Dolly Parton Song Quotes

All the best things in my life have started with a Dolly Parton song.

There's a powerful wisdom in just leaving the bullshit for someone else to fix.

She cared so much about her words, her creative expression, when what mattered to everyone else was the bottom line. Everything was a business--even art. She'd written the songs, but she wouldn't be able to truly own them. Not if she wanted the rest of the world to hear them.

Maybe it’s no coincidence that Parton’s popularity seemed to surge the same year America seemed to falter. A fractured thing craves wholeness, and that’s what Dolly Parton offers—one woman who simultaneously embodies past and present, rich and poor, feminine and masculine, Jezebel and Holy Mother, the journey of getting out and the sweet return to home.

That’s what a good country song is: a story about real things and real people and real emotions, set to a really good tune.

Also there’s this thing that happens to me sometimes, and it’ll usually be me watching a video of Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers singing “Islands in the Stream” and I wonder if I’m crying because I have majorly unaddressed psychological reasons or if that song is really that beautiful.

There is, then, intellectual knowledge--the stuff of research studies and think pieces--and there is experiential knowing. Both are important, and women from all backgrounds might possess both. But we rarely exalt the knowing, which is the only kind of feminism many working women have.

The woman who speaks about feminism is not always the one truly insisting on equality behind closed doors.

I just like horny songs.

ONE All the best things in my life have started with a Dolly Parton song. Including my friendship with Ellen Dryver. The song that sealed the deal was “Dumb Blonde” from her 1967 debut album, Hello, I’m Dolly. During the summer before first grade, my aunt Lucy bonded with Mrs. Dryver over their mutual devotion to Dolly. While they sipped sweet tea in the dining room, Ellen and I would sit on the couch watching cartoons, unsure of what to make of each other. But then one afternoon that song came on over Mrs. Dryver’s stereo. Ellen tapped her foot as I hummed along, and before Dolly had even hit the chorus, we were spinning in circles and singing at the top of our lungs. Thankfully, our love for each other and Dolly ended up running deeper than one song. I

I wrote a lot of songs that people wouldn’t play on the radio, but I didn’t care. It bothered me at the time, but I never thought, “I shouldn’t have done that.” Whatever I write is just what comes out of me, and I refuse to be judged.

Political headlines were fixating on a hateful, sexist version of rural, working-class America that I did not recognize. Dolly’s music and life contained what I wanted to say about class, gender, and my female forebears: That country music by women was the formative feminist text of my life.

I was a reader, when I could get ahold of something to read, and literature showed me places I’d never seen. Another art form, though, showed me my own place: country music. Its sincere lyrics and familiar accent confirmed, with triumph and sorrow, that my home—invisible or ridiculed elsewhere in news and popular culture—deserved to be known, and that it was complicated and good.

Parton’s musical genius deserves a discussion far beyond and above the matters of gender and class. But the lyrics she wrote are forever tied to the body that sang them, her success forever tied to having patterned her look after the “town trollop” of her native holler. For doing so, she received a fame laced with ridicule; during interviews in the 1970s and 1980s, both Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey asked her to stand up so they could point out, without humor, that she looked like a tramp.

I try to be a better me. I don't try to compete with anybody else, I'm not really that aware of what other people are doing, I'm not that interested in other people's business. I got to be my best self. I got to be me. Don't be a coward. Know who you are. Do what you do, don't be so easily influenced by other people, don't be insecure about it. You know who you are. If you don't, you need to find out, pretty soon, you can't live your whole life trying to please other people. And so I would just say go for it. Of course, I try to improve every day. If there's a better outfit, I want to wear it. If there's a better song I want to write it. If there's a better record I want to record it. I want to continue to try to be as good as I can at all my abilities. I want to make the most of them, if I want to do better movies, and I come up with new ideas all the time.

