Stuff You Should Know - Why does everyone love Dolly Parton?

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

Today we dive in to celebrate the international treasure that is Dolly Parton. Why is she nearly universally loved? Listen in to find out. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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and today we're going to make some joyful noise together here on Stuff You Should Know. That's right. I just poured myself a cup of ambition. Uh-huh. I had a few of those this morning. Before we dive into Dolly Parton land, we should talk about our tour really quick, because we're looking to sell some more tickets, specifically, well, everywhere, but specifically DC and Toronto, right? Yeah. For the whole shebang, we're going to be in DC, Boston, and then Toronto, May 4th, 5th, and 6th, right?

That's right. And there are plenty of great seats available. This is a really good show. I think one of the best ones we've done in a long time. And if you're in the Northeast, like this is it, we're not doing New York this year. Very sorry, New York. But if you live in the Northeast, this is your chance, because we're doing the Southeast in the fall, and this is your opportunity. I think that's a great angle for this marketing campaign here, Chuck. Yeah. Northeast or bust.

Okay. So that's enough about us, everybody. We're here to really talk about Dolly. Yeah. So, Livia helped us with this one. And, you know, we've remarked about how Livia is getting great at titling the articles, even though she doesn't even have to. She does it because she's creative and talented. And her title for this is, Why Does Everyone Love Dolly Parton? And we're going to explain that. But I think the easiest thing to say is, since the 1970s,

this is a woman who has basically just put goodness into the world at every turn. Yeah, for sure. I was reading an interview with her in Rolling Stone from 1980. Like, nine to five had just come out. And you might as well have told me it was from 2023. Yeah. She's been the same way this whole time. That's great. Like, she doesn't, like, get into any political stuff.

She said, I'm not political. I won't talk about politics. She leaves hot button issues alone. But if it means something to her, it's really meaningful. She'll come out on, you know, in favor of endorsing it. But she doesn't put anything down. She might support something, but she's not going to put anything down publicly. Yeah. So the other kind of funny thing about this one from Livia is she always includes her sources.

And she may have broken her own source record. Yeah, there's a lot. Oh, boy. There were probably a hundred sources, but we did want to mention one in particular. Because I listened to this from Jad Avamred, the great Jad Avamred of Radiolab fame, like four years ago put out the wonderful series, Dolly Parton's America. Yeah. And Livia binged it.

And I listened to it back then. And back then I was like, oh, man, I want to do an episode on Dolly Parton. But it's like, Jad did it. Like, he covered it so well. Like, what's the point kind of thing? Right. But now four years on, I was like, well, we can give it the stuff you should know treatment, which is to say not as not as deep a dive.

But it's a great series. If you want to learn more about Dolly Parton, then check out Dolly Parton's America. Very nice. And then just to button up, Chuck, we were trying to answer that question. Why does everybody love Dolly? I came up with another hypothesis too. And it's that, you know, when somebody is like, they can be anything anybody wants them to be like, they're interpretable from all different angles.

So everybody just assumes they're like them. Dolly is not like that. She is her own person who can't be pigeonholed into one box or another, right? But she's likable from all sides. Yeah. Like find someone that's going to talk smack about Dolly Parton. And then you and I are going to have a discussion in the parking lot with that guy. It's a sad state of affairs though, dude, because there's think pieces all over the internet

about how it's just amazing that everybody doesn't hate Dolly Parton. And it's like, good God, like this is what we've come to. Like everybody hates everybody casually. So I mean, how does she escaped it so long? And it's just like such a sad state of affairs that that's normalized by even writing pieces like that. But they're out there for sure. But the upshot of it is people are amazed that people don't hate Dolly Parton. And it's true.

People don't hate Dolly Parton. Yeah. And she's someone that is so I think kind of universally beloved and internationally beloved that as you'll see later in this episode, she's been studied by anthropologists and sociologists, which is pretty amazing. And so let's start at the beginning, shall we? Wait, hold on. One more thing. Yeah.

More praise. The other thing about her I think that's so amazing and so remarkable is that she, this is the reason why everybody's just so fascinated with her right now. She's maybe the one person who is straddling both sides of the political and social divide as wide as it is in the United States today. And is not like hanging on by her fingernails. She's like, I got a foot here and I'm not lying about it. Got a foot here. I'm not lying about that either. Right.

I'm not lying to fool either side. This is what I'm into and I like both of you basically. It's almost like being a genuine human who 100% stays true to who they are is something we should all aspire to. Sure. But it also shows, she shows that that's such a rarity in this world that you can be globally beloved by just doing that and also making like a ton of really great music too. Well, yeah. I mean, come on. We're going to talk about all this stuff.

But can we go back to the beginning now? Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Okay. Hey, never apologize about singing the praises of Dolly Parton. That's a great rule of thumb. It's stuff you should know about. And I just can't wait till we get to the Dollywood stuff because you've been and I have not.

All right. So she was born Dolly Rebecca Parton in 1946 in January 19th of 1946 in rural Tennessee. How do you pronounce it? Is it Severe County? I think it's Severe. Oh, it's just Severe. I'm almost positive it's Severe. Okay.

