Remembering Dolly Parton: An Icon, A Songwriter, An Original
There are famous people. There are country music stars. And then there are the handful of people who become something bigger than all of it. Transcendent cultural figures.
Dolly Parton was an icon.
Not in the way that word gets thrown around now. The real kind. The kind where you can say one name...Dolly...and just about everybody knows exactly who you mean.
She belonged to Tennessee, certainly. But somewhere along the way, she also became part of the fabric of Texas.
In 1982 she stepped into the role of Miss Mona in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, opposite Burt Reynolds, in a movie rooted in the story of the legendary Chicken Ranch in La Grange. Somehow, Dolly fit that very Texas story as naturally as if she'd been part of it all along.
That movie also gave “I Will Always Love You” another life. She had written it years earlier as a goodbye to Porter Wagoner, but re-recorded it for Whorehouse and took it back to No. 1. Whitney Houston would give it new life with 1992's The Bodyguard and then decades later, that same song found its way into our Texas Music universe.
In 2011, Fort Worth’s Josh Weathers stood onstage at the Kessler Theater in Dallas with a guitar and sang “I Will Always Love You.” Somebody filmed it. The video spread everywhere, and before long people far beyond Texas knew what those of us around here already knew about Josh Weathers.
That is what great songs do.
They leave the person who wrote them. They travel. They cross generations and genres and state lines. They wind up on movie screens, in honky-tonks, at the Kessler, around campfires and in the hands of singers who weren't even born when they were written.
And Dolly wrote a bunch of those songs. “Jolene.” “Coat of Many Colors.” “I Will Always Love You.”
Then, somehow, Texas got another one of those Dolly moments in 2023.
At 77 years old, she walked onto the field at AT&T Stadium during the Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving game dressed in her own version of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders uniform and proceeded to own the place. She sang “Jolene,” “9 to 5,” “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You” and owned the moment.
Of course she did.
She could have been remembered solely as one of the greatest songwriters country music ever produced and that would have been enough. Instead, she became DOLLY.
Movie star. Businesswoman. Philanthropist. Comedian. Cultural institution. A woman covered in rhinestones who somehow never allowed any of the spectacle to obscure the very real person underneath it. The only thing bigger than her talent was her heart.
Maybe that is why she endured.
There was no irony to Dolly Parton. She knew exactly who she was. She could laugh at herself without ever diminishing herself. She could walk into just about any room in the world and somehow belong there. And in an increasingly fractured culture, almost everybody seemed to agree on Dolly.
She was ours. An American original. A true icon.
From the Galleywinter perspective, maybe the most important thing is still the simplest thing.
The songs. Somewhere tonight somebody will pick up a guitar and play one (or many) of Dolly's. People will cue up Dolly on streaming sites. Load up the record player with her vinyl. And soak in her greatness.
That's the thing about an icon. They leave. The music and memories don't.
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