It is the contradictions that define the whole. What's the old expression: Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds?
Little minds must go into full cardiac arrest when Dolly comes to town. She is too square for the round holes, too round for the square. She requires us to do an awkward balancing act, giving equal weight to incompatible extremes without tipping too far one way or the other.Buxom, gaudy babe, looking like an escapee from a Penthouse fantasy, who challenged the good ol' boys of country with the notion of the strong-willed, independent woman.
Down-home girl with just-folks ways, an aw-shucks, gee-whiz, goldang, friendly smilin' hick who could skin you alive with the sort of tack-sharp business savvy the wolves of Wall Street would envy.
Plain-spoken, salty-talking, no-pretense hillbilly gal whose writing betrays the depths and textures, soul and substance of a poet.
Singer. And for that, you don't need adjectives or a counterweight. Just "singer." Voice as pure as the air of her Appalachian home. Honeyed, too - sweet and lofting. And yet strong. Not muscular, not throaty, but strong in the things you can't fake because they come from inside. Like purpose. And self-love.
"My voice is very emotional and unique. . . . Like most stylists, you either love it or you don't love it at all. Mine is more a throat voice. I'm not a trained singer. I don't know one note from another looking on paper, (but in hearing it back), I know instantly if hit a wrong note.
"I guess," she says, "you'd call me a heart singer and a throat singer."
The subject of Dolly's voice has come up as a natural adjunct to a discussion of Whitney Houston's voice. No, make that Whitney Houston's VOICE. Flawless, soullessly beautiful VOICE that took Dolly's delicate, finely honed "I Will Always Love You" and rendered it loud and lung-busting and empty and in the process also made it the most successful single in history - 14 weeks at the top of the Billboard pop charts (eclipsing Boyz II Men who had previously eclipsed Elvis) and quadruple platinum sales at a time when a single is considered a success if it struggles up to gold.
Dolly is more than diplomatic about Whitney's wailing. "A song like that is so simple in structure, and it's so universal in what it says, that I think her version was wonderful. I was very proud of her. What a voice she has! I could never hit some of the stuff she hit.
"Anytime something is born of the soul," she says of her own rendition of the song, "it's different than somebody else's interpretation. My version of it - a No. 1 song twice in the country field - was very emotional because I had written it in a very serious, emotional place. I was leaving a show ("The Porter Wagoner Show") I had been with for seven years."
And then, of course, there's the practical side of the matter. "My God, she's set me up for life," cries Dolly. "If you're lucky enough in your life to get two or three songs like that, you literally can retire."
Dolly is happy, you see, because she retained the publishing rights to the song she wrote in 1974 - even after, she says, Elvis Presley's handlers offered her what would seem to have been a sweetheart of a deal. The King would record the song - and take the publishing rights.
Dolly says she returned that deal to sender, and now she's reaping the rewards of her decision. "I've already made a couple of million dollars from the publishing and the royalty. You can retire on that money if you know how to save it.
"I don't," she jokes. "I'll just buy a bunch of cheap wigs and jewelry."
And just like that, the quick quip deflates the image of the buy-cheap, sell-high, hard-nosed businesswoman. Dolly Parton is a self-correcting machine. It is the contradiction that defines the whole.
"People think of me as tits and hair," she says without rancor. "And that's my own fault. I have an outrageous, outgoing personality, and I wanted my look to match how I felt on the inside.
"Somebody said, `You know, Dolly Parton wrote this song.' And somebody (else) said, `Naw, you've got to be joking. Dolly Parton's not that deep.' Deep? That's one of the simplest songs I've written."
A creature of contradictions? "Yes, my career has been a contradiction in terms of a lot of things. I feel it took all of that to make a Dolly Parton."
The first thing it took was Sevierville, Tenn. Perhaps it's not just coincidence that the place is pronounced Severe-ville. "As I've often joked, we didn't know that we were poor because all the people in that area were poor. A lot of people called us white trash. My father never had an education, never had a chance to go to school, can't read or write, but he's a hard-working, very intelligent person with common sense. He scratched out a living on a farm there."
Her folks "had 12 kids the age of 35 and 37. It was not uncommon for those mountain people to do that."
Dolly got her business sense from her dad. "My daddy could stretch a dollar further than anybody I've ever seen. He knew how to make do. He was smart. And he was stingy, too. Poor as we were, daddy always managed to have a little bit of money put back for an emergency."
If her financial savvy came from dad, her look came from somewhere else.
"My look came out of what a country girl's idea of glamour was. I wasn't really a trashy girl. I just looked trashy. A lot of the girls who looked like angels and saints were the ones who were screwing everybody in town. I was the one who wasn't doing it. I was writing my songs and dreaming my dreams.
