If a Butterfly Could Sing...

 

If A Butterfly Could Sing, It Would Sound Like Dolly Parton

 

Dolly Parton celebrates her 80^th birthday on January 19^th. I interviewed her fifty years ago for the Kingsport Times-News, only a couple of months after her 29^th birthday and barely a year after her break up with her longtime singing partner Porter Wagoner. She had just finished headlining a country music show (there were three other acts who preceded her) and then spent a good half hour signing autographs for everyone waiting in line. It was almost 1:00 in the morning when she boarded her bus for our interview. She was as cheerful as if she had just woken up. She answered my questions for almost an hour, never looking at her watch, never signaling to any of her entourage to rescue her from this inquisitive writer. The interview only ended after her bus driver came back and said, “Miss Parton, we have to go.”

Here is a story about the young Dolly Parton based on my notes from that March 14, 1975 interview. She was very much then like she is today, half a century later.

 

 

The blonde hair piled toward heaven frames a petite face distinguished by large Spider Lady eyelashes. A tight cowgirl pantsuit gets your attention.

She looks outlandish but in a pretty “more is more” kind of way.

Then she opens her Revlon lips to begin her part of the show. If a butterfly could sing, it would sound like Dolly Parton.

The near capacity crowd at the Dobyns-Bennett Dome had waited patiently for three hours, through three other acts (Hank Williams, Jr., Billy “Crash” Craddock, and Ronnie Milsap) and three interminable intermissions to see her. They'd cheered her every song. And when she finally finished her act, a hearty band of loyalists had kept her signing autographs until past 12:30 a.m.

Dolly Parton had come back home, to East Tennessee.

And on such an eventful day: just that morning, she'd learned that her latest single, "The Bargain Store," had climbed to the number one spot on the country charts, her fifth solo number one.

It was less than a year since the celebrated Dolly-Porter split, an amicable parting of the ways of Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner after seven years of success. And it was a scant six months since she'd put together her new act - The Dolly Parton Show featuring the Traveling Family Band.

It was a chance she took, leaving the success and security of Porter 'n' Dolly for a solo career as a singer-songwriter. But the gamble seemed to be paying off.

 

Dolly Parton is country music's reigning sex symbol, an outlandishly dressed woman whose exterior belies a sensitive soul, a songwriter of restraint and taste. It is the heart of a poet trapped inside Mae West's body.

"All I ever wanted to be was a star," Dolly Parton told me about her childhood aspirations. To a girl growing up in a rundown house in the shadow of the Smoky Mountains, stardom had an image. Stars wore the finest clothes, drove the biggest cars, owned the nicest houses.

She became the Dale Evans of country music, the bright, sparkly partner of country music’s most flamboyantly dressed country boy, Porter Wagoner.

And by 1974, she was, as they say, doin' good.

A member of the Grand Ole Opry. On TV every week on the popular "Porter Wagoner Show." Every record they released in the Top 10. And acclaim as Female Vocalist of the Year by the Country Music Association.

There was even growing recognition as a songwriter. Merle Haggard was recording her composition "Kentucky Gambler" (it would later make it to No. 1 on the country charts). Maria Muldaur had included her "My Tennessee Mountain Home" on her million-selling "Midnight at the Oasis" album. Everyone from Linda Ronstadt to Mac Davis was singing Parton's praises. And songs.

At 28 in 1974, Dolly Parton was at the top of her profession.

That's why country music was shaken nearly to its cowboy boots when she and Wagoner announced they were splitting up. Amicable was the word they used at the time.

"We're still friends," Parton says. "We have a publishing company together, and we still record our duets. The break was as much his idea as mine. When Porter first asked me to join his show, I told him that some day I wanted to have my own show, and he understood that."

Even in 1975, it was clear that she just outgrew him. As long as she remained with him, she would just be the back half of Porter 'n' Dolly.

 

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born on a cold Saturday in January 1946 in Sevierville, Tenn., a tiny mountain town on the periphery of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Dolly was one of six daughters and six sons in the poor, but deeply religious Parton clan.

She grew up without a radio or television in the house so most of her early musical training came at church and in school.

"I was singing a lot before I heard anybody but my family and the people at church. We didn't have electricity until I was 9. Our first piano didn't even have any ivory on it. But it sure helped me write some songs.”

She told me she wrote her first songs at the age of five, a pair of ditties called "Little Tiny Tassel Top" about a corn cob doll and "Life Doesn't Mean Much To Me."

"Here I was all of 5 years old singing 'Life doesn't mean much to me,'" she says with a laugh.

Since then she estimates she has written thousands of songs. "I have boxes and trunks of songs that like a little bit being finished and others that are complete, but I haven't recorded because I keep writing new stuff. I write all the time."

By the time she was ten, she was a regular on Knoxville grocer Cas Walker’s programs, making twenty dollars a week for appearances on the morning "Farm and Home Hour" TV show, his noon radio show, and the Wednesday and Thursday night TV shows. In between school and the Cas Walker shows, Dolly appeared on the famous WNOX Midday Merry-Go-Round and sang in country music shows all over east Tennessee.

