Remembering Dolly Parton

0:00This is Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Nomi Fry. And I'm Vincent Cunningham. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Now, you may have noticed a little slight difference in the rhythm of our intro today. Actually, there's a third chiming voice offering their name too. As clear as a bell. That's right. Alex Schwartz is home sick today. So it's me and Nomi. She misses you. I'm sure you miss her. But there's a big thing happening. Last week, we lost one of the most beloved figures in really recent memory, Dolly Parton. News of Dolly's death was announced in a video from her family. And within minutes, it felt like a wave of love and admiration was breaking everywhere you looked there were tributes to Dolly Parton.

1:01How did you know me? How did you hear about the news and what have you been seeing in the days since then? Well, I heard it through one of my group chats. There was a link shared from TMZ, that Dolly Parton had died at 80 years old and it just kept coming from there. I mean, it was like a total outpouring. In a way that like, it didn't, I mean, obviously I knew that she was a beloved figure, but it really felt like seismic. Do you agree? Yeah, it was like the mound and the tenor of the tributes. Instantaneous. Yeah. And, you know, we all, of course, had the sense that she was very, very beloved in her life. I've never heard a bad word said about her. And still it was shocking the volume. There were digital signs on the Long Island interstate, you know, Jo-Leen, Don't Speed. I will always love safe driving. I mean, just like everybody, every establishment you went into every sort of situation that

2:03I've been in. Like the music was blasting immediately in like coffee shops. Yeah. So yeah, just the real kind of like coast coast everywhere in between, horizon to horizon, kind of like a sweeping, responsive grief and love to this piece of news. Grief and love and a kind of joy that she ever existed. There's just a sort of, just a kind of sharing of people's favorite moments. So in that vein, we are talking today about Dali Parton and what accounts for this immense sense of appreciation that has taken hold in the culture over the last week. When it comes to Parton's life and work, of course, it's impossible to be exhaustive. There's just too much to cover. So what we're going to do is call up three of our favorite, most illustrious New Yorker colleagues who are going to help us build a picture of who Dali Parton was and what her legacy inevitably will continue to be. We will hear from the great Catherine Schultz who wrote Dali Parton's post-gripped, as

3:06we call it here, in the New Yorker, from the music critic Amanda Petrusic, who has agreed to the frankly impossible task of picking the three just three out of a catalog of thousands essential Dali Parton songs. And finally, we'll talk with Lauren Michelle Jackson, who is such a great thinker on the topic of celebrity and fame. We'll talk with her about Dali's absolutely singular status as an icon. So that's today on Critic's So Large. All things Dali Parton. Is there one piece of Dali Parton's work that is especially near and dear to your heart, a song and album and movie? Well, I think this is like many people. One Dali Parton text that I always enjoy going back to is 9 to 5.

4:06The movie she started with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 1980. And I watched it several times over the years and I watched it again only a couple of nights ago with my daughter and tribute to Dali. And it's just like such a delight. The theme song, you know, we're just like, rollicking and exciting. And then the movie is such a kind of loony tunes comedy that has like heart and also kind of an ideological bent. It's just like such a delight. And Dali is just like such a sweet heart in it. I'm afraid I got a little carried away. I just like to apologize to you. Oh, don't you worry about it, Mr. Hart. I've been chased by Swiftermin the new and I've been caught yet. So we get back there later now. Yeah. Dory Lee, you know, put upon Secretary who does her best until she snaps. I got a gun out there in my purse and up to now I've been forgiven and forgotten because

5:06of the way I was brought up, but I tell you one thing. If you ever say another word about me or make another indecent proposal, I'm going to get that gun of mine and I'm going to change you from a rooster to a hand with one shot. Don't think I can do it. What about you, Vincent? My favorite Dali Pardon work of art, which I'm sure we're going to talk about is the 1974 song, Jolene. It's just brilliant. It's the minor key, the repetition of the name Jolene. It's just such a work of real true recognizable human emotion. It's like, Mount Rushmore to me. It's so good. Yeah. Okay, let's get into it. We're starting out hearing from Catherine Schultz. Catherine is a staff writer at the New Yorker and as we said before, wrote the New Yorker's post script, which is what we call obituary is basically for Dali Pardon. Hi, Catherine. Good morning. Hey, Catherine. So good to see you.

