husband lives on in infamy in “Jolene,” a lyric and vocal performance that combine to create one of popular music’s most wrenching (and oft-covered) confessions of neediness and insecurity.
Parton forever dramatized her decision to go solo in “I Will Always Love You,” a tenderhearted goodbye to her boss and former duet partner Porter Wagoner that kick-started a country-to-pop crossover. That unapologetic ambition to become something more than the so-called “girl singer” on Wagoner’s television show paved the way for women of subsequent generations (Reba, Shania and Taylor, to name just a trio) to follow in her path. The song also gave Parton an opportunity to flex her savvy as an entrepreneur: She refused to sell half of its publishing rights to one of her idols, Elvis Presley, when he wanted to cover it. “Everybody’s going to use you if they can,” Parton reflected decades later. “These are my songs — they’re like my children.”
The ’80s — a decade she kicked off in grand fashion with the working woman’s anthem “9 to 5” — brought Parton some of her greatest mainstream success, but the climate of the times also conspired to reduce her to a punchline and a caricature: The self-made country-pop queen who had pulled herself up by her bra straps. She played along, as an act of self-preservation, but it is a consolation to know that she lived long enough for her reputation as a songwriter to rise considerably in the 21st century. The work of her Dollywood Foundation, and especially her Imagination Library’s focus on child literacy, also cemented her status as a dedicated philanthropist.
In the third act of her impossibly long career, Parton became a creature who by all other accounts had gone extinct: a celebrity just about everybody likes. The volume and variety of tributes pouring in after her death attest to that — it is difficult to imagine another person who inspires kind words from both President Donald Trump and Parton’s “9 to 5” co-star Jane Fonda. But the universal goodwill Parton engenders also makes her death sting more sharply, because we mourn the loss of something even greater than one of the most beloved singer-songwriters of our lifetimes. We also mourn the concepts she embodied with grace right until the very end: compassion, good-humored joy, a genuine wish for the well-being of her neighbors. All that and a bone-deep belief that everything’s gonna be all right, gonna be OK.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
