Ask Dolly Parton what she was and she would not have said star. She said songwriter. “That’s what I take more seriously than anything else I do in the business,” she told an interviewer in 1989. She was making up songs on Locust Ridge before she could write them down, and she was still doing it at 80.
The proof is a stretch of about eighteen months in the early 1970s that has few equals in American music. Coming off “Coat of Many Colors” and “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” she sat down in 1973 and wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” — the second a farewell to Porter Wagoner, whose television show had made her a national name and whose partnership she was leaving so she could run her own career. Two songs. One year. Either one would be a life’s work for most writers.
She was also shrewd in a way the industry did not expect. When Elvis Presley wanted to record “I Will Always Love You” in 1974, Colonel Tom Parker demanded half the publishing, as he did with everything Elvis cut. Dolly cried about it, and then said no. Eighteen years later Whitney Houston’s version from The Bodyguard sold more than twelve million copies and became one of the best-selling singles ever recorded — and Dolly owned it. She used the royalties to buy an office property in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Nashville. “This is the house that Whitney built,” she said.
She was a great collaborator on top of all that. The Porter Wagoner duets. “Islands in the Stream” with Kenny Rogers in 1983, written by the Bee Gees. Trio with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris in 1987, a Grammy winner that reminded everybody what three unamplified voices can do. In 2023, at 77, she released Rockstar, a rock record with Paul McCartney and Stevie Nicks on it, because the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had inducted her and she figured she ought to earn it. She kept going after that — a family album in 2024, and in January of this year, for her eightieth birthday, a new all-star recording of “Light of a Clear Blue Morning.”
The trophies piled up: 11 Grammys from 54 nominations, CMA Entertainer of the Year in 1978, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1986, the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999, the National Medal of Arts, an Emmy, two Oscar nominations. She wrote about 3,000 songs. Most writers would settle for two of them.