6:07You too. How are you guys? Good. And maybe this is a bit of BTS about the process sometimes at the New Yorker, as it sometimes happens, minutes after the news of Dali Pardon's death, you, Catherine had already texted your editor to say that you had you wanted to write her post script for the magazine. So I guess we should start by asking just why you were so eager to write this lovely piece. I'm normally very reluctant to raise my hand for last minute assignments because I am typically an extraordinarily slow writer and I know my limitations. So I try not to volunteer for things that involves with her to round, but I love Dali and she's a hero in this household and a hero of my whole life. She had a great fan in the form of my father who was a Jewish refugee who grew up from his teenage years on in Detroit, not what you think of as core country music audience. It wasn't coal country. It was very far from coal country. It's hard to travel in a very different way, but very far from coal country.

7:11And that was part of what Dali did was made a whole bunch of people fall in love with country music who didn't actually identify pre-existingly as country music fans. It just felt like the kind of thing that I knew so well and so deeply, obviously not as a human being, but as a body of work, as a figure in the world that it didn't feel like the kind of heavy lift of, well, how will I do all the research in the reporting? I felt like I actually have a lot to say and I'd really like to say it. Yeah, that's one of the surprises for me is how many people have so much to say that like there is this pre-existing heroism and this pre-existing intimacy. What is it like in your estimation that people respond to so strongly with her? I mean, you know, it's an interesting question. And speaking for myself, I think it's kind of the whole package, right? I mean, what's interesting about Dali is you could take any piece of the life and it would stand on its own two feet. It's, you know, the songwriting and the musical career just all by itself is jaw-dropping.

8:12I mean, decades upon decades of incredibly successful, funny, charming, moving music that reach generations after generations of people. You know, if that were your whole life, you'd think, I mean, amazing, right? We should all live such a life of creative genius and of bringing joy to people's lives in this way. But of course, there was also Dali Parton, the quite brilliant entrepreneur, right? And almost Oprah-level figure in her capacity, both for kind of social savvy and for a business savvy. You know, plenty of celebrities, loan out their names as it were, you know, put their brand on other brands and sort of expand their personal fortune that way. But Dali was quite different than that. She actually was the mind behind most of the enterprises she got involved in, most famously, of course, Dali would. But I think for me, the thing that moves her over into the category of, you know, the ready-word one reaches for a saint, right? Yeah.

9:13The thing that we are over into the category of... Culture hero, yeah. Cultural hero exactly is her incredible generosity, right? I mean, this is someone who came from nothing and might reasonably have felt the instinct as, you know, generations, for instance, coming up to the Great Depression to afford everything they had, right? And she had the absolute opposite instinct, which was to give as much a way as she could and to give back as much as she could. And she, you know, it's cliched to say, oh, never forgot where she came from. But, you know, remembering is one thing in doing is something else. And I mean, this woman gave away 300 million books and counting to American children and countless other ways, made her generosity known and palpable and important in every community that reached out for help, basically. That to me is the real legacy. Katherine, can you maybe walk us a little bit through Dali's origins?

10:13Sure. I'd be happy to. So Dali Parton was the fourth of 12 children born to a very kind of hard, scrabble family, by barely above subsistence, living her father. At the time she was born, her father was a sharecropper in Severe County, Tennessee, meaning he didn't own the land. They own essentially nothing. But it was a very, very hand-to-mouth living. And she writes about it really wonderfully. I think another kind of underestimated feature of Dali. She was in a great way a self-mythologizer, but she was a great writer. There's good reason to believe she actually did write at least the first of her own M.R.s. And she sounds just like she does in her song. She's quick-witted and comic. She's a wonderful, kind of funny flair to her. But she writes quite frankly and beautifully and movingly about her upbringing and about the poverty of circumstance and the wealth of joy and family and community.

