Love Without Cringing

“Dumb Blonde” was not her joke

Her first hit, in 1967, was a song called “Dumb Blonde,” in which a woman informs a man that being blonde is not the same as being stupid. She was twenty-one. She did not write it.

Curly Putman did. Which means the joke, the persona and the terms of engagement all arrived before she had any say in them, and the first thing the public heard from her was a rebuttal to an accusation nobody had put in writing. She spent the next fifty-nine years working inside that costume, and got so good at it that most people came to believe she had designed it from scratch.

That distinction — assigned, then inhabited, then mastered — is worth holding on to, because it is the honest version of a story usually told as pure self-invention. She was extremely deliberate about the wigs and the nails and the laugh. She was also handed a slot marked blonde girl singer by an industry that had exactly one of those, and the alternative on offer was not a different persona. It was no career.

The Book Lady, and what was on the envelope

In 1995 she started mailing books to children in Sevier County, Tennessee. Not the poor ones. Not the promising ones. Every one, birth to five, a book a month, until they started school.

Thirty-one years later that is more than 332 million books across five countries, going out at something like three and a half million a month. In all that time, the thing that was never added is a test. No income threshold. No application beyond an address. No reading assessment, no referral, no diagnosis, no waiting list, and no annual review to confirm the child still deserves it.

And the parcel does not say to the parent or guardian of. It carries the child’s own name. A two-year-old who cannot yet read gets post.

She built it for her father. Robert Lee Parton could not read or write, and his daughter called him one of the wisest men she had ever known — both halves of that at once, which is the entire design. She did not conclude that he lacked something. She concluded that something had failed to reach him.

The programme is Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, and the children called her the Book Lady. In 2017, at seventy-one, she wrote them an album and handed it the proceeds.

It also puts two songs forty-six years apart into a single argument, which is the reason this section sits in a rack rather than only in the zine. “Coat of Many Colors” (1971) is written from inside the laughing — the child in the handmade coat, mocked for it, insisting she was rich and they could not see it. “Makin’ Fun Ain’t Funny” (2017) is the same playground addressed to the other children, the ones doing the laughing. She had been the kid in the coat; when she finally got a room full of six-year-olds listening, she wrote to the ones on the other side of it.

The copyright in her pocket

In 1974 Elvis Presley wanted to record “I Will Always Love You.” The night before the session, Colonel Tom Parker explained the terms.

By Parton’s account, the rule was that Elvis did not record anything without half the publishing going to Presley’s side. She had written the song. She had published it herself. She said no — and, by her own account, cried all night about it.

Eighteen years later Whitney Houston recorded it for The Bodyguard and it became one of the best-selling singles ever made, with the songwriting income going where Parton had kept it. The story gets told as business acumen, and it was. But the shape of it is a refusal, not a strategy: somebody powerful asked her to hand over half of a thing she had made, as the price of being allowed in the room, and she declined to pay a toll she did not owe.

That is the same instinct as the mailing label, pointed the other way. She would not put a gate in front of anybody else, and she would not walk through one herself.

She wrote the dark ones too

The received Dolly is relentlessly sunny. The catalogue is not.

“Down from Dover” ends with a stillborn baby. “The Bridge” ends, by implication, with a pregnant woman going over one. “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)” is a title doing an entire argument’s work — a refusal to let anybody get nostalgic about her childhood on her behalf.

Cottom reads this run as gothic motherhood: country music demanded that a woman be a wife or a mother to be taken seriously, and Parton, who never had children, answered the demand by writing an archive of motherhood as painful and complicated as the real thing. That reading is hers and we are borrowing it with the tag on.

What it means for this rack is simpler. The woman who built the most loving institution in American children’s literacy was not naive about what happens to people. She had written the worst outcomes down, in detail, decades earlier. The optimism was a position taken, not a failure to notice.

What travelled, and what got left

Every song here has been carried somewhere by somebody, and carrying changes things.

“Jolene” left home as a plea to another woman and came back as a meme, a metal riff, a slowed-down internet artefact and, in March 2021, four syllables of public-health messaging sung in a hospital chair. “9 to 5” left as a labour song written on acrylic nails on a film set and is now used to sell productivity software. “I Will Always Love You” left as a goodbye to a business partner and came back as the most famous vocal performance of the 1990s, at which point a great many people assumed Whitney Houston had written it.

This is the ordinary fate of anything that travels well, and it is the reason this rack keeps naming what a song was for when it was made. Not to police the covers — she was famously delighted by them — but because the smoothed version always travels further than the specific one, and the specific one is usually where the argument lives.

And that is what the title of this rack is pointing at. Near the end of her autobiography, having just spent two pages on the fact that people will sometimes take your love and give nothing back and are still all there is, she catches herself being sincere in public and declines to apologise for it:

Cottom opens The Dolly Moment by observing that this is exactly the register the culture normally denigrates — that it took a particular political moment to make earnest sentimentality acceptable coming from her. Both things can be true: the moment made room for it, and she had been working in that register for twenty-seven years before the moment arrived, taking the cost of it in reviews the whole time. The songs are where you can hear her not waiting for permission. Twenty-four of them follow.