S-E-V-I-E-R. And see, immediately this is, I'm sure, Jad's episode pronounced it perfectly. Yeah, he just threw his face into his palm like these guys. But she was born to a big family of 12 kids and it's kind of fun to look up photos of Dolly and all her siblings because, you know, a few of her sisters look a lot like her. All her brothers look like, you know, they should be like shooting pool down at the pool hall. Yeah. You know, all very just sort of genuine article, Smoky Mountain, Tennessee, Foothills people. Yeah, for sure.

And there were 12 of them, did you say? 12 Sibs, including her. And she was the fourth. Yeah, the fourth of 12 and all 14 people in her family lived in a two room cabin. Poof. And I've seen a replica of this cabin and it is no joke, a two room cabin and 14 people lived in it in the Smoky Mountains. You mean two bedrooms with an office, right? Right.

Just two rooms. I mean two rooms, my friend, with the outhouse, no running water, no electricity. Amazing. Like she grew up as Smoky Mountain, as a Smoky Mountain person can grow up. Like even people in other parts of Tennessee are like, wow. Yeah. But she said she had a great childhood running around just being outside. Yeah.

And because she was the fourth of 12, she wasn't particularly like paid attention to. So she could just kind of go off and do her own thing. Yeah, I get the idea that they were semi-ferral sort of mountain kids. Her granddad was a Pentecostal minister, very fiery and brimstone-y. And she still, you know, mentions God a lot. I get the sense that she's a little less overtly religious, but spirituality is still very much a mainstay in her life. Yeah, I think it's more of a personal relationship between her and God. Yeah, which is not supposed to be.

So she really lucked out because she had an uncle named Bill Owens, who was a musician, a songwriter, who noticed that she wanted to get into music from a very young age and was maybe the only person in her entire life or early life that noticed and then nurtured it. And she later said when he died a few years back at his funeral, like she wouldn't be here today if it wasn't him. Like she owed him everything because he nurtured it in her. He encouraged her. He supported her when she got rejected. And he helped her break into the business.

So Bill Owens was a huge influence in her life. But he noticed, like I said, from a very early age, I think she wrote her first song when she was five. Yeah, a little tiny tassel top about her homemade corn husk doll. And she would pretend she would get a tobacco stick and a tin can and act like it was her microphone and mic stand. And she would sing for the chickens in her yard and had obviously a real talent from the beginning. If you listen to her very first recording, Puppy Love from 1959,

it sounds like 13-year-old Dolly Parton. You can hear Dolly in that young voice. And like I said, she was 13. And that was the same year that she made her very first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry, introduced by none other than Johnny Cash. Yeah, who was her first big crush? So it was even more amazing for her. Unbelievable.

Her family didn't get to see it though because Dolly Parton was on TV before her family had a TV at home. Yeah. It was pretty cool. Was it on TV back then? I believe there was a TV appearance, yes. Okay. And if that one wasn't the first, whenever it was she was on TV first, her family still didn't have a TV back then.

Gotcha. So thanks to Uncle Billy taking her around and banging on doors, she ended up making her debut on Mercury Records in 1962, which is nothing to sneeze at. I get the impression that it wasn't like her, it wasn't like a, okay, this is a serious recording contract. It's like, okay, let's test this girl out. Back then they called any woman in country music a girl singer.

Right. So she was a bit of a novelty, not just because of her age, but because she was a woman as well. But she had her sights set on becoming a country music star and so the day after she graduated high school, the day after she graduated high school, she got on a bus for Nashville and moved there. Yeah, amazing.

In 1964, and very soon after she moved there, she met a man that would become her husband and a mainstay in her life to this day who is remarkably hard to find stuff about. His name is Carl Dean. They met very famously at a laundromat when she was 18 and he was 21, married a couple of years later. I think a lot of people that don't know a lot about Dolly Parton

think she might be single or something because she never had kids, but she's been married to Carl Dean since 1966 and he just, he doesn't want to be in the limelight. He never did. He's her biggest fan and supporter. She's always said, you know, off the stage, but he just doesn't want any part of the limelight and it's hard to even find a lot of pictures of this guy.

There's a handful out there, but he started an asphalt laying business in the late 70s, still runs that business today, which is just amazing. I read an article a couple of years ago. She was like, you know, Carl and I, we like to run errands. She said, we go to the 24-hour stores, you know, in the middle of the night, like Walmart and places. She said, there are fewer people there to come up to me

and she said, I don't mind it. I love people. She said, I just don't want it to get in the way of our shopping. Carl's not wild about it. So they just live a very simple kind of pure life together, I think, outside the limelight. Yeah, I've read an interview with her somewhere and she said that in her opinion, if she's out in public, that time belongs to her fans.

So she doesn't have a problem with people coming up to her, asking for autographs. She knows that she's out in public and that's a risk that she runs, right? Sure. But her leisure time, her time away is like secluded off with Carl, just the two of them usually. Maybe she has a very close best friend. I can't remember her name.

They go everywhere together. So she's almost like a stand-in for Carl when Dolly's traveling around. Yeah, and she's always been very, her persona is very flirty and she's always sort of flirted around with, in fact, no friends that have worked on like commercial shoots with her. And they were like, man, she's the biggest flirt you would ever know. And that's just her personality. And she said that Carl understands that

and that's just how she sort of has fun and relates to people and it's always very innocent. And I just think it's kind of cute and fun. Yeah, for sure. I want her to flirt with me, you know? I think is what I'm saying. This episode might be your big break, Chuck. Yeah.