11:16And one aspect of that joy, of course, was music. She had an uncle who was a gifted musician, her mother sang all the time around the house and kind of brought in this very Appalachian way, had brought this kind of old English and Welsh tradition of ballads and kind of homespa music into her life. So from very early on, she started singing at age six. Her professional debut was in her grandfather's church, the church being the other deeply formative influence in her life. So she began singing in church. She quite quickly, by like 10 years old, was singing for the local radio station. So she started at age 10 and by 13 there, she is at the Grand Old Opera being introduced by Johnny Cash. She was truly maybe more than anything else, just a natural born performer. She just loved it. Speaking of that sort of English Welsh mountain tradition, one of my favorite, you know,

12:19now there's all these clips running around the internet. One of my favorite clips is her in Ken Burns' country documentary. And she starts to sing like a little snippet of one of those mountain ballads. I know, no, I never shall marry. If he should stay there seven years more, I've got to finish it. He took his hands both out of his pocket, his fingers were. And it's like she's immediately inhabited by it. You know, you're talking about this lover performance. She's immediately like, you can just feel her whole sort of ancestry rolling through her in this amazing way. In the piece, I hope you don't mind if I quote you to you. It will make me cringe, but go ahead. You say that she's part Betty Boop, part Annie Oakley, part Abraham Lincoln. And then there's another part, right after that, you say something that I really want to ask about. And it's about sort of maybe the construction of a persona and how this interacts with our,

13:20you know, our enjoyment of a figure. Those closest to her presumably knew some other dolly, less rehearsed and likely deeper. The rest of us just got the surface, but who could feel cheated? The surface of dolly was the point, like the surface of diamonds. I would just love to hear you talk maybe about the sort of the allure of her persona. Yes, she had this generosity, this personal relationship to other people that you had to kind of know more about her to know, but just seeing her on television with its own experience. It really was. What did you make of that presence, that persona? Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly right. And maybe, you know, in the years to come, as people feel like they have done right by her desire for privacy in the moment has come to share more stories. Maybe we'll hear more about other things about dolly, part. And because, you know, one assumes there was some intensity interior private part,

14:22in part because the persona was so polished, right? There was no way into it. It was a perfect entity. I think she understood how people saw her, right? Especially in those early decades. How could she not? Setting forth in the world is this incredibly ambitious young musician who also happens to be this kind of bombshell blonde, right? I mean, not the kind of looks she could overlook, right? And she made very early a very powerful choice, which was to just absolutely and completely step into that, right? You have a range of options in that moment. One is to buy out of the game entirely because how maddening to be this incredibly gifted singer and this incredibly gifted songwriter and all half the world, three quarters the world wants to talk to you about is like, your breasts, frankly, your looks and these things that are utterly irrelevant to who you actually are and what you're actually capable of. That is like so frustrating.

15:23Dolly said, okay, no, here I am. I have this incredible surface. I have this surface people keep reacting to. I am going to step into it and change it and polish it and refine it and make it even more impossible to overlook so that I get to be in control. That's tough. I would love to hear what that experience was actually like for her. And she, in a way to her credit, decided just never to say she just did the thing she loved to do. Could we talk a little bit about the specifics of her philanthropy? So yeah, I mean, her philanthropy was capacious and occurred on many fronts, some of which I'm sure will be forever unknown to us. She was not a particularly showy giver. But she did establish the Imagination Library, which, you know, this is a program that will send any child in this country regardless of circumstances, regardless of income, regardless

16:26of anything at all. Any child in this country will get a free book every month up until the age of five when they begin kindergarten. And you can watch me. I can actually barely speak about it without tearing up. You know, when my first daughter was born, there were two things in the hospital that made me cry. And one was information from the National Diver Bank because you just think how heartbreaking to not have the most basic resources to take care of them. And the other was information. It was literally a sign up, like, sign this baby up right now for the Imagination Library. And, you know, incredible, right? Like you have a new baby in this mind just ready to like absorb the whole world. And there is Dali Parton with the institution she created to make sure that that kid will be invited into the just magnificent and vast world of books and stories and language. And she did that because her father never learned to read. And she wanted to do what she could to make sure that was never any other child's fate,

17:27which is a dream anyone could have. But I mean, 300 million books. That is really something. Yeah. That is. Before we go, I'm just wondering if there's a song that's been on your mind. And the days since she died? Sure. I mean, I could never pick a favor, right? There's so many. Yeah. And they're so wonderful and they're so different. But it is interesting, you know, I have been, since she died, I have been listening non-stop to the same song, which one of her later albums, Backwoods Barbie, there is a song on that album called Better Get To Living that it is about exactly what the title says, you know, Better Get To Living, right? Like, life is short, none of it is a guarantee, none of it should be taken for granted.

