“Dolly?”
Dolly Parton looked up, about 10 feet away, just before the interview picked back up from a break on a Nashville-area soundstage. I was hired to work with her on Star of the Show: My Life on Stage, the third in a trilogy of coffee-table books for Random House subsidiary Ten Speed Press.
The project had a specific focus: We were telling her story through her evolution on stage. We were just a few questions away from a tough moment in her career, and as uncomfortable as the topic was, I didn’t feel like I would be doing my job if I ignored it.
As she acknowledged in her last public statement on Aug. 21, Parton endured female health issues in the early 1980s, and they raged in the summer of 1982. A doctor warned her against taking the stage at the Indiana State Fair, but she performed anyway, trying to fit the show in before a rainstorm arrived. Her band knew she’d been struggling, but the musicians were unaware of the duress under which she was carrying out the “show must go on” mantra that particular night.
She held up long enough to do her job, but in the hours after the show, she was flown to New York City, where she had surgery and cancelled her public commitments for several months. Parton was as adept as anyone at turning heartbreak into heroism, and I wanted her to have the opportunity to do that with this moment.
“Dolly, it’s your book, so it’s up to you.”
I said that — or something close to that — as I let her know what was coming. “I think your resilience is one of the things your fans admire about you, and I suspect your story about this could inspire them.”
Her response was quick: “Nah, that’s a bunch of female problems. Nobody wants to hear about that.”
She had, it seemed, made her choice. But about 20 seconds later, she looked up again: “Listen, you ask me whatever you want to ask, and I’ll give you an answer.”
So I asked, and she went way deeper into it than I had anticipated. She had pushed herself so hard for so long, she recalled, and as she recovered from her operation, she realized that she needed to reclaim control of her health if she was going to be Dolly Parton for years to come. She changed her eating habits, revised her sleeping patterns, and — while she remained a hard-working woman — she became more fiercely guarded of her time and commitments.
Five years later, when she hosted her ABC variety show in 1987, she’d become a svelte model of health and — thanks in great part to her Kenny Rogers duet on “Islands in the Stream” — an even greater superstar. It was a level of significance which she owned all the way until her death from cancer on Aug. 25, defying the typical career arc. What goes up, we are told, must come down, but that was never the case for Dolly Parton’s influence.
Parton had rarely, if ever, discussed in great detail how learning from her early-‘80s illness led to a personal rebound. That Indiana incident is a great example of why she was able to navigate her life so successfully for so long on a global level.
There were numerous examples of resilience in her life.
• After leaving the Porter Wagoner show in 1974, she was in debt for several years but became one of the richest women in show business.
• Her ABC show got poor ratings, in part because she allowed the Hollywood “pros” to dictate the format, but she learned from that experience to be even more demanding about her creative control.
• She shied away from touring in the late-1990s to focus on other ventures and spend more time at home, but when she returned to the road, she became an even bigger concert draw, selling out stadiums internationally, a feat she had never achieved even in her “9 to 5” / “Islands in the Stream” peak period.
The source of her strength and resilience was, most likely, her spiritual life. Her grandfather was a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher, but she grew to see God in more loving terms, and her faith inspired her throughout her career, impacting such inspirational pieces as “The Seeker,” “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” and “He’s Alive.” The latter song, grounded in a story of Christian resilience, led to what was likely her greatest-ever live performance, a raise-the-roof appearance on the Country Music Association Awards in 1989 that featured a surprise choir and a mid-song standing ovation from an audience filled with stars. Parton herself was overtaken by, it seemed, some other force.
“I honestly felt my spirit lifted,” she said. “I felt like I was not even standing on the floor.”
She knew the source of her power, and she set up her life in a way that allowed her to draw upon it. She had a small chapel in her Nashville office. One of her associates showed it to me in December 2024 — it was quiet, respectful, beautiful and as calming as any space I’ve inhabited. When I asked a few months later about her pre-show ritual, Parton said she would “pee and pray” — she would specifically ask that her performance have an impact on her audience, that God would use her to inspire these people as they moved forward in their lives.
She found all sorts of ways to incorporate her faith walk into her music. Nearly every album featured some sort of gospel content, and she rearranged a number of pop and rock songs to reveal a Godly message — or, at least, a Godly sound — that had not been obvious in the original version. That included her takes on Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher,” Collective Soul’s “Shine” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”
I believe — and I use that phrase intentionally — that “Coat of Many Colors” is the greatest song that Dolly Parton ever wrote, because it so deftly encapsulates many, maybe all, of the messages at the heart of her work. It draws upon the story of Joseph, a Biblical figure who was sold by his brothers into slavery, only to become an influential figure who helped Egypt grapple with a devastating famine. Joseph’s resilience, refashioned in the song’s central tale about a gift from her mother that her classmates denigrated, became a symbol of Parton’s own ability to overcome devastating hurdles. As she wrote it, she incorporated her faith and her love of family into a three-minute life lesson about beauty, about self-confidence and about keeping the value of money in proper perspective.
One of the hardest tasks for public figures is to keep smiling for the crowd even in those periods when they are struggling internally. “Coat of Many Colors” reflects how she learned to do that as a child. Her approach to her health issues in the early-1980s — and her willingness to share how she bounced back from that period — reflect her ability to do that as an international superstar. That skill is likely a big reason why her death has resonated so deeply with so many. She was able, because of her faith, to explore some of the deepest, darkest feelings in her soul and to share her experience with the world.
She was a strong, strong woman, who loved and led in a manner far beyond what most of us dare to dream. She was the best of us, and her passing, coming in the midst of a dark time in our public discourse, is a reminder to look to the light.
