Songteller by Dolly Parton: a life in lyrics that is as sweet, steely and elusive as its author

Dolly Parton’s $1m donation to the Vanderbilt University Medical Centre helped it to discover the 94.5 per cent efficient Moderna Covid-19 vaccine.

The act of largesse further cemented her status as an international treasure, first established by her Imagination Library, which has donated more than 147 million books to children in honour of her illiterate father. In 2007, she visited Rotherham to launch the Library’s UK arm, although the council quietly scrapped it eight years later.

She is, it seems safe to assume, the proverbial good egg, the acceptable face of philanthropic superstardom. Those looking to overturn the narrative will find no smoking gun in Songteller, a jigsaw autobiography, where Parton re-tells her tale through 175 of her songs, loosely grouped into thematic chapters, alongside thoughtful linking essays by Nashville writer Robert K Oermann.

Songteller is keen to stick to the established line: the good ol’ gal hauling herself from poverty to global acclaim by virtue of sheer talent alone, all without losing her sense of self.

She has sold more than 100 million albums during a career which has lasted for 66 of the 74 years since she was delivered by her local doctor in exchange for a sack of cornmeal. If her mix of twee and grit sometimes sounds too good to be true, perhaps it’s both too good and true. “I know I look phony. But I’m totally real. I’m comfortable with who I am and the way I feel.”

Piecing the disparate elements together unveils a complex, driven, kind woman, whose willingness to transcend the Nashville establishment’s innate conservatism preceded her Imagination Library by decades. So, while country was mired in gloop,
Parton was singing about prostitution, mental illness, feminism, bullying, drug use, PMS, death in childbirth and homosexuality.

Yet, she is ruthless, dumping her controlling mentor Porter Wagoner in the mid-70s, looking back only to write “I Will Always Love You” about him. In 2007, as Wagoner lay in a hospice, hours from death, Parton paid a visit, which she spins in myth-waxing fashion. “I forgave him and thanked him for all the opportunities he gave me. I asked if there was anything he needed to forgive me for. He wasn’t coherent, but I squeezed his hand. He made a move to say he understood.”

She is business-savvy, too. The owner of Dollywood theme park, Splash Country Water Adventure Park, Smoky Mountain Cabins, Pirates Voyage Dinner & Show, and the DreamMore resort also owns her own songs. Tellingly, although she claims Elvis Presley crooned I Will Always Love You to Priscilla as they left the divorce court, Parton denied him permission to record it when his manager demanded half the publishing.

“It broke my heart, but I couldn’t give up my copyright.”

She teases (“I’m no angel”) about her marriage of 54 years to the elusive Carl Dean, who “is such a loner. He don’t want to be around anybody but me”. And beyond chiding Sylvester Stallone’s attempts to sing her songs (“he didn’t execute them very well”), she doesn’t have a bad word to say about anyone, even the tabloids: “I love them. I read them all. I believe everything they write about everybody. Except me!”

Songteller is as sweet, as steely and as elusive as its co-author – but who could possibly want a mean-spirited Dolly Parton?

Out now via Hodder & Stoughton, £35