‘It’s hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world’

By Eleanor Limprecht

Excess and acceptance, artifice and reality, a place for everybody: what I love about my birthplace are the same qualities I loved in Dolly Parton. After the news of her death, I reconnected with her the very first way I knew her, through song. And what a catalogue. She sang bluegrass, pop, commercial country and collaborated with everyone from Kenny Rogers to Beyoncé.

My favourite Dolly Parton song is ‘Coat of Many Colours’ from the album of the same name, released in 1971. Growing up in Virginia, my parents owned the song on a record set called The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music. I spent most of my childhood with my nose in a book, but this was the first song I heard that told a story better than a book could.

‘Coat of Many Colours’ is about a young girl growing up poor who didn’t have a coat when it was ‘way down in the fall’. Her mother was given a box of rags. ‘Momma sewed the rags together/ Sewin’ every piece with love/ She made my coat of many colours/ That I was so proud of.’ While sewing the mother tells the Bible story of Joseph and his coat of many colours, a story within a story that gives the piece of clothing deeper resonance to the little girl.

But when she wears the coat to school, her classmates tease her for wearing something made of rags. She doesn’t understand it, how something she put so much value in can be laughed at and made fun of. Dolly sings: ‘They didn’t understand it but I tried to make them see/ One is only poor, only if they choose to be.’

My family was not poor, I’d never gone cold or hungry, but I knew what it meant to love what other people laughed at. And as a child, I’d never heard it so achingly told. My heart broke for the girl so proud of a coat which other people told her was worthless.

Dolly Parton knew this story intimately: she grew up the fourth of twelve children born in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Her father was a tenant farmer and her mother a homemaker. She epitomised the American Dream, someone coming from nothing who made herself into a star, known for her songs and her image—her enormous, enhanced breasts, her teeny tiny waist and her bouffant blonde wigs.

As much as I loved Dolly Parton when I was a child, I was embarrassed by her as a teenager, laughing at the many blonde and boob jokes told at her expense. Why did she have to go so far, I wondered. Wasn’t her voice and songwriting talent enough, why did she want to look that way, like (as she famously sang) ‘Backwoods Barbie’?

And what was with the way she made fun of herself—famously saying ‘It costs a lot of money to look this cheap?’ It took my own reckoning with what the world wanted of me versus what I was willing to give it to realise that Dolly Parton’s appearance was her armour. It brought attention, and then she used her voice to sing about abused women, about powerful women in the workplace, about trans families, about the many injustices in the world. She was ahead of her time, making her brand before we understood what that meant, keeping her own publishing rights, wearing her low-cut tops and rhinestone-studded everything while saying women should have the right to dress and act however they liked.

As I became an adult, I came full circle to being proud of my Dolly Parton fandom. She was, I realised, not just an incredible musician, but a philanthropist, writer, gay icon and humanist. She never took herself too seriously—even entering a Dolly Parton lookalike contest once (she lost)! Since then, the America I love has changed too, and Dolly’s message of acceptance, a place for everybody, seems more distant than it has ever been.

America is a country that is easy to stereotype: big trucks, small minds, ultra-white teeth and too many guns. Dolly Parton showed me what it means to break a mould, she never let other people’s expectations hold her back. She could laugh at their jokes because she knew what she was capable of. And she was the opposite of the current administration: loving kindness instead of fear and fury.

I will miss not just the hope she offered, but the delightful surprises.