18:32Thank you so much for being with us today, Catherine. Yeah. Thank you, me and it was a ton of fun. I hope you're all just listening to Dally Around the Clock. Same. In a minute, the New Yorkers Amanda Petrusis, critics at large from the New Yorker, will be right back. We've been talking about Dally Parton's life and now we're going to be turning to her music and we're getting help from an expert on this one. This is our beloved colleague, Amanda Petrusisch, who writes about music for the magazine. Hey guys, can you hear me? Yes. We can hear Andy see you. It's a miracle. Welcome back. Oh my God, I see your cat. Oh, yeah, he's usually very present on Zooms.

19:33Hopefully we will not have to quarantine him elsewhere in the hall. No, I want him to be present. I want him to be more present. Thank you so much for coming on. You are a dear friend of the pod and I know you have a lot to say about Dally. There's the persona, the character, the entrepreneur, the philanthropist, all of those things. But of course, she is first and foremost a musician. What would you say makes her unique? It's funny because she's obviously beloved in this sort of massive, almost overwhelming way as we're seeing now. But I do think Dally is low key like a little slept on as it's insane to say, but a little bit slept on as her musicianship is in some ways can feel kind of incidental to her life and her personality and her charm and her wit. But I feel like her storytelling, you know, storytelling is so crucial to country music

20:34as a genre. It's sort of the engine on which the whole thing runs. And Dally had such a unique and I think empathetic voice as a writer and also voice quite literally as a singer. There's this sort of lovely kind of ripple in her voice, a warble that I think only comes really from the holler. You know, it's like a real kind of country sort of tension and texture to it. And I think in the eulogizing we're seeing of her, I would love it if that, you know, if her skill and kind of acumen as a writer and as a performer took up a little more space in that conversation because I do think she was such an extraordinary musician. Yeah, it's so funny. I've been thinking, kind of figure out where I put her voice specifically. I was thinking about two people. I was thinking about Diana Ross and the Brazilian kind of, you know, again, culture hero, Katano Veloso, like people who are not vocal athletes, but they're, but it always sort of cuts through the tapestry of the song where they're really delivering songs in a way

21:38that is unforgettable. Yeah. And it's funny too. There's like a little irony there, I think, in the bigness of her life and the bigness of her presentation and then the relative smallness of her voice. And I mean, smallness in the most complimentary way possible. I think she was an incredible singer. But there is something very sort of warm and tender and human in there that kind of works as an interesting contrast to, you know, the hair and the makeup and the rhinestones and the glam. To me, the tension between those things is so compelling. Yeah, that's such an interesting point, that contrast. And you know, Dolly Parton released some 3,000 songs over the course of her life. And today we ask you the frankly impossible task of bringing us three songs to talk about with us today. And I know it's hard. And yet I also know that you're up to this challenge because I have trust in you.

22:41So what are we going to go with first? What in this three song track list that you've prepared? Sure. I think impossible not to start with Jo-Leen. Yes. Which is, of course, probably Dolly's most iconic song. She recorded it in Nashville in 1973. It was a huge hit the following year. Jo-Leen, Jo-Leen, Jo-Leen. I'm begging of you, please don't take my man. You know, she tells the story that she wrote this song after she realized her husband, Carl, was spending a lot of time at their local bank in Seemun. Not the local bank. Not the, I know. Among us has not lost a man to the local bank. He seems, I guess, you know, beguiled by this sort of fair skinned red hair teller. You're smile is like a breath of spring. Your voice is soft like summer rain and I cannot compete with you. Jo-Leen. He talks about to any sleep and there's nothing I can do to keep from crying when he calls

23:49your name, Jo-Leen. You know, she has a lot of almost this sort of, this sort of like, throbbing, almost sort of sore admiration for this woman. Because Jo-Leen is not the villain of the song. This sort of gets me every time. I listen to that tune and I've heard it, you know, a gazillion times in my lifetime, which is remarkable to me. I think it's much easier, you know, arguably much more fun to kind of villainize a romantic rival. But it takes incredible empathy to do what Dolly's doing here. And that's the thing that always gets me about Jo-Leen. It's that Dolly, you know, she's scared, but she's not angry. And that's why, you know, like Beyonce famously included a cover of Jo-Leen on Cowboy Carter. And, you know, Beyonce can kind of do no wrong in many ways. But she tweaks the lyrics so that it becomes more confrontational and more aggressive. And it's sort of like, I'd love to see you try. Jo-Leen, Jo-Leen, Jo-Leen, Jo-Leen.