"I had my lonely times because I was different," she says. "I was the kind of child who needed a lot of attention, and I was going to demand it one way or another . . . without even realizing it. . . . I realized as the years went by that I needed more attention than a family could give. I needed as much attention as a "world" could give."
Her dreams, she says, came from reading. "I would read about it in Sears and Roebuck catalogs. I would read about it in fairy tales. I saw early on that there might be a way to make a business out of (music). To get into another world and to do something more with my life. I didn't want to just marry and have a house full of kids like most of the women in that area. Nothing wrong with it, but I just wanted more . . . ."
At that time and in that place, wanting more made her something of an outcast. "I remember at graduation, all the kids were saying what they were gonna do. I got up and said, `I'm going to Nashville to be a star.' And the whole place just roared. I didn't say it to be funny. I said it out of all sincerity. But the whole place roared, and I was so embarrassed."
But not too embarrassed to do exactly what she'd told them she would. Dolly graduated from high school on a Friday in 1964. The next day she hit the road, headed for Nashville.
"I had such faith. I believed so strongly that it could not not happen. You can think yourself sick or well, you can also think yourself successful. It all started with a good attitude. A feeling of, `I don't know why I can't do it. This is America. They can't put me in jail for trying.' I figured, I can't be any poorer than I've been at home. So to be poor in the city, what's the difference?"
Dolly spent three years in the country capital, writing songs and attracting minor attention. In 1967 she joined Wagoner's television show and soon became a popular staple of his act and his frequent duet partner. While she was still a part of Wagoner's TV family, Dolly also struck out on her own, recording such hits as her classic tear-jerker "Coat of Many Colors" along with "Touch Your Woman" and "Jolene."
She left Wagoner in '74 and has never looked back. In the years since, there have been hits both country ("Two Doors Down," "Heartbreaker," "Yellow Roses, Rocking Years") and pop ("Here You Come Again," "Islands in the Stream," "9 to 5"). There have been movies ("9 to 5," "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," "Straight Talk") and even an ill-fated TV variety series.
Dolly's most recent albums - "White Limozeen," "Eagle When She Flies," "Slow Dancing With the Moon" - have moved her back toward straight country after a late-1970s to mid-'80s flirtation with pop that many country fans saw as an outright betrayal. Asked how she looks back on those pop years, she replies promptly:
"As a smart business move. Music was my world and my job, but it was the music `business.' I pissed a lot of people off when I decided to make a change, but I knew I had gone as far as I could in the country music field. . . . I wanted to go out into the world, I wanted to do movies, I wanted to cross over. I was a personality. I had the freedom, and I saw no reason not to do it.
"There's a song on my new album called `Full Circle,"' she adds. "I feel like I have come full circle. There was a period of time when I did records that meant nothing to me nor to anyone else. But I was trying things. I had the opportunity to try."
"Dolly's Breasts Are Killing Her!!"
That's what the scandal-rag headline screamed. Parton, onstage last year in Sunrise, Fla., thought it was the funniest thing she'd seen in a long time. She assured everyone that she wasn't in danger of mammary-cide.
This year, the screaming headlines have the 47-year-old singer playing tonsil-hockey with Billy Ray Cyrus (untrue, but a compliment "to a woman my age") and undergoing massive plastic surgery (true, but exaggerated).
Dolly likes to call herself the tabloid queen. "I always say I don't deny or admit anything," she says. "What I haven't gotten around to doing, I'm certainly capable of doing. Some of the stuff (in the tabloids) is just a big crock of . . . and a lot of it is a crock of truth. I find them fascinating. I buy them. What're you going to do, anyway? You belong to the public. You can't accept the good and not take the bad."
Makes sense. A woman whose entire image is built on exaggeration and a medium for which exaggeration is lifeblood. She's the star who likes the tabs.
Add it to the list of the contradictions that define. Dolly Parton: Mae West with a twang. Poet with a naughty mouth. Serious businesswoman with a tacky wig. A feminist who makes no apologies for looking like a painted hussy.
Take your pick. Take any of it. Take all of it. Dolly doesn't much care.
"I can't think of anything I would do different or anything that's troubling me or bothering me," she says. "Like when Michael Jackson did his (interview) special, he wanted to clear up a lot of things from the tabloids. I don't care what they say about me. It'd be nice to be totally loved by everybody, but that's not humanly possible."
And if, after all these years, people still don't know her for all the things she is? If she doesn't get credit for the business savvy or the songwriting skill or the pioneering achievements? If all they see is big hair and a bigger bustline?
"I think people pretty much see me as I am," she says. "But if they don't, I've got time to wait."