Dolly Parton Was Punk Rock
Dolly Parton died Tuesday in Nashville at 80.
A few years ago, our band (The Slants) was invited to be part of the Most Perfect Album, a project where artists each wrote songs about the Bill of Rights and the amendments that followed. Dolly took the 19th. We took the 18th and 21st, prohibition and its repeal, mostly because I thought doing the 1st was too obvious. Being on the same track list as her was one of those moments where you realize the room you've wandered into is bigger than you thought.
The whole project ran on a premise Dolly had been proving for fifty years: that a song could carry constitutional history and important lessons in a way a lecture couldn't, and that musicians might be better positioned to do that work than legal scholars.
"9 to 5" is a song about wage theft.
It's also about workplace harassment, credit-stealing bosses, and the particular exhaustion of being underestimated by the people who sign your checks. It went to number one on both the country and pop charts, won two Grammys, and got nominated for an Academy Award. Millions of people have sung every word without once calling it a labor critique. She made hard things go down easy without making them softer. Sometimes that's what art can do to change the world.
She wrote it on the set of the film, tapping out the rhythm on her acrylic nails. The clicking you hear at the beginning of the recording is her fingernails. The thing people underestimated her for became the instrument.
The movie was Jane Fonda's idea, built around research into what secretaries actually experienced at work. Fonda and Lily Tomlin knew the message would land harder with three women from different worlds than with a polemic. They needed someone who could make an audience laugh while describing conditions that weren't funny at all. Dolly had never acted in a film before. She got the part anyway.
Arguments tend to reach people who already agree with you, but stories can get further than that. Dolly knew it, and she never confused seriousness with grimness.
Joe and I have a running bit in my talks about Dolly Parton and punk rock. It gets a laugh because the pairing sounds absurd, but there's a deeper message underneath it.
Punk was never really about the leather or the volume. It was about refusing to ask permission. Building your own venues, pressing your own records, deciding that the gatekeepers' approval was optional. By that standard, Dolly was more punk than most of the bands I came up with.
She left a stable job on a popular television show to go solo, against everyone's advice. She wrote "I Will Always Love You" as a goodbye to the man who'd made her career, then refused to sell Elvis the publishing rights when Colonel Tom Parker demanded half. That decision cost her an Elvis recording and eventually made her a fortune when Whitney Houston's version became one of the best-selling singles in history. She built a theme park in the Smoky Mountains when it made no strategic sense, and turned it into the economic engine of a county that needed one.
She did all of it while looking exactly the way she wanted to look. The wigs and the rhinestones weren't a costume covering something authentic. They were the authentic thing. "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap" is funny, and it's also a complete artistic philosophy. I know exactly what you think this signals, but I'm doing it anyway. I'm going to be so undeniably good that your assumptions become your problem instead of mine.
That's not a country move. That's a punk move.
She spent a career being underestimated because of how she looked and talked, so she made that miscalculation the whole point. She never asked anyone's permission to be taken seriously. She just kept being undeniable until the labels other people put on her stopped fitting, which is a form of reappropriation in its own way.
I spent eight years in federal court over a version of this question: whether a community gets to define the terms used about it, or whether that authority sits with someone else. The Supreme Court eventually said what most people already knew intuitively. Meaning belongs to the people who carry it, not to the institutions that catalog it.
Dolly never needed a court to tell her that. She proceeded as though it were obviously true, for six decades, until everyone else caught up.
She gave away more than 200 million books through the Imagination Library. She funded vaccine research without turning it into a press release. She stayed married to the same man for fifty-eight years and almost never discussed him publicly, in an industry that runs on access.
Her family asked that donations go to the Imagination Library instead of flowers. That seems right. She spent her life turning attention into something useful for people who had less of it than she did.
Most people who get told they aren't serious spend their lives trying to prove otherwise. Dolly just kept working, kept writing, kept being exactly herself, and let the record accumulate until the argument was over.
The labels we get handed are rarely the ones we'd choose. Sometimes the work is refusing them. Sometimes it's flipping their meaning on their heads. Sometimes it's outlasting them.
She outlasted all of hers.
Simon Tam is the founder of The Slants and the central figure in Matal v. Tam (2017), the unanimous Supreme Court decision that struck down the government's power to deny trademarks on disparagement grounds. He speaks on identity, expression, and civic life nationally. For information on bringing him to speak, visit simontam.org/speaking.