So would you just like turn bright red and like dig the toe of your foot into the dirt? I kind of am a little bright red. I thought it was the stuff you should know sign in here, casting a red beam on my face. No, it's you thinking about being flirted with by Dolly Parton. I know. Well, dude, I grew up as you did, but I'm a little bit older. Like the heyday of early Dolly was when I was a kid. And of course, my dad was in love with her.

And you know, it was just she was one of the biggest stars in the world. And my parents were kind of into country music. So she was just sort of prevalent in our household somehow. Yeah, my introduction to her was through nine to five. And my mom, that whole message and the idea behind it was right up my mom's alley. So she would watch it with her hands clasped together. The side of her face, like just an adoration of everybody, including Dolly Parton too. I think my family was never really into country music.

So I think that that was like a big introduction and probably a win over for my family was nine to five. All right, well, we'll talk about nine to five and crossover success more. It's a good setup, but how about we take a break? Yes. And we'll be right back with more Dolly Parton. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything. But imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech.

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But that changes right now in my new podcast, She Wants More. I'm Joe Piazza. For the past year, I've been talking to real women and reporting on the surprising and provocative reasons why they chose to have an affair. I don't think you can get everything from a partner. And if you do, you're going to have expectations that are not fulfilled. I just feel like it's something that I needed, something I deserved. I think we need to take the stigma out of all of this. Like, what could be more dishy or delicious or devastating than affairs?

There's one podcast everyone is going to be talking about. Listen to She Wants More on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so we're talking about Dolly becoming a star. Like, she's had a couple of record contracts, nothing serious, though. But then in 1965, she signed with Monument Records. That was her first big record contract I read. But they wanted her to be a pop singer, which is kind of ironic, because she's a big star. That was her first big record contract I read. But they wanted her to be a pop singer, which is kind of ironic,

because she actually would kind of become a pop singer later on in her career. But at first, she was like, no way. Like, have you seen my house and do you know how many people are in my family? I'm not a pop singer. I'm a country singer, right? So she persisted and hung in there and they ended up like folding and giving in. And she went on to become a full-fledged country singer. Yeah, in 1967, her first record, Hello, I'm Dolly, which is just great how they used to do records like that in Thailand. Like that when you like introduce her to the world.

But, you know, as would become a thing like in her career, most of the songs that she's well known for, most of the songs she's recorded, she's done, you know, plenty of covers because everyone does that, especially in country music, but she is most well known as a songwriter. And we'll get into that more in a little bit. But she wrote two. Now, I, Libya has a number 24, but I saw that they were both top 20 on the country charts. Dumb blonde, which is written by a guy named Curly Putman. Great name. And something fishy written by Dolly.

And I think the album itself was a top 20 hit. That's crazy. You know, on the country charts, right off out of the gate. Yes. I was looking up something fishy and it's about a woman who's become convinced that her husband's fishing trips are actually fishing trips and that he's running around on her. So one of the lines is, I guess some largemouth bass left that lipstick on your shirt. I don't think you're a fisherman, honey. I think you're a flirt. That's like perfect debut Dolly, like at what age, like 19, I think is how old she is.

Yeah, that's pretty great. And Porter Wagoner is someone that we talked about on our Grand Ole Opry show. And he had the Porter Wagoner show. He hires young Dolly to replace his other young woman sidekick singer. And basically, she elevated the show to the point where it was the number one syndicated show in the country radio show. And they started doing duets together and albums together, including their first one just between you and me in 1968. Yeah, and they started touring a lot too. And she learned a tremendous amount about touring, performing live, the music business.

Everything she needed to learn early on came from touring with Porter Wagoner. But he was also really well aware that he had like a real cash register on his hands. And he kept her under his thumb as much as he could, both emotionally blackmailing her, I get the impression. But also locking her into just really exploitive contracts because she might not have known what she was signing. She probably did and just figured like, okay, at least it's going to help me get to where I'm going. That's the likelier explanation if you ask me. But he was definitely in charge for the first many years of her serious career. Yeah, but because she's Dolly Parton and so beloved, when they eventually broke up their relationship, I think it was kind of rough.

And she ended up writing a song, I Will Always Love You, about that relationship. And ultimately they worked it out and she reconciled and was at his deathbed with his family. And it was kind of one of those no hard feelings kind of situations. Oh, really? I've read that his last dying words were, I'll never forgive you. That's what I'm going to say on my deathbed. No. I'm just going to like wave my finger around the room to everybody standing there. And we're all going to be like, is he talking about me? Exactly. You guys can spend the rest of your lives figuring it out.

And you'll be able to just look at me and say, he's talking about you. Totally. So they, while they were due wed... Oh, wait, Chuck, wait, wait. Hold on. One more thing. You brought up I Will Always Love You, which everybody knows. Probably one of her most famous songs. Arguably her other most famous song, Jolene. Great song. She apparently wrote those songs on the same day. Start to finish. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. I mean, she now says like, you know, if it wasn't the same day, it was within a couple of days of each other.

