For creating popular songs about real women, for turning feminine style into humor and power, and for bringing jobs and understanding to the mountain people of Tennessee.
Editor’s note: As the world mourns Dolly Parton, Ms. is revisiting Gloria Steinem’s tribute to the country music legend, originally published in the January 1987 issue, when Parton was named one of Ms. magazine’s Women of the Year. Steinem celebrated Parton not only as a gifted songwriter and magnetic performer, but as a shrewd businessperson who transformed femininity into a source of humor and power—and used her success to lift up working women, poor communities and the mountain people of her native Tennessee.
If feminism means each of us finding our unique power, and helping other women do the same, Dolly Parton certainly has done both.
Gloria Steinem, 1987
People who haven’t listened to Dolly Parton or to feminism may be surprised to learn that they go together. In fact, she has crossed musical class lines to bring work, real life, and strong women into a world of pop music usually dominated by unreal romance. She has used her business sense to bring other women and poor people along with her. And her flamboyant style has turned all the devalued symbols of womanliness to her own ends.
If feminism means each of us finding our unique power, and helping other women do the same, Dolly Parton certainly has done both.
In 1986 she crossed two more boundaries.
Dolly’s Smoky Mountain Christmas, an ABC made-for-television movie based on her original idea and produced by her own company, brought down-home style and her own songs into our living rooms. The story of a disillusioned entertainer whose Christmas spirit is restored by children in her poor mountain home, it also let us share the reality and beauty of isolated mountain life in Tennessee.
Dollywood, a theme park she established in the Smoky Mountain foothills earlier last year, was a far greater accomplishment; a realization of Dolly’s longtime dream of bringing jobs and understanding into that isolation. It has already attracted more than a million tourists, to everything from mountain crafts and a river ride, to a back-porch theater and mountain-style restaurants—all with an eye to economic development for residents.
This strength, this capacity to dream what she could not know, seems to have been born into Dolly, as one of 12 children of a poor family in those mountains.
By the time she was 7, she was playing the guitar, reading books and dreaming of a world beyond the poverty and beauty of the Smoky Mountains.
By the time she was 10, she had coaxed support from her free-thinking mother, braved the opposition of her protective father, and earned her first public applause by singing before live audiences at a radio station in Knoxville. With that taste of success, she vowed to conquer the larger world beyond the mountains, but never to betray the country way of life that had nurtured her.
And that’s exactly what she has done.
Her career as a country music singer has brought her five gold and three platinum albums, three Grammy awards, 22 number-one singles, a total of more than 60 albums and the 1978 award as the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year. Even more unusual, she also has succeeded in bringing country music onto the pop charts, thus crossing over the music world’s class line without losing her original audience.
As a composer and lyricist, she accomplished that difficult crossover with irresistible country melodies, and with lyrics that celebrated a real life.
In songs like “Poor Folks Town,” she treated her childhood with irony and praise:
“We got no money, but we’re rich in love; and that’s the one thing that we got a-plenty of.”
Country or urban, songs like “Working Girl” and “9 to 5” have become anthems for the millions of women flooding into the paid labor force. Who could resist such lyrics as: “Tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen; pour myself a cup of ambition…” And: “They let you dream just to watch them shatter; you’re just a step on the boss man’s ladder, but you’ve got dreams he’ll never take away.”
Few singers make a successful transition into films, but Dolly Parton accomplished that, too. Her debut performance in 9 to 5 was praised by surprised critics. Later performances opposite Burt Reynolds and Sylvester Stallone combined humor, sexuality and strength.
Even fewer performers control their own economic lives, but Parton’s down-home business sense is evident in everything from Sandollar, her own film and television production company, to The Traveling Family Band, a 1970s road show that enlisted many of Parton’s own family members as ambassadors of country culture and mountain music.
All this has been accomplished with her country accent intact, and a populist taste for tight, bright clothes that emphasize—and never apologize for—a body that is as mythically female as the Great Goddess statues of prehistory. Like Better Midler, she has taken all the ridiculed modern symbols of femininity, from makeup and platform shoes to wigs and false eyelashes, and infused them with humor and a conscious power.
But staying true to herself as a country artist, a strong businesswoman and a mountain woman with loyalty and love for her roots, Dolly Parton has brought her own world into a larger one, and so added richness and understanding to them both.
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To honor five-plus decades of feminist reporting, rebelling and truth-telling, From the Vault features some of our favorite classics from the pages of Ms. The complete Ms. Magazine Archive—every issue since 1972—is now available digitally on ProQuest: free to students, educators and activists via their libraries. Ask your local or campus librarian about subscriptions or free trial access. (More info here.) For an essential collection you can hold in your hands, don’t miss 50 YEARS OF Ms.: THE BEST OF THE PATHFINDING MAGAZINE THAT IGNITED A REVOLUTION (Alfred A. Knopf)—a stunning anthology of the most audacious, norm-breaking stories Ms. has published.
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A note from Ms. editors: We want to hear from you for The Majority, a new campaign collecting stories about how reproductive freedom has enabled readers to build the lives they want and need. Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. Add your voice and complete the sentence: “Access to reproductive choices gave me the freedom to….” Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible.
