Lessons I Learned From Dolly Parton

Everything I need to know about surviving this bad economy, I could learn from Dolly Parton. True, Little House on the Prairie [2] might offer more practical advice than the bouffant-wigged glamourpuss who admits she’s spent millions trying to look that cheap. But listening to Parton’s new multi-disc collection Dolly [3]—the first career-spanning box of her career—is way more entertaining. With all her spirited instructions on sewing new clothes from old rags (“Coat of Many Colors”), living rent-free on the river banks (“Gypsy Joe and Me”), and getting a job when there’s not much work to be had (“Mule Skinner Blues [Blue Yodel Number 8]”), she should have called the set The Smoky Mountain Girl’s How-To Guide for Hard Times.

Even her honkytonk classic “False Eyelashes” offers a convincing argument for trying to live well with less: “A pair of false eyelashes/ and a tube of cheap lipstick,” she sings. “A pair of worn-out high-heeled shoes/ and a dress that doesn’t fit/ These are all my possessions, all I have to my name/ and a record played in my hometown is my only claim to fame.” The emotion here is supposed to read as shame. But the way Parton sings it—in a gorgeously wide-mouthed Tweety Bird yodel—it sounds a lot like the pride of a self-made woman. “Oh, this little old gold record?” she seems to say, “Why, I put it together with nothing more than Cover Girl and some chewing gum!”

Now, being poor and reveling in simple pleasures may be the most overused trope in country music. But Parton actually did grow up in a ramshackle one-room cabin with a father who couldn’t read and a mother who struggled to feed 12 kids. So she sees both the good and the evil in that old Backwoods Cinderella story. In “The Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad),” she remembers “mama layin' in suffer and sickness/in need of a doctor we couldn't afford,” then insists, “No amount of money could pay me/to go back and live through it again.” And yet, as country’s Queen of Contradictions—the feminist icon with fake breasts, the Christian woman who modeled her look on the town tramp—she also suggests that this godforsaken upbringing was a blessing. “I had to get rich so I could afford to sing like I was poor again,” she once said.

Dolly’s other specialty is, of course, relationships, and here thrift helps create some of her most inspired metaphors. On “Bargain Store,” she even describes her body as if she were advertising a used tractor-trailor: “Take for instance this old broken heart/ If you will just replace the missing parts/ You would be surprised to find how good it really is.” Yes, love is just like being broke: You’ve gotta spruce up the stuff that’s already lying around the house.

Of course, it’s even more fun to hear Parton hollering about breaking things off. Most songs on Dolly fall into two categories—"I Know You’re Cheatin’ on Me When You Say You’re Out Fishin’/Gamblin’/Starin’ at Some Trollop’s Cleavage" and "I’m Awful Sorry I Dumped That Nice Young Hillbilly Years Ago." And money’s often what sparks her intuition that things aren’t gonna work out. Arguing over bills on “We’ll Get Ahead One Day,” a he said/she said number shared with her longtime collaborator Porter Wagoner, her voice is so charged that it crackles with the real-life financial tension between her and her duet partner, who shared her songwriting revenues. It’s telling that Parton’s version changes Wagoner’s line “If the sun comes up and my wife cuts down/ We’ll get ahead some day” to “If the sun comes up and we both cut down/ We’ll get ahead some day.”

If there’s a lesson behind Parton’s most tender love songs, it’s that a gal’s gotta make her own money, so no man has the power to leave her with nothing. That’s the subtext of “I Will Always Love You,” which Parton wrote for Wagoner after deciding that she didn’t need him as a professional partner anymore. (“We couldn’t agree on what I should do, what I should sing, what I should write, or who should publish the songs I did write,” she recalled in her memoir [4].) And her gospel power-ballad “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” is really a declaration of financial independence, written after she’d finally settled a $3 million lawsuit that Wagoner brought against her. Whenever she sings the word freedom, it’s just another word for raking in what’s rightfully hers with her own acrylic nails.

For Parton, hard work may be the closest thing to feminism—it’s no accident that her most famous song, “9 to 5,” is a demand for “a fair promotion.” Plus, she knows hard times have always provided the best opportunities for women. Putting her own spin on Bill Monroe’s “Mule Skinner Blues (Blue Yodel Number 8)”—a Depression-era tale of a big-swinging ranch hand looking for wages—she sings in-character as a “lady mule-skinner,” a former waitress who’s sick of her husband stealing her tips. Released at the dawn of the women’s movement—just years before the mid-‘70s recession—the cover landed at No. 3 on the country-and-western charts, her highest spot yet. And no wonder: singing from the perspective of the lone female talent among droves of cowboys, she could have been singing about her own real-life career, especially when she tells the boss why he should hire her. “I can make any mule listen,” she insists, “Or I won’t accept your pay.”

Still, the biggest hope Dolly offers her empty-pocketed fans doesn’t have much to do with mule-skinning or husband-robbing. It’s something to do with the music itself, played out in the evolution between 1959’s Greatest Generation cut “Puppy Love”—a bare-bones rockabilly track recorded just a few years after Parton made her first guitar from an old mandolin and two bass guitar strings—and 1992’s easy-money hit “Romeo,” a country-pop stadium-rocker that seethes with excess, from its all-star cameos by Billy Ray Cyrus and Tanya Tucker to its slick studio production. Having outlasted her share of boom times and, er, busts, Parton has become a living advertisement for economists’ current go-to mantra: This, too, shall pass.

“It’s been a long hard fight,” she sings on “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” “but I see a brand new day dawning … everything’s gonna be alright.” That’s a comforting thing to hear right now. Let’s hope the mules are listening.