“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” Dolly Parton said it so many times it became a catchphrase, and almost nobody noticed it was also a mission statement.
The look started young, and it started here. As a girl in Sevier County, she has told the story a hundred times, she saw a woman in town whom the churchgoing folks called the town tramp — bright red lipstick, piled-up bleached hair, tight clothes, painted nails — and decided she was the most beautiful thing she had ever laid eyes on. When people told her the woman was trash, Dolly thought: that’s what I want to be when I grow up. She built herself in that image on purpose and she never sanded it down. Rhinestones, five-inch heels, acrylic nails, and wigs — enough of them, she guessed, for every day of the year, because she wore one about every day.
It cost her, especially early. In Nashville in the late 1960s, a woman who looked like that was assumed to be somebody’s decoration. Producers underestimated her. Interviewers asked about her figure instead of her catalog, and kept asking for another fifty years. She answered with jokes sharp enough to end the conversation — “I’m not offended by dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb, I also know I’m not blonde” — and with a candor about her own maintenance that took the ammunition away from everybody else. She never denied the surgery. “If I see something sagging, bagging or dragging,” she said, “I’ll get it nipped, tucked or sucked.”
What she understood before almost anyone in her business was that the look was leverage. It made her unmistakable on a stage, on a billboard, on a magazine rack. She put herself on the cover of Playboy in October 1978 in bunny ears — the first country singer to do it, fully clothed — and called it plainly what it was: a way to market herself into the mainstream. Then she spent the attention on things that lasted. Publishing rights she fought to keep. A theme park in her home county. A book program for children who could not afford books. Being looked at was the price of admission. What she did once she had the room was the whole point.
She titled a 2008 album Backwoods Barbie, and explained it about as well as anyone could: a country girl who wanted to be pretty more than anything, and who had a brain and a heart underneath all the hair. She died Tuesday at 80, still the most recognizable woman in American music.