Dolly Parton’s peerless career turned country music cliches inside out | Alexis Petridis

Beneath the wig and rhinestones, Parton was the genius behind strings of classic songs from Jolene to I Will Always Love You that continue to inspire new artists

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In December 1977, Dolly Parton submitted to an interview with ABC Television’s Barbara Walters, much against her friends’ advice. Walters was not noted for her deep love and understanding of country music. She was a notoriously tough cookie, a Boston-born, Sarah Lawrence-educated journalist who had battled scarcely believable sexism to become the first female co-host of an American news programme. The month before she met Parton, she had interviewed Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin while they were working out the terms of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.

It was all a very long way from Parton’s world, and the interview has something of the anthropological exercise about it. Walters looks aghast as Parton shows her around her tour bus, her collection of wigs and her “hand-washable and wrinkle-free” stage outfits (“you really like this? To me, it seems like horror”), and sits impassively as Parton sings Coat of Many Colours to her: an impressive feat, given the song’s saga of rural poverty and homespun wisdom is the mother of all tearjerkers from an artist never averse to yanking at her audience’s heartstrings. She asks Parton if people from “where I come from” would call her a hillbilly; regards the singer’s outfit with a jaundiced eye and tells her “you don’t have to look like this”. And, most infamously, she enquires: “Do you ever feel that you’re a joke?”

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