But like either way, it's remarkable. Yeah. And it's possible it was the same day. She just doesn't remember. Yeah. But that really like kind of goes to show what kind of, she was drinking cups of ambition left and right, apparently. Right. Because not only does that story potentially true, she also put out 25 albums. Yeah. Both due us with Porter Wagner and then some solo albums in the five year period between 1968 and 1973.

Yeah. I mean, that's remarkable. She started, and that's kind of where I was headed anyway. She kind of started recording her own solo stuff as she was, you know, it's kind of obvious. She just had, she was too prolific of a songwriter. I mean, she supposedly, her quote is that she's written more than 3000 songs and three of them are good. She's also humble. Another reason people love Dolly Parton. But she had too much to say early on. And so started making solo records while she was still with Wagner.

And it was in that time period, I think in the early 70s is when, you know, those iconic songs, Jolene and I Will Always Love You came out. Right. But still under the tutelage of Porter Wagner, right? Yeah. I mean, those are solo albums. And I think I Will Always Love You was about them splitting apart. So it was sort of right there at the end, I think. It definitely was. And I heard a story years back that he said, okay, I'll let you out of your contract. She let me produce this amazing song.

Oh, that song? Yeah. I Will Always Love You, right? And then apparently he turned around and sued her anyway for breach of contract. But she got out of it. She got out of this terrible contract, this exploitive contract. She got out from under a very domineering mentor. And this is a really big time of transition for her because not only did she get away from Porter Wagner, which was enormous because in a sense, she was like a pinball that had just been plunged

when she was released from Porter Wagner just looking for like the next bumper to just shoot her off in another direction. That's my analogy, buddy. Yeah. And that's exactly what happened. But she also had to break up with her family band. Like they were her original backing band. She had to be like, I got to get better musicians, you guys.

And she made some really hard decisions, but they ended up paying off. And from what I understand, there were no lasting hard feelings from it. Yeah. That's pretty great. She hosted a TV show for one season just like us. It was called Dolly. Back then they had all those great variety shows. This was 76 and the 77. And then a very important man comes into her life by the name of Sandy Gallon,

who was a uber manager, got the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, would later manage Michael Jackson and Barbara Streisand and Cher. And Sandy Gallon was a pretty instrumental person for a couple of reasons. One is kind of encouraging the crossover success. Yeah. Like he booked her at the bottom line in the Greenwich Village, you know, everyone from Springsteen to Lou Reed were playing there. Like Andy Warhol came and watched her show.

There's an awesome picture of them sitting together. Yeah. Talk about crossover. Yeah. Exactly. And she was nervous. I saw that she was nervous on the way to being scared. I'm sure. Yeah. He had her tour of Europe, exposed her internationally.

He took her to Studio 54, which is probably where she also hung out with Andy Warhol. But the other big reason is that Sandy Gallon was gay. He died like five years ago, and this was a very instrumental relationship. And I get the impression, you know, Dolly is very famous for being sort of an icon in the LGBTQ community. Yeah, from very early on. Yeah. And it seems like this is kind of where it all started was having this relationship with Sandy and, you know, just the gay community wrapping their arms around her early on.

Not necessarily because, you know, she had a gay manager, but, you know, I don't think it hurt. Right. And the New York Times wrote that she got a warm welcome in San Francisco from transgender fans and quote, other exotic urban cult audiences. Well, Dolly's always said, you know, she's one of those love is love types. And, you know, it's just like it's the way to live life. Like she doesn't judge people and she never has and she's always just embraced like whatever community wants to love her music. Like, why would she I never get it when people like intentionally sort of turn audiences off.

Right. You know. Yeah. No, for sure. For sure. But also like it's that's so true. And it's so prevalent when you read about her or watch interviews with her, just listen to her talk. You're almost like, what's your angle, Dolly?

Right. What are you really up to here? Her big crossover hit was Here You Come Again, which was considered a pop song. I mean, I've always kind of thought it was a country song, I guess, because her voice is in it. And she insisted on a steel guitar. So it still had a little country tinge to it. But it's like a perfect song. It's a perfect crossover.

Like it's exactly perfectly balanced. Like there couldn't have been a better song to transition from full on country singer to country pop singer. Yeah. And it went number one on the country chart, number three on the pop charts. Album went platinum. And this is, you know, the late 70s when she really, really, really blew up. Yeah. That was that.

She just took off like a rocket from there. One of the things that she did very wisely in the late 70s, early 80s, right around this time was just hop on the TV circuit. Yeah. She's been on at least a few hundred TV appearances. But a lot of them took place in the 70s and 80s when she was just making herself known, making herself a household name. And none of this was by accident. She's wanted to be an Omega star since she was a kid and this was part of, she apparently makes a lot of lists. And they turn out to kind of be five year plans.

And I'm sure getting on the talk show circuit was part of one of those lists. And that explains why as a kid growing up in the 70s, I saw a lot of Dolly Parton. Exactly. She was everywhere. Dolly wanted you to see a lot of Dolly Parton. And the 80s is when she continued some of her collaborations with other artists, very famously with Kenny Rogers with Islands in the Stream. Huge, massive hit. Haven't heard it.

And then 1987, my favorite collaboration at least came out and maybe my favorite Dolly stuff period was the album Trio. Yeah, that she recorded with Linda Ronstadt and Amy Lou Harris. Just three of the best voices in the history of music coming together to sing together. They ended up making three albums over the years together. So if you haven't listened to any of this stuff, highly recommend Trio from 1987. She also released some bluegrass albums in the late 90s. The Grass is Blue, Little Sparrow, Halos and Horns. And then she released her first Christmas album in 30 years back in 2020, A Holly Dolly Christmas.

