Kathryn Schulz’s postscript on Dolly Parton, dead at eighty, opens like a Lincoln address: “Four score and three thousand songs ago, in the middle of a whopping winter storm, a sharecropper and his young wife brought forth upon this continent a baby girl named Dolly Parton.” Born in a one-room cabin in Sevier County, Tennessee, the fourth of twelve children, she went from singing in church at six to a Grand Ole Opry introduction by Johnny Cash at thirteen.

The life was as outsized as the hair:

  • Some fifty studio albums, 100 million records sold, ten CMA Awards, eleven Grammys, and four halls of fame — country, gospel, rock and roll, and songwriting.
  • The Imagination Library sends a free book monthly to about one in seven American preschoolers, honoring her father, who never learned to read.
  • After the 2016 Gatlinburg wildfires she paid a thousand dollars a month for six months to every family that lost a home; in 2020 she gave a million dollars to COVID vaccine development.
  • She never learned to read music but played nearly anything with strings — plus her own fingernails, immortalized as the percussion on “9 to 5,” “that national anthem for the nation of women.”

Schulz’s sharpest point is the persona. Handed the usual options for a woman of her looks and ambition, Parton took none of them: she stepped into every insult — dumb blonde, bimbo, trailer trash, whore — and made herself impossible to mock because she was always in on the joke. She once entered a Dolly Parton look-alike contest on the sly and lost, to a man.

The deeper insight: country music sells authenticity, and the best way to sell it was through artifice. She walled off her real childhood home while building a fake version for tourists — and told everyone everything about the wigs and the boob jobs, which made her seem entirely sincere.

“She was commonly called the Queen of Country Music, but that is exactly wrong: she was democratic to her bones, of the people and by the people and for the people, the duly elected President of the United States of Americans.”

Her last public appearance was the grand opening of a Tennessee truck stop named in her honor — a perfect Dolly exit. She died, in Schulz’s telling, young: “It goes to show you’re never old unless you choose to be.”