176THIS SUMMER, A PARTICULARLY BUOYANT MEME BEGAN
bouncing around Twitter. Created by comedian Rob Dubbin, it hing-
es on the punch line “ran into jolene....she mentioned you left kind of
an intense voicemail.” Its giddy reception was a testament to the fact
that a song written 46 years ago still resonates with The Youth. For
further proof, look at the Gen Z members of the K-pop group BTS,
who mouthed the words to “Jolene” as Dolly Parton performed it at
this year’s Grammys. The song’s appeal, like that of Parton herself,
transcends age, race, nationality, and pretty much every demographic
factor out there, possibly including “home planet.”
But Jolene herself was always kind of a cipher: We know she was a
looker, with those flaming locks of auburn hair, but what, exactly, was
going on behind her eyes of emerald green? A new Netflix series, Dolly
Parton’s Heartstrings, premiering November 22, promises to let us in
on her backstory. Each episode of the show, which Parton produced,
narrates, and appears in, expands one of her songs into a mini movie.
“I’m as proud of it as anything I’ve done,” she says. “All my life, I’ve felt
my songs tell such stories. I’ve always dreamed about being able to
make them into movies.”
It’s a natural extension. Parton’s lyrics have always been cinematic
narratives, and for her, music and Hollywood have always been inter-
twined. The little girl from Locust Ridge, Tennessee, began appearing
on local TV as early as age 10. By the time she became a regular on The
Porter Wagoner Show, she was an old hand at show business. Back then,
she already had the Backwoods Barbie persona, which she patterned
after the “town tramp”—what she calls a “country girl’s idea of glamour.”
She remembers her friend and mentor, the country star Chet Atkins,
telling her, “Dolly, you need to tone it down. You’re wearing too much
makeup. You need to have a little more taste. People are never going to
take you serious[ly] as a songwriter and singer. I know you’re great at
that, but people are just going to look at you like it’s all about the body.”
“I said, ‘You know what? I can’t separate the two. This is who I am.’ I
not only didn’t tone it down, I figured if my work was truly good enough,
people would eventually recognize that,” she says. “It was about me
knowing who I was, being happy with me, and feeling comfortable in
the way I presented myself. If I was happy, I could make other people
happy. That’s how I’ve always looked at it: that I look totally artificial,
but I am totally real, as a writer, as a professional, as a human being. A
rhinestone shines just as good as a diamond.”
The rhinestone exterior began as a coping mechanism of sorts. “I
was not a raving natural beauty,” she insists, though the early, fresh-
faced shots she regularly posts for Throwback Thursday would beg todisagree. “I just wanted to be pretty. I wanted to be striking. I wanted
to be colorful. I wanted to be seen. When I went to Nashville, I always
overdid it. When they say, ‘Less is more,’ I say, ‘That’s BS. More is more.’”
We live in an era when EmRata posts about feminism and Kim Kar-
dashian advocates for criminal justice, and with the exception of a few
trolls, no one sees a contradiction. But at the time, Parton’s bombshell
exterior—big hair, big boobs, and a whole lotta lashes—sometimes
left people surprised by her seriousness as a businesswoman. In the
’70s, Elvis wanted to record her song “I Will Always Love You,” but
his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, wanted half the publishing rights.
Parton wouldn’t budge. “It was unusual at the time for a girl to be de-
manding,” she acknowledges. “I never thought of it [as being] about
being a woman or a man. I thought of it as being an artist, and a writer,
and a person of a strong will. I had grown up in a family of men, with
six brothers, my dad, my uncle, and my grandpa, who I loved dearly. I
understood and knew the nature of men, so I had no fear of working in
that world, because I understood it. I just felt like I had something that
was sellable. I would go into meetings saying, ‘I think I got something
that could make us all a lot of money.’ I never felt that I had to cower
or to feel like, because I was a girl, I had to do it any different. I just
believed in myself. Still do.” For country superstar Kacey Musgraves, a
longtime Dolly fan, Parton’s approach was inspirational: “She managed
to walk in looking like a soft and beautiful woman, did business like a
man, and left with the respect of both sexes.”
When she transitioned into cinema, Parton became best known
for female-fronted films like 9 to 5 and Steel Magnolias—fare that was
empowering before the term became as common as kudzu. 9 to 5, with
its story of pink-collar work wives—played by Parton, Jane Fonda, and
Lily Tomlin—taking revenge on their lech of a boss, looks especially
prescient in light of the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements. Farcical
as it may be (the story involves kidnapping and a threat from Parton’s
character to turn the boss “from a rooster to a hen!”), it came from a
very real place. “I think that brought so much stuff to the forefront that
people had not been willing to look at, even though they knew it was
happening,” Parton says. “At that time, we really hoped that it would
make a bigger difference than it actually did. Although I do feel like it
did open a lot of doors and a lot of eyes to a lot of problems that we’d
been having since time began.”
That said, she hastens to clarify, “We still have a lot of the same
problems. I think that we just have to keep working at it. I think the new
#MeToo movement and all that stuff has thrown more light onto it. I
think women are in a better place now than they’ve ever been before.THE ORIGINAL YEEHAW QUEEN IS RIDING HIGH WITH A NEW NETFLIX PROJECT AND A WHOLE NEW
GENERATION OF DEVOTED FANS. BY VÉRONIQUE HYLAND. PHOTOGRAPHED BY JASON BELL.DOLLY PARTON
ICON