Which is pretty good. It's cute. But I think the best Christmas album she released was Once Upon a Christmas in 1984. There's a lot of Kenny Rogers on it. I made a joke this last Christmas on Instagram. I think that like probably 50% of Dolly Parton's Christmas songs are about sex. It's true. Or there's like sexual overtones.

Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it's good stuff. But that 1984 album has hard candy Christmas on it. Which is, I mean, maybe your best, her best one if you ask me. Great song. All right. So now let's talk a little bit more about her songwriting.

I think that's the thing that she's sort of most proud of. She said in a 2020 book, if I had to choose just one thing to be, I would choose to be a songwriter. She's always said that she loves writing from the male point of view. She loves writing songs from men. Because a lot of her songs are sort of narrative story type songs. And she's written a lot of big huge hits for people like Merle Haggard and Kenny Rogers and Hank Williams Jr. and all kinds of dudes. Right. She also plays a bunch of instruments.

The guitar she says is her strongest. And there's a lot of other string instruments that she can play. I saw a video of one of her concerts. She's got a banjo slung around her. She's got a strap hanging from a strap while she's playing a fiddle really fast. It's pretty amazing. But if you really want to be amazed by Dolly, you should watch her play the saxophone. And in particular at the Glastonbury Music Festival in 2014 in the UK in front of a crowd of 100,000, she busted out Yackety Sax, the Benny Hill theme song.

And it just killed. It did. That whole show is a fun watch because it's at the Glastonbury Festival and it's like, I don't know. I think her legendary status just like grew with that appearance. Oh yeah. She was kind of a cult favorite in the UK and then she became like a pop culture favorite after that show. Yeah. Nine to Five, the movie that you mentioned before in 1980 is when she got into movie making.

And it is a movie boy, not only does it hold up today, but it is that was ahead of its time and like even more relevant today than it probably was then. Which is sad if you stop and think about it. No, no, totally sad. But it was based on an actual movement called Nine to Five, the Nine to Five movement from the early 70s that I guess Jane Fonda was aware of because she was one of the creators behind the movie Nine to Five. And that was an actual like movement led by secretary starting in Boston and it spread around the country. And they were protesting sexual harassment, low pay, getting passed over promotions. And they had a great slogan that I saw, raises not roses. Raises not roses.

Yeah. I love that. I love it too. I don't need your flowers. Talk about a great t-shirt. Exactly. About some money. Exactly.

I'll buy my own flowers. Right. I'll buy my own flowers. Yeah. That's what the back of the t-shirt said. And then parentheses quit pinching my butt. Plus also that's a Miley Cyrus song. Who is Dolly Parton's goddaughter?

That's right. Yeah. And Dolly credits that relationship with the fact that millennials love Dolly. Yeah. I wasn't aware of this. So everybody knows even I know that Miley Cyrus was Hannah Montana on Nickelodeon from I think 2006 to 2011, right? And she would have Dolly on here or there as Aunt Dolly, like her aunt, Hannah Montana's aunt. And I guess millennials just grew up watching that.

And she just exposed herself, not literally, but figuratively, to an entirely new generation. And it stuck. Like that's how they met Dolly. And they just kept following her and loving her from that point on. I love it. Me too. She was in a bunch of movies over the years. Best Little Whorehouse in Texas with Bert Reynolds, of course, part of the ensemble in Steel Magnolias.

Very disappointingly, Livia doesn't mention my favorite Dolly, second favorite Dolly Parton movie, which was Rhinestone with Sylvester Stallone. One of my big HBO movies early on. I watched that thing over and over again. Stallone sings. Have you ever seen it? No, I never have. I turned the TV off after Life Force.

You should check out Rhinestone because the premise is she's to make a country star out of Sylvester Stallone. And he has a song in there called Drinking Stein instead of Frankenstein. And the chorus is Budweiser, you've created a monster and they call him Drinking Stein. Wow. But Stallone really sings. And it's just, I think it's known probably as a bad movie, but it has a very special place in my heart. It sounds like the prequel of Tulsa King. So she also, did you mention Sand Dollar yet?

No. She founded a production company with Sandy Gallin, her longtime manager and friend. And they went on to produce movies like Father of the Bride, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the movie. She also did a straight talk, which she was in, where she plays a woman who accidentally becomes a radio host and of course just shoots into the stratosphere in popularity. I never saw that. Oh yeah, it was okay. Okay. Not her best work, but still.

She was amazing at Steel Magnolias. I mean like, if you go back and watch some of the scenes between her and her husband in particular, she's a really good actress. No, she's good. In fact, but the Shelby I just did was more Sally Field. Not that I think about it. I detected Hannah Sally Field in there. All right.