24:52I'm wanting you. Don't come for my man. Jo-Leen, Jo-Leen, Jo-Leen, Jo-Leen, Jo-Leen, Jo-Leen. Don't take the chance because you think you can. And to me that cover doesn't work. Like that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is so beautiful and great about Jo-Leen. Just I don't, who can dig deep enough in themselves to find that? I think this is a willingness to go to this place of, you might call it objection, you might call it longing, but just like to express negative emotion, but express it in its full sort of beauty. I think that's the reason when other people get hold of her songs, they have to make them more like, you know, macho in a certain way. Because it's like, a lot of people can't go to this place of frank desire, longing, like irreconcilable emotions and it just seems like this was like a super power. What is the next song that you've brought us?

25:54So the next song I picked is The Bridge, which is a song from 1968 from a record called Just Because I'm a Woman. And you know, this is an era in which Dolly was just coming into her own as a solo performer after recording quite a few duets famously with Porter Wagner. I love her vocal on this track. I think her voice has maybe never sounded more kind of clear and bringing and beautiful. The Bridge, so high, the bridge, so tall, here is where it started on bridge. But I also think this is another wonderful example of what people talk about when they talk about country songwriting being so rooted in storytelling. It's a song about a woman who falls sort of hopelessly in love with a man, becomes pregnant and then she's either betrayed or abandoned by him and she's standing on the edge of that same bridge where they fell in love.

26:55The song ends abruptly. We can sort of fill in the blanks about what happens next. My feet are moving slowly, closer to the edge. Here is where it started and here is where I landed. Oh wow. Yeah. So it just ends kind of, yeah, abruptly as you said. You know, that was pretty provocative songwriting for a country singer in 1968. It also sounds, I have to say, listening to this and again, I'm not, I wasn't familiar with the song. It's very post like, it sounds a little stonzy. Like it sounds a little like, I don't know, she's a rainbow or something. You know, there's a little bit of that. Totally. It sounds like a light rabbit. Yeah. It's like one of those summer of love, like one of those like post-67, like songs. I really feel that in the tonality of it.

27:59Right. I mean, agreed. One can imagine the doors doing that song. Yeah. You know, any of those bands agreed. And I think that's a sort of under-considered sound for her, but it worked. I mean, and you know, Dolly, I'm curious actually about both of your takes on this. I think she was always really uncomfortable with the word feminist. I think she sort of evaded the label or would even maybe actively resist it. But I think in this era of her career, in particular, she was giving voice to the female experience in a way that felt both unprecedented and sort of radical. And again, I think sort of centering these stories that were, you know, at that time, were not centered. Yeah. No, it's absolutely. I mean, there's something about not using the label, which of course I can understand. And how that might have been criticized, you know, by feminist or, you know, who wanted her to like just say the word, you know, say the word.

29:01Like even when she was doing nine to five in 1980, which is of course, it's a comedy, but it's a feminist movie, she didn't say, you know, I'm a women's liberal, whatever, you know, like term. And I understand how that might have been frustrating. But I also think there's something almost like generous about not making anyone feel excluded by using a label that might for a certain woman have been off putting, you know, showing rather than telling, look at the life I'm leading, look, look at the things I'm thinking about. Yeah, it's an interesting, it's an interesting conundrum, but I don't think it's like all bad. No, no, no. Ultimately, what you're saying, I think all of those things are much more significant. What is the last song that you brought us? The last song I brought you guys is called Little Bird. And this is really a minor song in her catalog, to be honest.