I’ll never forget this one night when Daddy had taken us way out to a little church up on a high ridge. There was no kind of instrumentation, and the hymns were all sung a cappella. During the preaching, there was a little more shouting from the congregation than usual. When it came time for us to sing, we were introduced by the preacher, a wiry little man with kind of a fiery look in his eyes. We stepped to the front and took our places on the old wood-plank platform to one side of the pulpit. Softly, I sung a note to get us started because it was decided I could come closest to hitting a key that we could all sing in. We began our songs, just as we had planned. I was aware that the pastor was on the stage behind us, but I didn’t think anything of it. After a while, I could feel Stella nudging me in the ribs, trying not to be noticed. I looked at her, and she motioned with her head slightly back toward where the preacher was standing. He seemed to be totally wrapped up in the spirit, nearly in a trance. I didn’t think too much of it, until I spotted a familiar sight—the back markings of a snake, a cottonmouth moccasin. I had seen them in the woods, usually scurrying across the path toward cover. They were afraid of me, and I was afraid of them. And up to now, we had always managed to keep our distance from each other. Here, apparently, they were a part of the worship service. I could see now, out of my peripheral vision, that the preacher had a full grown cottonmouth by the back of the head and it was twisting and coiling all around his forearm. Some members of the congregation were reaching out as if they wanted to touch it. The preacher was getting more and more worked up, and he reached into a wooden crate by the pulpit and took out two more snakes. This time he seemed to be holding them much more carelessly. He lifted them near his face as if daring them to strike. We sisters just kept on singing, unconsciously moving away from the snakes until we were very near the front of the platform. Just then, I noticed something that struck a note of fear in my heart much greater than that inspired by the snakes. My father had stepped into the back of the church to hear his little girls sing. Whatever he had been drinking didn’t impair his ability to see exactly what the preacher had in his hands. Just at that moment, the man and his snakes took a step toward the congregation, thus toward us. Daddy had seen enough. He charged down the aisle like a wild boar through a thicket. “You get them Goddamn snakes away from my kids!” Daddy bellowed with a force in his voice I had never heard before. It was amazing how quickly that preacher broke his trance and paid heed. He had heard the voice of a higher power, in this case a really pissed-off redneck. Daddy swooped us up and out the front door before we had time to think about what was happening. We didn’t even stop singing until we were almost down the steps into the churchyard. We were glad to be out of there, and I at least was proud that Daddy had come to our rescue. But Daddy obviously felt terrible about it. On the way home in the car, he got to feeling especially bad. “Goddamn! I can’t believe I said Goddamn in church!” he muttered to himself. He finally got so upset he had to stop the car and get out in the woods and, in his way, ask God’s forgiveness. I couldn’t help thinking how badly Mama had always wanted Daddy to walk down the church aisle and declare himself. Now he had certainly done that, although not I’m sure the way Mama had in mind.

I put my playlist on shuffle mode and it’s giving my emotions whiplash. Songs bounce from Bad Omens, Eminem, Dolly Parton, Korn, to Sam Tinnesz.  One of the nice things about letting my clients choose the music during their sessions is I’ve been introduced to a lot of artists I might not have heard of otherwise. I’ve got one hell of an eclectic compilation rocking through my studio because of it.

I flapped open the lid of my cardboard guitar case and whipped out my old Martin. Mr. Killen seemed a little taken aback. I think he wasn’t sure whether I was going to play the guitar or brain him with it. He breathed a sigh of relief when I went into a song. Bill hustled his guitar out as fast as he could and joined in. I sang loud and strong with the security that comes with knowing that one way or another, it’ll be over soon.

One day I was standing with my stage manager, Sandy Prudden, and Buddy Sheffield watching as Kermit the Frog (with the help of the late Jim Henson) sweetly sang a song. Sandy was always a big joker. He sidled up to me and said, “Isn’t it amazing the way Kermit can sing like that with somebody’s hand up his ass.” Without missing a beat, I came back with, “Shoot, that ain’t nothin’. I did that for seven years on the ‘The Porter Wagoner Show.