I think let's take another break and then we'll, this one's going to go a little long, but that's okay, because we're about to dive into Dollywood right after this. Shelby. There are things women never talk about. Infidelity is one of them, but that changes right now. In my new podcast, she wants more. I'm Joe Piazza. For the past year, I've been talking to real women and reporting on the surprising and provocative reasons

why they chose to have an affair. I don't think you can get everything from a partner. And if you do, you're going to have expectations that are not fulfilled. I just feel like it's something that I needed, something I deserved. I think we need to take the stigma out of all of this. Like what could be more dishy or delicious or devastating than affairs? There's one podcast everyone is going to be talking about. Listen to She Wants More on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, my friend, here we are. I'll set it up with how it starts and then you can just take over because you've actually been there. But in an interview in 1982 with Barbara Walters, Dolly Parton said something about being interested in opening up a theme park back home. Yeah. And there was a theme park, Silver Dollar City in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. And the owners, Jack and Pete Herschand, heard this interview, gave her a call and was like, let's get together on this.

And they did to great success. Yeah, four years later, Dollywood opened it, reopened as Dollywood, I should say. Just that first year, they doubled their entries to 1.3 million people coming. Yeah. And that's not just a full year. Like it snows and everything kind of shuts down in the wintertime in Pigeon Forge or in the Smokies. So I'm guessing they crammed a lot of those people in in a very short amount of time. Probably summer.

I don't know why I'm going off on this tangent, but it just seemed important when I started. It's called how theme parks work. Right. They close in the winter. Be quiet, Chew. So it was a success right out of the gate, I should say. And little known fact, or it's a rumor that a lot of people don't realize this actual fact, they buried a time capsule there on opening day and it contains an unreleased Dolly song.

No way. That is not to be open until I think she's 99 years old. Wow. Which is, what is she now? 76? 78, I think. Okay. So it's close.

Yeah. We can wait. She sees it. Yeah. Oh, we'll wait. So tell me about Dollywood. I want to know more. So it is a, you can definitely believe that it used to be a silver dollar city.

They preserved a lot of stuff. There's a coal fired train that kind of takes you around on some neat vistas and everything. We went around Christmas time, which kind of undermines my argument about shutting down in the winter. We went for Yumi's birthday actually, like one year. And there was like a Christmas show where there was like singing and dancing, but it was so corny that I was waiting for everybody to be like, oh, you know, we're just joking. Here's the real show.

It never happened. It was just that like kitschy and American and earnest. Yeah. And just corny, but it was very sweet in retrospect, especially hard to sit through, but very sweet. And then there's just a lot of like people dipping candles or tons of food to eat. There's a roller coaster that neither Yumi nor I went on, but there's a museum there that's closed temporarily because apparently they're reimagining it, but it was originally called the Chasing Rainbows Museum and Dolly Parton is a just a self professed pack rat.

She saved everything, Chuck, everything, the coat of many colors that she sings about. It's there. You can see it in real life right there and it's the tiniest, cutest little thing you've ever seen in your entire life. It's so tiny. This is a coat her mom made for her when she was a kid, right? Out of old rags. That she sang about in that coat of many colors.

It's what a great song, but then just to love that song and then see the actual coat and then just see how dinky it is, it was just amazing. Those lists I told you she used to keep, she kept those as they're on display, wigs, rhinestones everywhere, but it's not just like this odor tribute to Dolly. It's a genuine curated look into her whole career and it was one of the best museums I've ever been to in my life of any kind. Why didn't you guys ride the roller coaster? We're both scared of roller coasters.

Oh, I don't think I remembered that. Yes, I've been scared of roller coasters for decades, but I feel like I'm starting to come out of it. And I might go challenge myself and ride a few roller coasters this summer and see if I'm correct or if I'm really, really wrong. Well, you should go to Six Flags with Ruby and I because there's nothing like getting your courage worked up than a seven-year-old who will ride anything. Okay.

Staring you in the face. Okay. All right. I may use that. That's just the elixir I'm looking for. Yeah, yeah. She'll go on whatever. She's just like, she wouldn't understand.

She'd be like, why don't you want to go on it? What do you mean you're scared? You're kind of ruining things for me. Well, I want to go to Dollywood, so maybe we can go to Six Flags and then Dollywood and just do a theme park roundup. I strongly recommend it because there's like all sorts of stuff in nearby Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. Yeah, of course.

I've been to Gatlinburg. Ripley's Museums and just all sorts of just cool, super kitschy touristy stuff. Yeah. I think, oh, what's his name? The guy who sings, I'm proud to be an American. Lee Greenwood. Lee Greenwood. There's the Lee Greenwood Cafe where they no joke play that song on a loop over and over

again the whole time. You're like, where's the next song? They don't play the next song. I heard that song every night of the summer for like five summers when I worked at the Stone Mountain Leisure Show. Oh, yeah. I'll bet. I got my fill of it.

Yeah. So, we can talk a little bit more about her politics. And this is where the sociologists and anthropologists come in. There's a sociologist named Tressy McMillan-Cottum that has written about how black women have always looked up to Dolly Parton as a role model. Even though she's like, it's a very specific sort of white southern thing that she embodies. Again, just, you know, testifies to her crossover appeal that she is to be admired by anybody. Her Q-Score, if you don't know what a Q-Score is, it's a marketing tool that basically,

there's a bunch of things that go into your Q-Score, but it's basically how much people like you, how much they recognize your name. And her Q-Score is like, legendarily one of the top Q-Scores of all time, celebrity-wise. She has a high positive Q-Score. They also do a negative Q-Score, and she has a very low negative Q-Score. So she's among the most beloved and among the least disliked people in the entire world. Yeah. I don't want to know my Q-Score.

