An American icon without baggage—that’s a rare status, but Dolly Parton had it. You can say many things about her life because it was a large life. What didn’t get enough attention was her songwriting. Country music is a storytelling art, and Parton, who died Tuesday at 80, was its master.
Any number of her songs demonstrate her gift. A common choice is “I Will Always Love You,” written by Parton in 1973 and released in 1974. It was rerecorded in 1992 by Whitney Houston, who gave it a second life and a second meaning. The recordings tell two stories—one when Parton sings, one when Houston sings. The words don’t change, but the story does.
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The song is told in the first person, and Parton sings it slowly, sadly, and softly. Voice and words together tell you that she is strong enough to leave her man but not strong enough to tell him. To say goodbye to his face would hurt so much that she might not go through with it. She can’t risk that because, if she stayed, she “would only be in [his] way.” So she slips out. The song is a note left on the dresser.
Houston sings it bigger, stronger, and faster. There’s a power in her voice that isn’t in Parton’s, and it changes the picture. It’s no longer a note left in the dark. Now the woman has found the courage. It hurts, but she looks him in the eye and seems to say: I am in the way and I need to leave.
The only reason to cover another artist’s song is to bring something different to it. Houston did, and her version is more popular. But it is Parton’s story.
“Coat of Many Colors” (1971) is another example.
On the surface, it’s a song about a poor girl whose mother sews a coat for her from a box of rags. While she sews, she tells the girl about Joseph in the Book of Genesis. The next day, the girl excitedly wears the coat to school. The other children laugh at her because they know the coat means that she’s poor. The girl is confused instead of ashamed; she doesn’t know that she’s poor. She sings, “I couldn’t understand it for I felt I was rich / And I told them of the love my momma sewed in every stitch.”
You feel the mother’s love; how she made her daughter see riches in rags, sparing her the knowledge that they were poor. That is poignant enough, but what sets the song apart is a choice Parton makes in the first lines: “Back through the years I go wonderin’ once again / Back to the seasons of my youth.”
We are not in the present but in memory. Parton could’ve written the song from the perspective of the child looking at the coat, or from the mother’s viewpoint, or from that of some other family member. Any choice would have made a good song. Instead, Parton made the song a reflection, and that reflection contains its second story.
The second story is a grown woman remembering what her mother gave up to provide for her, and how no one thanked her for it. The love couldn’t be repaid then because it wasn’t understood. That’s what the daughter now realizes in the song. She’s “wonderin’” why she didn’t know that she was poor, and she knows now that it’s because her mother hid it from her.
If you’re old enough, you’ve felt something like this. Going through a hard stretch, you think, “It wasn’t this hard for my parents.” Then you think a minute longer, and realize: Oh, yes it was. And you realize that they only made it look easy—and that they did it all for you.
That’s what the singer knows at the end of “Coat of Many Colors.” That’s the deeper thing Parton reaches for, and it’s what makes the song beautiful. Upon hearing it for the first time, it hits you because you feel something. The second time, it hits you because you know something. This was Parton’s gift, and no song shows it better.
What a storyteller. What an American. And what a life. She will be missed.