30:03I mean, I mean, that literally in the sense that it's less than two minutes long. I've just, it's a personal choice for me. I've just always loved it so much. Again, I love the kind of ripple in her voice here. I love the sound of her asking in this very earnest and almost skylist way for more time. To me, it just feels so, again, so human. Beauty is a rare perfume, precious yet doesn't last long. Youth is but a playful breeze that blows our way once it moves on. I don't, maybe I'm being particularly emo because my daughter is starting kindergarten tomorrow. Oh, I'm going to lose my voice. But I'm like, who among us? Who among us doesn't have these moments, you know, where they just, you want more time, more beauty, more youth, whatever. And you just feel the sort of sand slipping through your fingers. It just, that song hits me. Little Bird, take me aboard your beautiful wings and let me fly.

31:05Fly me away back to yesterday. In a minute, Lauren Michelle Jackson on Dolly Parton and Image Minking. Critics of large-form in New Yorker will be right back. We are wrapping up today with our fellow staff writer Lauren Michelle Jackson. Lauren, hi. What's up? Lauren, where are you? Are you in Chicago? Are you here? I am in Chicago. I was actually just fluent yesterday evening because I was at the Olivia Rodrigo thing. You are, you are like the foremost pop girly concert goer that I know. You have seen them. You just introduced Jesse Arianna Grande live. I did see Ari. I just saw Casey.

32:06But yeah. Lauren, I could go on and on about your work, which I love. But the main thing we want to ask you about today is something you're especially attuned to, I think. The art and machinery of celebrity and image making. You wrote this piece called The United States of Dolly Parton. This was back in 2020. I love this piece. And I guess there's arguably nobody who's made her image in a more deliberate, savvy, ironic fashion than Dolly Parton. Before we jump in, I just thought we could start out listening to a clip. This is from an interview that Dolly did with Barbara Walters in 1978. You don't have to look like this. You're very beautiful. You don't have to wear the blonde wigs. You don't have to wear the extreme clothes, right? No. It's certainly a choice. I don't like to be like everybody else. I've often made this statement that I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable. That's the easiest thing in the world to do.

33:07So I just decided that I would do something that would at least get the attention. Once they got past the shock of the ridiculous way I looked and all that, then they would see there was a part of me to be appreciated. I'm very real where it counts. And that's inside and as far as my outlook on life and the way I care about people and the way I care about myself and the things that I care about. I just chose to do this and it's a show business is a money-making joke and I just always like telling jokes. But do you ever feel that you're a joke, that people make fun of you? Oh, I know you make fun of me. But actually all these years the people have thought the joke was on me but it's actually been on the public. I know exactly what I'm doing and I can change it at any time. You talk in that lovely piece, Lauren, about a serious feminine brilliance, the Dolly Parton displays. And I think it is on total display in that clip.

34:07What is it about that brand of femininity that Dolly Parton not only sort of inhabited but played with so definitely that was kind of so hard for people, not the public journalists, like Barbara Walters, etc. to wrap their heads around. Every time I watch that clip I am always so tickled by the way, Barbara Walters keeps pressing, she will not let it go. And I feel like that interview now belongs to this genre of clip that circulates a lot now where we have like ball-busting lady interviewer who does not get it or is doing a little bit of a misogyny versus virtuosic pop star that's actually doing something or musical star who's doing something quite canny. But I also think it's kind of worth preserving the context in which that interview took place

35:07which is in the late 70s and if we think about second wave feminism and you have people like a Barbara Walters type or Barbara Walters herself who are like contending with serious prejudices about the seriousness of their work and their craft. And so in some ways you can see the wheels turning and the confusion about someone like Dolly choosing to look the way she does. And it's almost not even about for her a confusion about presentation but why someone so talented would choose to present with the hair and the makeup and the cinched waist. You don't have to look like this. You're talented, you're good at your craft. She's almost implying like why don't you look like me who incidentally should be noted.