I looked it up. We don't have one yet. Okay, good. But I was reading this article on the conversation and these two Australian marketing people were trying to figure out who would have been Australia's Dolly. And they landed on Hugh Jackman. And I'm like, I can't disagree with that. He's pretty likable.

Sure. Everybody likes Hugh Jackman. Yeah, I would agree with that. Even though he did the greatest showman, people still like Hugh Jackman. The anthropologist comes in, a man named Jonathan Zilberg in 1995 talked about how she was loved in Zimbabwe of all places. And again, it's just like, pick a country and chances are people there love Dolly Parton. And Dolly Parton is American and they talk about how Nelson Mandela while he was in prison

in South Africa got his jailers to play Jolene for the whole jail, basically all Shawshank Redemption. Uh-huh. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. And like you said earlier, she basically just avoids politics. She doesn't let any politician on either side use her music. If a Democrat uses it, she shuts him down.

If a Republican uses it, she shuts him down. She just sort of sidesteps all that stuff. She's always been, you know, growing up, of course, in the 70s. There were a lot of playground jokes about Dolly Parton's breast size. She was very well known for it. And she's always been the first one to jump in and joke about it herself instead of being like the butt of the joke. She can just go along with it.

And that's just, that's another really likable quality as someone who can laugh at themselves and not take things too seriously. I also saw it put that she knows that these jokes are going to be made anyway, so she can diffuse them by getting out in front of them and topping, you know, the lame jokes that like old talk show hosts would make. I saw once she said that she burned her bra and it took the fire department three days to put it out. Like that kind of stuff, that's hilarious.

That was her joke? Yeah. Oh, that's good. That's very funny. Like we mentioned this before, do you know that Dolly, the sheep, the first cloned animal on the planet was named Dolly because she was grown from a mammary gland cell? Yeah. I can't remember where we talked about that.

But it really just goes to show like, that's how ubiquitous Dolly Parton's boobs were in the 20th century. I know. Like they were as big as she was, basically. Yeah. They were definitely part of her, they were definitely part of her brand, for sure. Yeah. You know, she was smart enough to lean into it.

Another thing that she had done over the years is there are a lot of really dark songs that she's written about, even though she's never kind of outright considered herself a feminist, she very much is. And a lot of the songs she's written over the years have been very dark songs about women who are either abandoned or suffering from sexual double standards or there's one brutal song from 1970 called Daddy Come and Get Me about a true story of a relative in her family that was basically institutionalized by her husband. So she's never been afraid to go down sort of in the tradition of the old sort of dark

country murder ballad thing, go down these darker roads with some of the songs she's written. Yeah. I saw that she considers herself not a feminist, but in favor of all women. She's for all women. So it's like she doesn't subscribe to the movement part, but what the movement's ultimately about, she's totally in favor with, and that's super her. She made a very rare overt statement when she came out in support of Black Lives Matter

at a time where it was like you're casting your lot one way or another, and she stood up for it, which is pretty cool. She did. She also, in 2018, that was at Dollywood, the Dixie Stampede. She changed the name to Dolly Parton Stampede after people complained about the whole Dixie connotation and Civil War theme. She changed that up, and she was just like, you know, I never really thought about, you know, the Confederate imagery, meaning what it meant to people, and so she was happily

changed it, and that's just the kind of person she is, I think. And she got guff for that, and she got guff for supporting Black Lives Matter from some of her right-leaning fans, but she can always explain herself, you know, and she does so in such a great way that you're just kind of like, well, fine. It's hard to be, you can't keep a grudge against her even if she goes against you politically, but she just so rarely does it. Yeah, agreed. She is, we're going to wind it down with her business in philanthropy, very savvy business

person from the very beginning. She was smart enough to hang on to her, the rights to her own music and never give them up, even when Elvis Presley came, Colin, and wanted to cover I Will Always Love You. He wanted half the publishing rights, and she was like, no way. Take a walk, Elvis Presley. He didn't, apparently Colonel Tom called her up on the morning of the scheduled recording session and sprung that honor, and she turned him down, and she said she was hoping that Elvis was as disappointed as she was.

And that took a lot of gumption, especially to have it sprung on you like that. And she said, nope, not doing it. But that's one of the things that made her so incredibly wealthy. Like, apparently her music catalog has a net worth of about $150 million and brings in about $6 to $8 million a year for her, according to, I think, Forbes. And then her stake in Dollywood is her most valuable asset, I think it's like $165 million. Pretty neat. She's done quite well for herself.

She, I mean, these days, she's not stopping either. She's on Duncan Hine's buttermilk biscuit mix with her little cartoon face. They have fragrances branded by Dolly. They have pet clothes that she's branded with, like just all kinds of things. She's not afraid to license her image, for sure. We've got the Duncan Hine's frosting in our pantry, the chocolate cream frosting. And then one other thing I saw, Chuck, she wrote a book, co-wrote a book with James Patterson, one of the best and most favorite novelists in the entire world.

It's called Run Rose Run. And it's a thriller based kind of loosely on Dolly's story of making it in the music biz. Oh, wow. Yeah. I think it just came out. Okay. I might have to check that out.

