Friday charts: Farewell to America's bipartisan icon of optimism

Dolly Parton was bright and bubbly. Her high heels, long nails, and big hair were exuberant. Her glittering outfits were a little girl’s dream.

She smiled constantly and laughed a lot. She was always ready with a joke, always at her own expense.

Her speaking voice was mountain-twang friendly. Her singing voice was high-pitched innocence. 

The songs she wrote were catchy, their hooks and melodies irresistible.

The words, though. The words could be harrowing. 

Her song “The Bridge” told a heartbreaking story of a teenage woman abandoned by a lover who had gotten her pregnant out of wedlock. The song ends — abruptly and unsentimentally — with the ashamed woman jumping from the bridge where they had first met: 

“Down from Dover” tells the story of another young woman who senses that her stillborn daughter knew her father had abandoned them:

It was “one of my best songs ever,” Parton said. Released in 1970, radio stations refused to play it because it depicted pre-marital sex.

An autobiographical note in another song was even darker: “Being born was the worst and the first mistake I ever made.”

This was the woman behind the glitter. Musician, movie star, businesswoman, and philanthropist, Parton was first and foremost a songwriter.

The songs she wrote were stories and she wrote them from experience.

“I used to write a lot of sad-ass songs,” she said. Sad, she explained, because “that's how I grew up.” 

How she grew up was mountain poor.

Her father was a sharecropper, meaning he farmed someone else’s land and kept a share. Dolly called him “the smartest man I ever knew,” but unschooled, he couldn’t read or write.

Her mother married at 15 and had 14 children by the age of 35. Dolly was the fourth. 

Dolly was born in a one-room home after her father paid the doctor that attended her birth with a sack of cornmeal (worried for his wife’s health, he had ridden on horseback to ask for help).

Five years later, her father had saved up enough to purchase his own farm.

There was no thought of a car to help with the move, Parton wrote in her autobiography, so the family walked. 

The new home was an upgrade: two rooms instead of one. But still no electricity or heat. It did have running water, though — “if you were willing to run and get it,” Parton later joked.

Old newspapers helped keep the mountain winds from blowing straight through the gaps in the cabin’s clapboard walls. They also gave Dolly something to read.

The Partons were poor even relative to their modest surroundings. Dolly was ridiculed at school for the clothing her mother had sewn together from rags — the inspiration for her iconic country song “Coat of Many Colors.”

Still, she knew from a young age she was going to be a star. Rolling Stone later wrote that “Dolly began planning her escape to the world of money and glamour as soon as she heard about it.”

She made her first recording, “Puppy Love,” at the age of 11. At 13, she made her debut at the Grand Ole Opry, where she was introduced by Johnny Cash: “We’ve got a little girl here from up in East Tennessee. Her daddy’s listening to the radio at home.” She sang “You Gotta Be My Baby” and received three encores from the knowledgeable country-music crowd.

Four years later, she became the first in her family to finish high school. She moved to Nashville — on a Greyhound bus — the very next day.

That wasn’t the end of her hard times, however. At first, she earned so little as a session singer she regularly went to hotels and took leftover food off the room service trays people left in the hallway. At a local diner, she’d wipe down tables and refill the salt and pepper shakers in return for a free meal.

None of it dimmed her belief in her coming stardom. “She is a fiercely positive thinker,” Rolling Stone observed.

It was a theme that ran through much of her work: Things are bad. But they’re going to be good.

“It's been a long dark night,” she wrote in “Light of a Clear Blue Morning”:

Early in her career, Dolly Parton was poor and optimistic — just like a lot of the rest of the country.

She was right, too. By 1980 she’d topped the Billboard charts, toured the country, had her own TV show, and starred in movies. Exactly as she’d dreamed it.

“If ever somebody figured out the American dream and made it work, it’s Dolly Parton,” Rolling Stone wrote.

The rest of the country was right to be optimistic, too.

No one farms another person’s land for a share of the crop anymore. Things the Partons must have thought were only for the richest of people — electricity, washing machines, air conditioning — are near-universal now. Effectively everyone can read and write. Few need to walk when they move to a new home.

Within a single lifetime, America has become rich beyond what the Partons could possibly have imagined.

And pessimistic.

By every measurable statistic, Americans are wealthier than they’ve ever been and far better off than their grandparents. But 57% say they’re pessimistic about the future. 61% say the economy is not working well for them.

There are many reasons for that, I’m sure. We compare our lot in life to what we see on social media. Or to billionaires. We worry about AI taking our jobs. Basics like housing, healthcare, and child care seem expensive. 

Personally, though, I blame politics — the politicians who are constantly telling us how bad things are. That we should be aggrieved. That things are worse than they used to be and will be even worse in the future.

Each side blames the other for this. We all pick a side and believe them.

Except Dolly. Dolly refused to pick sides.

"I just love everybody," she said in explaining why she resisted pressure to weigh in on the issues of the day. "I think we should just love each other, try not to judge, and find the good in us."

In that, too, she succeeded. 

“I’ve got as many Democrats as I do Republicans as fans,” she added, “and I’m not going to insult any of them because I care about all of them.”

Uniquely, both sides loved her back.

Her concerts were famously an eclectic mix of people who have little or nothing in common other than their Dolly fandom. On news of her passing, heartfelt tributes came in from every part of the political spectrum: from the DSA to the White House.

The best tribute, though, would be to try to live the way she did: loving, non-partisan, and — perhaps most importantly — optimistic.

We've just seen what 80 years of optimism can do. 

Imagine 80 more.

Let’s check a few charts.

We agree on one thing, at least:

The competition here is perhaps not too stiff, but I doubt you could find similarly bipartisan support among Americans for anything other than apple pie.

Facts:

Dolly’s popularity ranged from Warmly Adored in states like California to Above All Other Human Beings in Tennessee. 

Where will this be in 2106?

Fed data only goes back to 1984, but median household income in Dolly’s home state of Tennessee is up nearly five-fold in that time.

Education:

In 1964, Dolly was the first in her family to graduate high school. Now, almost everyone does.

One more photo:

Who could disagree with that?

Rest in peace, Dolly.

— Byron Gilliam

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