36:08She is not undone. No, that's the thing that's so interesting because it's not like Barbara Walters is sitting there. She's not like Andrea Dworkin or something. She's not sitting there and overalls like her hair is blown like everything. She's wearing like a brooch, right? Like a gold brooch or something. And I also keep going back to this word that Dolly repeats a couple times which is choice. Dolly is saying, I choose to look like this. This is part of this grand theater of show business, the big blonde hair and the pink lip and all the other accoutre mom because this is in some ways a facade but also indicative of my realness. And I think one of the reasons why Dolly has become such a queer icon is kind of understanding how the foe can speak to a certain kind of authenticity and realness about who she is

37:10as a performer and as a person. Was this kind of ahead of her time? Do you think, I mean, nowadays this type of playfulness with the signifiers of femininity, whether it's, you know, and you mentioned this in your piece, whether it's someone like Cardi B or Nikki or, you know, just like Ariana, Britney Spears and her heyday, Lady Gaga, of course, Sabrina Carpenter, who had this kind of like exaggerated girliness. Do you think Dolly kind of like was a kind of an important precursor to these women playing with her femininity in front of audience as mass audiences? She has to be, right? But I also do think there's something about genre specificity that is maybe relevant here. Like even as we have a kind of plethora of pop girlies doing some version of showmanship,

38:17I do think we like kind of still have these sort of cemented notions about what being like a singer, a songwriter or like an authentic or like a real musician is. And yes. But like coming out of a kind of like country music sensibility, coming out of a tradition that really venerates songwriting and craftsmanship and musicianship and playing your own songs and writing your own songs and performing your own songs to also kind of embody the kind of artifice known to a sort of different domain of both musical performance and just theatrical performance in general. I do think was like really unique to her stardom and her performance. And this way that you do see, I don't know, like Mariah Carey or somebody who really does like and divas. Yeah. You know, it's so interesting because on the one hand there is right this total diva dumb,

39:19this attention to brilliant services. And at the same time, the women for whom Parton was perhaps a kind of capital V voice or as you say, are kind of her muses. I'm going to quote you to you. These are women tested by poverty and patriarchy who do what needs to get done and escape when it's time. Even if the fleeing lands them in another bad situation that they'll soon need to escape. They're women who are wronged or possibly doing wrong, finding a soundtrack to their own loves, et cetera. There's a balancing act between sort of her own brilliance and sort of defiance, but she's reaching back to people who are not achieving that same great surface. And I just, I would love to hear you talk about just sort of how that form of songwriting that she advanced interacts with the great surface. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So the thing I was thinking about is that someone like Dolly, if she were black, like would probably be called ghetto, a word that has not only racial undertones, but also class

40:24overtones as well. In the sense that on one hand, of course, she's asserting the uniqueness of her presentation. And yet also her taste level is really reminiscent of the kinds of women working class women that she grew up around and also still persists, right? These are the women who, when they're getting dressed up, they're putting on their acrylic nails or their pressons, they're dipping their heads in peroxide, right? They're putting on the big lip and the big eyeshadow and the big eyebrows. It's this interesting, as you say, this interesting balance between, on one hand, she is the embodiment of the Tennessee hauler, even as she's accruing so much capital, literally, also culturally, and so I think it is in this way that she has become a feminine icon in a, in a kind

41:27of like walking emblem of her own sound, while also, regretfully to some, perhaps, kind of scurrying the question of how she identifies politically. A great clip. There've been so many clips circulating about Dolly these days. One of them you mentioned in your piece and it's, and this goes to the bit about sort of a certain kind of working class aesthetics too, the acrylic nails of it all. She and Patty Lebel are sort of washboard styles scraping out a version of that song, Mama's Little Baby Love, Shorten and Shorten. You know, I ride a lot of songs when I don't have my guitar, you know, I beat around the dash, bored in my car when I'm riding around, riding a song, but then I have a little rhythm that we can do with these acrylic nails. Can you do that? Yeah. You want to play a little song for them? Get it close to your microphone. We're a mocked right down in here. Get it close to them. Okay. That's cute. Can you hear that? See, we did that. I'm playing that, but we didn't know how it was going to sound. So we were so close to it. I can't see if we could do something like Mama's Little Baby, Shorten and Shorten,

42:28Mama's Little Baby, Shorten and Brick. Mama's Little Baby, Shorten and Shorten, Mama's Little Baby, Shorten and Brick. Play it, Patty. That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, it's this kind of, you know, rough. That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, it's this kind of, you know, rogue femininity on display, but also like, what would you say? Just a sort of improvisational genius, like, you know, if there's an art to, as we've been saying, like teasing out, if there's an art to being a celebrity, moments of humor and levity like that are so much of the substance of that performance. I mean, I think like one of the reasons why people love this clip so much, I love this clip, of course, as well is like, you know, you have Dolly Parton, Patty LaBelle sitting in these big, like sparkly gowns with like puffy sleeves, it's very, very 80s. They have the 80s hair. And yet, like seemingly kind of like on the fly, here they are, like harmonizing this