Yeah. She is very charitable as well. She founded the Hollywood Foundation in 1988 just to get literacy going in her home county. And it grew and grew and grew to the point where it is now in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., and Ireland. And to date, the program has given out more than 204 million books across these countries. And she'll build a hospital in her county. Anytime there's wildfires nearby, she's chipping in, she very famously donated a million dollars

to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for COVID-19 vaccine research. And people don't credit her with the Moderna vaccine, but they're like, that million dollars was instrumental in getting that vaccine to trial. Well, yeah. She also was like, everybody go get jabbed. There was a video at one around of her getting her own vaccine, the first one, I think. And she was seeing vaccine to the tune of Jolene and saying. Pretty nice diet.

Yeah. Exactly. It was great. So one other thing though about her foundation, one reason she got into literacy programs was because her father never learned to read. And apparently he told her just before he died that he was most proud of her for that work that she'd done with promoting literacy around the world. It's pretty cool.

It makes it even neater. And in addition to the vaccine Jolene song, she also did a version of, I will always jab you. That was less popular. Less popular. Sounds a little aggressive. She's been nominated for 53 Grammys, 53. She's 110, which I think that number should be higher.

But they have given her Lifetime Achievement Awards and Jolene and I Will Always Love You were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. So they have heaped awards on her even when she has not won the actual Grammy. And she's also won an Emmy, right? Yeah. She was also up for two Oscars for Best Song for traveling through for Trans America in I think 2006. And then nine to five, the song.

Nine to five not win? No, it was beaten by fame. Oh boy, that's a tough year. Traveling through was beaten by hard out there for a pimp from hustle and flow. That's a good song too. How are you going to top that? It's really hard. I was getting ready to trash whatever beat out nine to five, but fame is a great song.

That's a tough year. That was a very tough year. But she also has two Guinness World Records to her name, one of which is most decades with a top 20 hit, which really just goes to show how long she's been around and how long she's been huge. You know what else she has two of? What? Stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Two. I know. Is there anybody else who has that? I think so. People in different media, although probably not a lot of people. I bet it's a pretty short list. One in 1984 and then one in 2018 when I guess the final trio of trio albums came out. So if you think Dolly's slowing down, friend, you are dead wrong.

She's got a new album coming out. So she was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite her protests. She's like, I'm not a rocker. Apparently she's like, all right, well, I better go be a rocker and earn that honor. So her next studio album, her 49th, is coming out I think this fall and it's called Rockstar and she's going to be singing with some other rock stars too. Yeah. Stevie Nicks, Paul McCartney, Cher, I love it.

Yep. Vince Neal. No, not Vince Neal. That's correct. Not Vince Neal. Oh, okay. That'd be pretty amazing actually. You got anything else about Dolly Parton?

Oh, I've got one other thing before you answer. She wakes up at 3 a.m. every day and just daughter of a sharecropper. Yeah, I guess so. That's amazing. Okay. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Okay.

Neither, I don't think, but I'm going to think of 10 things after we're done recording. I know. I've been listening to Dolly Parton all day, so it's going to continue on. Yeah, it's not hard to do. If you want to know more about Dolly Parton, friend, go listen to Dolly Parton. Go watch videos of Dolly Parton. Go read interviews with Dolly Parton. She was once described as a black belt interviewee, so you'll never be disappointed with the

Dolly Parton interview. And since I said you'll never be disappointed by a Dolly Parton interview, that has opened up listener mail. I'm going to call this great email to follow up from Arcades. Hey, guys, want to tell you a story of my very traditional grandmother. She was very traditional in the Midwestern sense, and she was a homemaker, kept books for my grandfather's iron-working concern. She didn't tolerate cussing or fussing and was a conservative dresser.

She liked the calico. She didn't have any obvious vices. Save one. Pac-Man. Oh, yeah? To hear her tell it, there was a time where she would wake up before her husband and five children, power up the Atari and start a Pac-Man game. After 30 minutes or so, she would get breakfast on the table, get her family out the door

and do the books, clean the house, and then finally get back to her paused Pac-Man game, which she would play until it was time to start dinner when her family came back home. That's awesome. She had Pac-Man fever. That's good. Wouldn't be much of a story, guys, except here's the thing. She was really, really good at Pac-Man. Oh, yeah?

Pac-Man once told me she had the first 40-something levels memorized and could use them to rack up points and then, thus, extra lives. She got to a point where she could play the same game all day long. Eventually she would describe getting to a high enough level where the game would freeze, and what she was describing was level 256, the kill screen, but since she was home alone every time she reached it, and the internet wasn't a household thing, no one ever knew what she was talking about. She'd just round the door and be like, somebody, anybody, come look!

It was until many years later that I saw King of Kong and saw the footage of the kill screen my grandmother had described. Couldn't believe my eyes, or the fact that my conservative grandmother was such an early skilled gamer. She since passed away, but every time the subject of Pac-Man comes up, brings a smile to my face and I remember her and her high scores. That is from Aaron Miller of Kansas City, the Kansas side. Oh, that's rare.

You don't usually hear from those people. Kansas side. Well, thanks a lot, Aaron. That's a fantastic story. I'm glad you could smuggle that message out of the Kansas side of Kansas City to us. And if you want to be like Aaron and get in touch however way you can, try putting it in an email, sending it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.

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