Truth In Reporting: Dolly Parton

I grew up listening to something called "hillbilly music." In my lifetime those sounds metamorphosed to "cowboy music" and then to "country" or "country and western." What's never changed is the honesty.

Other kinds of music don't have to be honest, or even realistic. Americans who listen to country music also live it, and they demand the same of the musicians.

Real-life American love stories aren't fairy tales, and you won't find many princes of the blood royal driving 18-wheelers cross-country at three o'clock in the morning (the optimum way to listen to country music).

The best country musicians are like good reporters: They tell it like it is. The late Tammy Wynette was one of the breed. Her ex-husband George Jones is another. So are Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn, as were Hank Williams and Patsy Cline before them.

And then there's Dolly Parton. Her voice is so sweet, sometimes you forget she's telling you the truth. She's so glamorous, sometimes you forget she's a sharecropper's daughter, granddaughter of a Pentecostal preacher, from Pigeon Forge, Tenn.

Dolly hasn't forgotten. "I've never left the Smoky Mountains," she says. "I've taken them with me wherever I go."

She believes she grew up at one with the earth, watched over by God. "We had a great love for nature," she recalls, "which meant we had a great love for God." That's why, although she could live anywhere in the world, she comes back to the hills and hollers where she grew up, and where she met me this misty spring morning.

"How can you just walk around and see these birds and see this grass, these hills -- and if you believe in anything, you have to see God right here. I just see Him, I feel Him, I just feel I can touch Him, and I know He touches me through all this."

From childhood, everything seemed to make music for Dolly. She tells me that the first time she heard Hank Williams' classic "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," she could hear the call of whippoorwills in the song. Naturally, she wound up singing along.

"My grandpa believed that you could make a joyful noise unto the Lord, and whatever you was banging on was all right with God," she recalls. She demonstrates by playing her hit "9 to 5," anthem of the working woman, on her fingernails. "It sounded like a typewriter, so it inspired me," she grins. "When you love music, you can make it out of anything."

She's heard the tired complaint that country songs are too sad. "What do you get when you play a country song backwards?" she says, quoting the old joke: "You get your wife back, and you get your dog back, that whole thing." She rolls her eyes.

She sings from the heart because she doesn't know any other way. If she's sad, she isn't going to deny it as a part of life, any more than she's going to deny beauty or love. It's natural.

"The way I grew up, I remember all the sadness, not just my own but my parents' sadness whepeople would die, or when crops would fail, when things were really hard and somebody was sick," she says. "I took all that to heart, and I made a living out of it, too, by putting it into songs."

Looking out over Dolly Parton's "Tennessee Home," to borrow from the title of another of her hit songs, it's easy to understand why, for her, music and nature and God are all one thing -- and a song runs through it.

Questions and comments may be sent to Dan Rather, c/o King Features, 235 East 45 Street, New York, NY

Written by Dan Rather
©1998, DJR Inc. Distributed by King Features