43:32short and in bread song, which is like a folk song. I think it's like, hearkening back to like plantation days, which like maybe makes it like a slave song. Paul Roberson has a great version and so does Bugs Bunny, but can't please. Bugs Bunny, you know, one of our great minstrels. And they're like accompanied by, I mean, I have like acrylic nails on, I don't know if it's going to catch, but like, there you go. Mom, a little baby, that's something. That's all right. Right. And it's like, you know, these two people who are absolutely virtuosic and what they do, who are often kind of not really thought about, you know, they kind of occupy different regions and the cultural imagination for various reasons in terms of genre and in terms of race, united by like fake nails and a folk song. It's also just like making, making use kind of like turning the seeming seemingly priviless into, you know, making it useful, right?

44:34It's like kind of making do. It's like, oh, we don't have a banjo. We have our voices and we have our nails. You thought these nails were like stupid, look what they can do, you know, kind of kind of that. Yeah. Right. You just recently just last night returned from the Olivia Rodrigo, Daisy chain festival in Irvine, California. And I read that there was a Dolly tribute where Rodrigo brought on Sarah McLaughlin and they dedicated a duet of angel to Dolly Parton. Did you see this? I did see this. I mean, Dolly was kind of heavy in the air for me at least being at the festival in part because of its mission as a philanthropic endeavor and basically a benefits concert for charitable organizations that support women and girls. And so yeah, I was like thinking about Dolly.

45:36I was thinking about how she really entwined her philanthropy with her artistry, which is something that I think we could say Olivia Rodrigo is picking up. As a, as a mantle of sorts, like a, you know, Rodrigo describes her, you know, she's spoken out politically about various causes and she really describes it as like a thing that just artists are supposed to do and be about. Do you cannot know how happy we have been to have you on our shows? Lauren, thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm thinking about what Lauren said and the idea of Olivia Rodrigo sort of picking up politics, the Dolly loft behind. I think there's more pressure than ever. Nowadays Vincent, I don't know if you agree for stars to kind of fall on one side of whatever political debate is happening, especially partisan wise.

46:43And I wonder if she belongs kind of to a different, if she's kind of the last, the last great musician, popular musician, popular entertainer that was allowed to kind of remain in that ambiguity without it kind of being handed to her as, as sort of failing, moral failing almost. Yeah. And one way to say that, you know, that she kind of skirted this line is to say that, yes, there is a time for making statements, taking stances, but the highest form of politics is simply being involved in life and being like, you know, I think it is good that children ought to read. And while that doesn't often get heralded as politics, if politics is the sort of the art of being involved with the world that you live in, I don't think you can say that

47:46Dolly Parton skirted that higher perhaps responsibility. Absolutely not. And in fact, it very well may be that she did much more politically just with her work for, you know, the disadvantaged, her great philanthropy and her just general generosity of spirit. Just on these conversations or just I don't know any of this outpouring, is there a piece of Dolly Parton's art or other effusions that you've been inspired to pick up in the next couple of weeks in album, one of her movies, anything like that? Well, I think what is emerged for me is that I want to read Dolly's memoir from 1994, Dolly, my life and other unfinished business. Your condesour of showbiz memoirs are like, I don't like that. And I've missed this one. I never read it. I do love MMOR from the 80s and 90s.

48:49I feel like there was a little bit more freedom than even for very famous people. There was a bit more candor than nowadays. So that's where I'm going to be going next, I think. What about you? Well, you know, one album that got mentioned today is the relatively recent backwards Barbie. I am now inspired to check that album out. OK, OK, so that's what we're going to do. This has been a very Dolly Parton episode of Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Rian and Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Kutchman and we had engineering help today from Fran Bandi, with music by Alexis Cujrato. We can listen to all of our episodes anytime at New Yorker.com slash critics. Next week, our episode is all on the theme of Get Ready. Back to school.

49:49Join us for that.