Let’s kick this tribute off with a confession, because those usually put everybody at ease — one of her lesser but genuine goals in life . Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” always gave me the horrors, because turning a sweet song of self-abnegation into a braying display of one’s superior vocal cords struck me as at best a debatably attractive way of making the song one’s own. But Dolly, who was nothing if not politic, always made a point of sweetly praising Whitney’s version.
While also seeing fit to incidentally mention, cough cough, that it had made her enough money to buy Florida back for Spain. That’s why I will always love her.
Or one of the thousand reasons. It’ll tell you everything you need to know about my acute awareness of country music in the spring of 1977 that I knew her only as some singer Hunter S. Thompson seemed to like, as he saw fit to mention her as a cassette-tape consolation in Los Angelesc after Nixon’s win in Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail ’72.
It may get into TMI about my acute awareness of etc. that I vaguely guessed she must be some sort of cult jazz chantoozy. Those gals seemed like the soulful breed of songbird I guessed Hunter – we all called him Hunter then, our acquaintance with him seeming more intimate than actually knowing the guy would be – was likely to resort to when he was too down in the dumps to live vicariously through Mick Jagger instead.
Did I learn better that epochal spring? Uh-huh. I flipped for Dolly the second my college pal Cindy Read introduced me to Best of Dolly Parton, the second of two hits compilations – differentiated only by Vol. II’s missing “The” – she’d released in 1970 and then 1975. Since my own babble about how great she weret was pretty damn uninformed, here’s critic Robert Christgau summing up the self-same LP in his Consumer Guide:
In her productivity and devotion to writing Parton is like a nineteenth-century woman novelist--a hillbilly Louisa May Alcott. What’s best about her is her spunkiness and prettiness (Jo crossed with Amy); what’s worst is her sentimentality and failures of imagination (Beth crossed with Meg). And this is the best of her best. At least half of these songs have an imaginative power surprising even in so fecund a talent – images like the bargain store and the coat of many colors are so archetypal you wonder why no one has ever thought of them before. The psychological complexities of “Jolene” and “Traveling Man” go way beyond the winsome light melodramas that are Parton’s specialty. And even when the writing gets mawkish--”I Will Always Love You” or “Love Is Like a Butterfly”--her voice is there to clear things up. A+
Isn’t that expert Little Women analogy pretty darn genius-y itself? You betcha if you’re asking me, which it so happens you are whether you like it or not. But little did I know, as Louisa May Alcott her-own-self might phrase it, that just a few months later, Robert Christgau his-own-self would be shepherding me (I’d only turned 21 that May) into the ranks of professional rock critics in the pages of the Village Voice’s old “Riffs” section.
I had no idea why he saw promise in a young clod until I read in his memoir Going into The City decades later that he’d always hankered for a son named Tom. Funnily enough, he just happened to mentor and/or boost several of us T-boyz-to-men around then, and brother, will I always love now 84-year-old Bob. If my folks had named me Elmer, I’d be lucky to have ended up writing ad copy for Tom Petty, Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, or America’s Funniest Home Videos host Bob Saget instead.
The Dean, as we all called him – it reflected our awe of the man much better than our acquaintance with him did – was much too savvy to trust me with a Dolly record, though. So I wound up reviewing 1978’s Heartbreaker, one her earliest, most game – and least convincing – bids for a pop crossover, for ineffable Paul Nelson his-own-self at Rolling Stone and not the Voice. While I’ll always love Paul (1936-2006), he shoulda been shrewder than to trust me around a Dolly record either.
Not the way you’d think, though. I was still only 22, and many a four-eyed young dickhead with no social skills whatsoever (for self-protection, we tell ourselves not to trust anyone under 30 who has them) has first tasted power as a popcult reviewer. I was unhappy with Heartbreaker, because I was a gabba-gabba-hey punk zealot then and pop crossovers of any sort were anathema to me. I’d have to do some sloppy fast footwork to rationalize the Ramones-their-own-selves making the identical move on 1980’s End of The Century.
No master at to-everything-there-is-a-season in those days, I groused in print that “my” Dolly – like hell she was or can be even now, only partly because damned fools need not apply – sounded on Heartbreaker like she’d had a lobotomy or something. Something would have been a far, far better way to go. Even juvenile me fretted once my review saw print, still a startling and often chastening experience then, that it was too bitchy.
Or worse – infinitely worse, to a jumpy newbie writer – just plain ignorant. Luckily, besides being nasty and brutish, at least my pan was short.
That’s when future Dolly biographer Alanna Nash her-own-self did the kindest thing anybody ever did for a jumpy newbie writer. This one, any-hoo. I didn’t know Nash from James Boswell, but we ran into each other at the RS office soon after my crass review came out. I confided my fears (too bitchy, ignorant, so forth) and she confided back I shouldn’t worry. Dolly’s Nashville friends not only privately thought the same of Heartbreaker, but – I hope memory isn’t garbling this – had told Dolly her-own-self so.
I will always love Alanna Nash.
Maybe peculiarly, considering we both live in Louisville now – she’s from here and I’m not – she and I have never met again IRL. But we’re Facebook friends, which is how come I know her phone’s been ringing off the hook since Dolly doffed her coat of many colors. But she’s still too broken up grieving her Dolly – and if anybody has a right to that possessive, she does – to talk to reverential journalists (reverential of Dolly, not Alanna her-own-self) worldwide.
What Nash undoubtedly knew and I sure didn’t in 1978 was that Heartbreaker would end up as a blip in Dolly’s Napoleonic trek from achieving mere dime-a-dozen legend status to transcending mere $1 billion-a-dozen icon status at a mythic level equaled in wondrousness, white-people subdivision, only by Elvis his own self. When Whitney Houston was still in rompers, His Own Self wanted to cover “I Will Always Love You.” But Colonel Parker, predictably, wanted half publishing rights in exchange, and Dolly, whose lovability is and the hell with saying was only exceeded by her fierce protection of her fiduciary, artistic (and mythic) independence, regretfully told Parker nah. Then, by her own account, she cried all night.
Dolly scarcely holds her own, if that, with Elvis in cultural ubiquity, not to mention(ca-chung!) sales. Nobody does, but she may well exceed him in consensus. One pal quoted critic Lester Bangs’ famous line after the Big E died – “We will never again agree on anything the way we agreed on Elvis” – and allowed as how he had his doubts about that. His point was that we do agree that way on Dolly.
Let’s not forget that Mr. Hunka-Hunka Burning Li’l Abner was scorned by sophisticates in his glorious prime as an untutored and unpedigreed Dogpatch hick. (Sound familiar, Daisy Mae?) He was getting dismissed if not pitied, for Jesus H. Presley’s sake, as an untutored, unpedigreed has-been until he shocked the world on August 16, 1977 – here you come again, that summer, looking better than a bygone epoch has a right to -- by reminding it that what he had been, still was and always would be was immortal. Let’s also not forget that a fine synonym for unpedigreed, at least in this country, is unprecedented.