Chrissy King Alley

DOLLY Eighty years old. One of twelve children in a cabin in the Smokies, born to people she called dirt poor, and she leaves behind a body of work almost nobody in American music can touch. I am not going to write a discography. Everybody knows the songs. I want to talk about the business, because Dolly Parton was the shrewdest operator Nashville ever produced and nobody noticed because she let them look at the wigs instead. She started her own publishing company in 1967. Nineteen sixty seven. A twenty one year old woman from Sevier County who understood, before almost anybody, that the money is not in singing the song. It is in owning it. Then Elvis Presley wanted to record I Will Always Love You. Colonel Parker's people said the standard arrangement, half the publishing. She said no. To Elvis. At the height of Elvis. She cried about it, and she said no, and she kept the rights. Twenty years later Whitney Houston recorded it for The Bodyguard and it became one of the biggest selling singles in the history of recorded music, and every cent of that songwriting money went to a woman who had held the line in a room where she was the only person without leverage. That is the whole story. She spent her career letting people underestimate her and then owning everything they wanted. She wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love You in the same twenty four hours. That is not a career. That is a strike of lightning that hit twice in one day. She built a theme park in Appalachia that became the economic engine of her home county. She gave away a hundred and fifty million books through the Imagination Library because her father could not read. She wrote 9 to 5 on set, on the back of her acrylic nails, using them as a washboard for the rhythm. That percussion in the recording is her nails. She kept the take. She would not curse and would not make fun of Jesus, and she made a raunchier joke than anybody on the network. And she refused, her entire life, to tell you who she voted for. She said she had too many fans on both sides of the fence. In a country that has spent a decade sorting everybody into teams, one woman declined, and every single person still claimed her. She was married to Carl Dean for nearly sixty years. He paved roads, avoided cameras, and died last year. She wrote Jolene about a bank teller who flirted with him. Rest easy, Dolly. You were the smartest person in every room you ever walked into, and you let them think you were not, and you got everything. 🦋