I think of country radio like a great lover. You were great to me, you bought me a lot of nice things and then you dumped my ass for younger women.

Drake song “Make Me Proud” with a direct invocation: “Double D up, hoes. Dolly Parton.

DOLLY INCLUDED THIS SONG ON HER Blue Smoke collection of 2014. “Try” is also a cornerstone song on the soundtrack of a 2020 Netflix original musical Christmas on the Square.

Will Always Love You.” The song that always reminded me of Rory, of the first day I’d laid eyes on him, of the star-crossed arc of our young love. The jukebox clicked and whirred to life, and a moment later Dolly Parton’s signature warble

Except it made us look as if we were about to break out into song – a duet by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. Edie burst out laughing. Before I could stop myself, I started singing ‘Islands in the Stream’.

I have been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots,’” she said softly. “Is that a line from a song?” AnnieLee asked. “It’s from a book—Dust Tracks on a Road, by Zora Neale Hurston.

Feminism and all movements for social progress inevitably contain a gap between what’s on paper and what’s really going on: between the feminism proclaimed and the feminism enacted, the women’s rights legislated and the women’s rights enforced, the progress in policy and the progress in culture. Women of Generation X, of which I represent the youngest contingent, had more freedom than their mothers in meaningful ways. We were the first full beneficiaries of Title IX protections guaranteeing access to education and outlawing sexual discrimination in the workplace. We were entering our first romantic partnerships as the Violence Against Women Act became law. But the cultural cues we received growing up were full of gaps and dissonance.

Oh, I’m a female and I believe that everybody should definitely have their rights,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re Black, white, straight, gay, women, men, whatever. I think everybody that has something to offer should be allowed to give it and be paid for it. But, no, I don’t consider myself a feminist, not in the term that some people do, because I just think we all should be treated with respect.” Her answer might break your heart if, like me, you speak the language of college-educated activists. But I speak another language, too —poor country— and can attest that as an independent teenager in small-town Kansas who believed women and men should receive equal treatment, I might have given a similar answer. So much of what ails our country now, politically, is that we do not share a common set of definitions. In the context of her native class, Parton’s gift to young women is not a statement but an example. One wishes for both from a hero. But, if I could only have one of the two, I’d pick the latter.

That evening at Steinem’s talk on the University of Texas campus, I was struck by her explanation for how such venomous misogyny could overrun the presidential election in 2016. The moment a woman is statistically most likely to be murdered by her male abuser, Steinem pointed out, is when she escapes. Losing control of her is the unbearable threat that makes the violent ex-husband snap. Expanding this idea to a patriarchy losing control of half of the U.S. population would indeed explain a lot about recent years: Abortion provider George Tiller’s murder in Wichita in 2009, Hillary Clinton’s treatment and loss in 2016, the reliable track record of violence against and hatred toward women among male perpetrators of this century’s mass-shooting epidemic. It would explain, too, perhaps, how a self-possessed, powerful woman like Parton gets turned into a boob joke. Like Steinem, Parton is an icon of American womanhood in the twentieth century, still going full force today, perhaps with the energy other women their age who made more orthodox decisions must offer to their grandchildren. Steinem did not come from wealth, but the two women nonetheless had different experiences of socioeconomic class: one went to college, and one took a guitar to Nashville. In different ways and with different tacks, they both charted the course for us to nominate a woman for president in 2016.

Working-class women might not be fighting for a cause with words, time, and money they don’t have, but they possess an unsurpassed wisdom about the way gender works in the world. Take, for example, the concept of intersectionality. A working-class woman of color might not know that word, but she knows better than anyone how her race, gender, and economic struggles intertwine. There is, then, intellectual knowledge—the stuff of research studies and think pieces—and there is experiential knowing. Both are important, and women from all backgrounds might possess both. But we rarely exalt the knowing, which is the only kind of feminism many working women have.

I feel sexy,” Parton said. “I like being a woman. If I’d-a been a man, I’d-a probably been a drag queen.