Dolly Parton, Honky-Tonk Angel
It’s tempting to say that all the obituaries are wrong, but that’s wrong, too: Dolly Parton meant something to everybody, so everybody has something of their own to grieve. She really did launch out of a sharecropper’s cabin in a Smoky Mountain holler like a secret siloed missile built from blond hair, hope, mascara, and the King James Bible. She really did make her daddy proud by starting the Imagination Library to teach millions of children to love the books he had never learned to read. She really did write two of the best songs in the history of the human voice back-to-back: the I-want-him-to-stay-so-bad-I’m-begging-you-not-to-take-him “Jolene” and the kiss-my-ass-but-I’ve-got-class “I Will Always Love You.” She really did whatever your best friend from grade school just posted on Facebook or your old dental hygienist shared on her Instagram story: there was so much goodness and good will packed like buckshot in what she reckoned to be her five-foot, hundred-pound, size-40DD frame that probably any story you have heard in the hours since she passed is absolutely the gospel truth.
But that’s the truth that interests me. Amid the bad news of Dolly Parton’s death, I can’t stop thinking of the good news. I keep hearing a song of hers, maybe you know it, a bouncy, disco-ball-type number called “The Seeker.” Jesus could turn water into wine, but Dolly could make anything rhyme: “kitchen” and “ambition” in “9 to 5” or “plans” and “hands” in “My Tennessee Mountain Home.” In “The Seeker,” she brings that knack to her own soul’s situation. “I am a seeker, a poor sinful creature, / there is no weaker than I am,” she begins. But like the prodigal son crawling out of the pigsty, she quickly turns to asking for help from the “teacher,” the “reacher” who reaches down for us pitiful sinners: “Reach out and lead me, guide me and keep me / In the shelter of your care each day.”
That is the Dolly I keep thinking of today: the bathed-in-the-blood granddaughter of a Pentecostal preacher who “preached so plain a child could understand.” Born in 1899, the Reverend Jacob Robert Owens was also a talented musician and songwriter; one of his prized possessions was a fiddle which, legend held, had belonged to one of his Union ancestors who was executed by Confederate soldiers in the days after the Civil War ended. There was pride in family stories like that—and in the music that the children could draw from any instrument, whether it was inherited, made, or part of their own body—but Dolly had precious little else in her cabin-floor, outhouse-poor childhood in East Tennessee. When her mother, Avie Lee, brought the dozen Parton children to hear their grandfather Brother Jake preach, they almost certainly came wearing what they wore everywhere else: hand-me-down shoes and homemade clothes, the kind of wardrobe Dolly so tear-jerkingly testified to in “Coat of Many Colors.”
Dolly Parton grew up steeped in Scripture and hymns, and a congregation was her first audience; her faith and her talent were forever inseparable. But by the time she could afford to buy anything like Sunday best, she was not much to be found in her grandfather’s church or any other. A curious thing about the woman who I would argue is one of America’s most Christ-like Christians is that she did not particularly like going to church. Dolly called herself a Jezebel, and indeed she belongs to a beloved category of mine: the outlaw Christian, the kind for whom you can positively see the dust rising from the line Christ would have drawn in the sand for her, daring the rest of us to cast stones.
I love worship, but I’m fascinated by these outlaw Christians, and wonder what it says about Christianity that deeply good people like Dolly find no home in Christian communities. Here was a woman who, despite her flirtatious persona, remained faithfully married to the same man for almost sixty years, a woman who considered the heart of Dollywood to be a little chapel she built in honor of the preacher-doctor who delivered her, a woman whose daily routine involved waking up at three in the morning to pray. “Every single day, before I do anything, I wake up and I thank God for the night and ask Him to bless the day and to bring all the right things,” the singer once told RuPaul—yes, RuPaul—in an interview. “And just to guide me, lead me. And I always pray that He’ll let me uplift mankind and glorify Him.”
Unlike so much of the country, country music never really lost its faith, but Dolly Parton’s fandom extended far beyond the fenceposts of that genre. And yet, without anyone taking much notice, much less taking offense, Dolly Parton went around in interview after interview invoking the name of Jesus more often than the Pope. And that’s to say nothing of her gospel albums, full of her own original praise music and recordings of popular hymns, plus some truly spectacular spiritual duets: the fly-away-to-heaven-ballad “When I Get Where I’m Going” that she recorded with Brad Paisley, her last No. 1 hit, and the rescued-me-from-hell-on-earth confession “There Was Jesus,” with Zach Williams, for which she won the last of her ten Grammys. Even on the albums that were country or pop or whatever exists in the space between the two, she kept sneaking religious songs onto the track lists: “God’s Coloring Book,” on the platinum “Here You Come Again,” and “Calm on the Water,” on “Burlap & Satin.”
My favorite of these is the last track on “White Limozeen,” a cover of a super-power ballad called “He’s Alive,” written by Don Francisco. If you don’t know the Christian classic, it’s a first-person account from the Apostle Peter of what it was like to wait in shame and sorrow in the final hours of Holy Saturday before Mary arrives to tell him that Christ’s tomb was empty. Imagine if someone told Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to explain soteriology with eight verses and an electric guitar—it’s an awesome song, and not even an atheist can keep from headbanging when, after nearly four minutes and a suspenseful keyboard interlude, Dolly finally belts a triumphant chorus that you feel like you yourself have been waiting the whole long Triduum to hear: “He’s aaa-liiive! / Yes, He’s aaa-liiiive / Yes, He’s aaaaliiiiive and I’m forgiven! / Heaven’s gates are open wide!”
Dolly’s last gasp of “Sweet Jesus” at the end of “He’s Alive” sounds like she’s looking the Saviour in the eye, like the Second Coming happened and only Dolly saw. For all I know, there’s someone somewhere proclaiming that Dolly’s passing means the Rapture came and took her with it; the rest of us were left behind. But she wasn’t that kind of believer, as best I can tell. Heaven was a hope and prayer for her, and she seems to have refused to pass judgment on just about anyone. “I never tried to shove my religion down anybody’s throat,” she said once to a roundtable of journalists.
The whole world wanted to ask her questions. But she liked asking God two of them over and over again: “How can you use me?” and “What can I do today?” Unlike most of us who ask questions like that, it seems like she really heeded the answer. Her good works are too many to number. Instead of getting above her raising, she raised up everyone, becoming the largest employer in her home county by opening a theme park in a place where most people with a brain for business would have refused to build a billboard, much less an empire; offering scholarships for any of her employees who wanted them; providing months of financial support for neighbors whose houses burned down in wildfires; and giving a million dollars to Vanderbilt to help fund the development of the coronavirus vaccine and at least another million for food and grocery programs to the Salvation Army, plus millions more for everything from children’s hospitals to a bald-eagle sanctuary.
It wasn’t enough to sing of God’s love, Dolly felt like she had to share it. However uncomfortable she was with the church, I imagine she might have wanted her “religious convictions” to be more than a line in the story of her life. She kept her faith until the end, though like so many of the faithful, she thought it was probably just a new beginning. Her own joyful, twangy testimony song, “The Golden Streets of Glory,” didn’t dwell, as its title might suggest, on Heaven’s glitz or glamour but on the chorus of angels she’d join when the time came: “No sorrow there, just one long happy day.” ♦