At Sevier County High School, she was a member of the Future Homemakers of America and a snare drummer in the marching band.

Dolly as a senior in high school.

She picked up her high school diploma and her bus ticket to Nashville the same day. When she arrived in Music City that hot summer day in 1964, it was like a Hollywood movie. She met future husband Carl Dean in the Wishy Washy Laundromat the first day in town. And within two weeks, she had signed a contract with Monument Records.

The next three years were for laying the groundwork. She started putting out records, some of which climbed onto the lower echelons of the country charts.

All the while she was pursuing her songwriting career, writing when she could, and collaborating with her uncle Bill Owens on other songs. (She lived with her uncle Bill and aunt Christina when she first moved to Nashville.)

In 1967 Porter Wagoner caught Parton on one of those nameless country music shows that populate Saturday afternoon TV. He was searching for someone to replace his longtime partner, Norma Jean, and he thought Parton would be perfect. Her signature on a contract sealed it, and for the next seven years, Porter 'n' Dolly were as synonymous as George 'n' Tammy and Conway 'n' Loretta.

Then in 1974 came the announcement that shook the country music world: Porter and Dolly were breaking up. Their fans were dismayed - what had gone wrong? Could they no longer get along?

"'Course we've had business problems,” she told me. “Anybody who works together does. Like somebody said the other day, if two people are in business and they don't have no trouble, one of them ain't doing their job. If you don't have an opinion, you ain't much of a partner.”

Her first backup group, the aptly-named Traveling Family Band, was composed of Dolly's brother, Randy, two cousins, Dwight Puckett and Sydney Spiva, and a no-relation guitar player named Bill Reary.

 

Performing is one thing. But to Dolly songwriting is special. “Writing is such a part of me. It's such a natural thing for me to rhyme words. It's just a God-given talent: I've never had any trouble rhyming words. There are certain situations that remind me of things and I start putting words together into a song. Every writer writes different. For me the words and the music just seem to come together. I can't ever remember writing one without the other."

Her favorite song that she has written is "Coat of Many Colors," a ballad about a patchwork coat that her mother made for her when she was a little girl. "It's a true song and a personal song. It means a lot to me because I know how much I put into it."

She says she has a new song coming out that deeply affected her when she wrote it. "It's a sacred song and I got this strange feeling when I was writing it. I cried and that's something I'd never done after writing a song. But the words just started coming and I had it written in a few minutes. When I got through writing, I felt unburdened."

That song, “The Seeker,” was released on May 19, 1975 – two months after my interview - on RCA Victor.

Dolly Parton's records have changed in the past year or two and her music is being played on more than just country radio stations. In fact, her summer 1974 hit, "Love is Like a Butterfly," made the complete crossover and was played on a number of so-called Top 40 stations, even climbing onto the pop charts for a time. But Dolly says it isn't a reflection of any changing style within her, merely that she's braver now and willing to try newer variations on her records. "My writing hasn't changed much over the years, but record styles have changed and I'm getting to do more things now. Music is venturing out in new areas. Used to if they thought you were hard country and you did something a little uptown, they thought you were trying to get out of the category. But now a lot of people are trying new things."

Not that she’s happy about all those new ways. "I like a lot of the things that are being done in country music today, but I hope there will always be true country. Like Hank Williams and Porter Wagoner and Ernest Tubbs. I'd hate to see that die away. I hope there will always be a market for it."

She likes the new contemporary country rock sound, particularly the music of the Charlie Daniels Band, Goose Creek Symphony, Barefoot Jerry and Willie Nelson. Especially Willie Nelson.

"I loved Willie Nelson when he was just plain country. When I first moved to Nashville, he was on Monument Records and I was too. I remember I used to set on the floor of the studio over there for hours and listen to him sing and play. He didn't have much going record-wise then - you couldn't give him away because of his odd phrasings - but I just loved it. He was way ahead of his time and I'm real glad to see him getting the recognition now."

Country music is a traveling road show. Dolly Parton and her group play 120 nights a year, mostly on weekends, in all parts of the country, from Portland, Oregon to Miami, Florida. After her post- midnight interview with me in Kingsport, Dolly's bus headed out for an all-night ride to Raleigh, North Carolina where she would be performing on Saturday night. In Raleigh it would be much the same thing - last on the bill, an after-concert autograph session, and another all-night bus ride, this time to Norfolk, Virginia for a Sunday show. From Norfolk, the Dolly Parton bus would head back to Nashville for a few days of rest before heading out on the road again the next weekend. All total, Dolly and her crew will travel 200,000 miles this year, most of it via bus.

The hours on the road are long, slow ones. Often Dolly will travel eight hours. just to give a one-hour show. What does she do to entertain herself on the road? “We play a lot of games, like Password. And I'll listen to tapes and do a lot of the paperwork concerning the band. Sometimes I write songs."

It used to be the Porter 'n' Dolly Show.

But now it's just the Dolly Parton Show. Dolly Parton has come to the front. Her solo career is booming. Appreciative audiences. Hit records. And finally, recognition as a top-notch songwriter.

Still, in her heart, past all the rouge and the mascara and the hairspray, Dolly is just a starry-eyed country girl.