It's interesting to live long enough that you start to see how "history" "remembers" things. Which is about as well as the rest of us "remember" things.
Not very well.
Not to get all "before it was cool" on you but I've loved Dolly Parton since the '70s, since whenever I heard Jolene, and I don't know what to tell you: That was before it was cool to love Dolly Parton, at least where I'm from.
I was 9 when that song was released and I don't remember but I imagine I heard it sometime over the next year or so and I thought it was a banger, or whatever the equivalent word was for me in 1973. I never watched Hee Haw or any other country music shows but I knew who she was. She wasn't a huge star yet outside of the country music world but she was big enough to go on mainstream talk shows like Dinah Shore or Mike Douglas or sing on other celebrities' specials.
She was a joke, Dolly was. The jokes were mostly about her big boobs. She was, in fact, synonymous with big boobs, in that way that a couple generations earlier a life preserver had come to be known as a Mae West. If you said the words Dolly Parton, and especially if you said them on TV, you weren't talking about music. You were talking about big boobs.
When some scientists in Scotland cloned a sheep, the first mammal to be cloned, they named her Dolly. “Dolly is derived from a mammary gland cell,” one of them said, “and we couldn't think of a more impressive pair of glands than Dolly Parton's." That was in 1996.
She famously handled all that ridicule and condescension with wit and sass but I never heard about that back then. Just the ridicule and condescension.
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By the '80s I'd become a full-on Dolly Parton fan, and not because that felt like going against the grain in my California punk and postpunk world, though it did. I just liked her. I liked a bunch of her songs and she was fun. I don't have the hypnotized by big boobs gene and I didn't think she was sexy. I just liked her.
My friend Juliet and I had a little Dolly admiration society going, and it's hard to convey what an oddball thing our two-person club was now that we live in a world where Dolly was the last thing all Americans could agree is an unalloyed good. We were both bass players and we had a running joke about wondering how she played the geetar with those super long nails.
At one point Dolly got a TV show. She'd do a segment like Carol Burnett where she'd take questions from the audience.
One week a woman asked her how she played the guitar with those long nails.
Our question!
She said that her secret was she tuned the guitar to an open chord and just fretted with one finger, and then once or twice a year she'd go home, take the nails off, tune the guitar back up and write a batch of songs for her next album.
Our answer!
I immediately called Juliet but I got a busy signal. Remember those? It's because she was calling me. When one of us finally got through we both said
DID! YOU! HEAR! THAT????
I don't think either of us had any other friends we could tell that amusing anecdote to. We'd just get back "Wait, you like Dolly Parton?" This was the late '80s, way after 9 to 5 and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Cowpunk had been a thing. Alt country was starting to happen. But that whole rhinestone thing of Dolly's was thought of as the country version of corporate rock.
That Dolly, the not maverick but just regular old uncool Dolly, is not totally forgotten. Here's Natalie Weiner in The New Republic and Carl Wilson in Slate writing about the pre-Saint Dolly version of Dolly Parton. But history is "remembering" her as Saint Dolly, who everybody loved, and always did.
Mavericks and nonconformists are like political activists. We love that thing they do, as long as they do it in the past.
A similar thing happened to both David Bowie and Prince, who both died 10 years ago. Who in the world didn't revere Prince? Well, ask the people who'd booed him off the stage when he opened for the Rolling Stones in 1981, many of whom were no doubt tearfully crooning Purple Rain in a crowded street on that night in 2016.
At my middle school there were two — precisely two, out of more than a thousand — kids who liked David Bowie. I wasn't one of them. I didn't get it and I didn't try too hard to get it because you could get beaten up for liking David Bowie. People, almost all of them, hated David Bowie.
I know I didn't imagine this because when Bowie cleaned up and started acting like a straight guy and had a huge hit with his comeback album Let's Dance, I heard Bobcat Goldthwait joking about him on a morning radio show. Bobcat's a year older than me. He said "When I was a kid you'd get your ass kicked just for saying David Bowie's name and now my mom's dancing around while she's vacuuming going 'mah-dern love'!"
The David Bowie you could get beat up for liking isn't the David Bowie history remembers these days, nor is the Prince so many people hated for his assless chaps and high heels and falsetto voice or whatever they hated. Now, as with Dolly, they were Iconic Rebels, true to themselves types, and if we'd been around in their early days we'd have loved them for it, even if we really were around for their early days and didn't love them.
I didn't hate young Prince but I wasn't a fan either. I came around the first time I heard When Doves Cry, which was on his sixth album.
I know this is how history works and it isn't just with musicians. Martin Luther King Jr., as close as we have to a secular saint in this country, had approval ratings in 1966 that looked a lot like President Trump's approval ratings today, and they were falling about as fast. Gallup didn't survey the question again before he died in 1968, but I bet he'd have envied Trump's current 33% approval.
I'm just saying it's interesting to live long enough to see it play out. And it makes me wonder about the nuances I'll probably never know about people I wasn't around for.
May history remember you as fondly as it's remembering Dolly — and David and Prince. If you're anything like me, then all that nuance from your early days?
You didn't mean that stuff.
Next shows
I’ll be at the Poets' Playground: Harvest Picnic at Boxyard RTP on Saturday Sept. 5. The show starts at 6 p.m. Also on the bill: Singer-songwriter Kitt Ramble, poets Mary Mills,Emily Anne Dellinger and Jessica Covil-Manset, alumni of Youth Rock NC — formerly Girls Rock NC but renamed to include gender-expansive kids — and maybe you! There’s an open mic after the main show.
The picnic, put on by Third Angle Poets and the folks who run the wonderful monthly Tongue & Groove open mic in Raleigh, will be in a shaded, grassy area. Bring folding chairs, blankets, or towels to sit on for the full picnic experience. Tickets are $10, with all money going to the artists, and you can get them here, but Third Angle says they don’t want cost to be a barrier, so if you want to come but that’s too steep, DM them on Instagram.
I’ll also be at Speakeasy Carrboro on Wednesday Sept. 9 with Vito Dito & Ken Moshesh, but I’ll be back in your inbox before then.
Thanks for reading and listening and coming on out.
Your friend,
The King Teen