Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics by Dolly Parton and Robert K. Oermann (review)

Reviewed by: Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics by Dolly Parton and Robert K. Oermann Charles Bowen Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. By Dolly Parton and Robert K. Oermann. (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2020. Pp. ix, 380.) A daughter of the mountains, Dolly Parton grew up hearing her mom’s Appalachian ballads as entertainment, as history, as cautionary tales about the ways of a harsh world. “Mama had this haunting voice, and, Lord, you would feel it,” Parton writes in her book Songteller. “There is a famous old folk song called ‘Two Little Orphans’ about two little kids who come up to the door and are frozen to death because nobody’s answering. Mama would emphasize those moments in the lyrics the two little orphans are ‘talking.’ It was really like being there if Mama was singing it.” Parton was born in East Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains 77 years ago into a life that seemed to be right out of one of those stark mountain stories. One of a dozen siblings, “we lived in these old, cold-ass houses,” she writes, so cold that the kids slept with their clothes on, so poor that the doctor who delivered Dolly was paid with a sack of cornmeal. Later on, that same doctor was to be the subject of one of Parton’s early songs. In “Dr. Robert F. Thomas,” she wrote that “he often rode on horseback to get where he was needed / But if he had to walk, he always came.” People and events from her mountain raisings inhabit many of the near-3,000 tunes that Parton has written to date. Some of those songs are famous, of course. Who doesn’t know about the child who was mocked for wearing a colorful coat of rags to school? Who hasn’t heard the lament about the ravenous, ravishing mountain siren named Jolene? “As a songwriter, I love to write those mournful things and put myself in those situations,” she relates in the book. “It comes from those early days of all the old songs I grew up with. I loved feeling all the sorrow in a song.” But some of the best stories in Songteller are Parton’s lesser known ones. [End Page 117] “Applejack,” for instance—a 1977 recording on which Dolly was accompanied by a court of Nashville royalty, including Kitty Wells, Grandpa Jones, Roy Acuff, Chet Atkins, and Minnie Pearl—was about a character from her Appalachian youth. “An old guy we called ‘Sawdust’ lived up in the woods and he played the banjo,” she writes. “He had a bunch of old hunting dogs, and he stunk like crazy, but I would sneak off to his place. Mama said, ‘Don’t go up there.’ But I was so intrigued, because I’d heard him playing the banjo. . . . I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just hold my nose and go.’” Of course another role for those mountain ballads of Dolly’s childhood was to provide the news of the day, and as a working songwriter she carries on that tradition too, as illustrated in the final pages of the book. When the COVID-19 epidemic forced massive shutdowns in quarantines in the spring of 2020, a compassionate Dolly Parton quietly pledged $1 million to help fund research for a vaccine. Then she did something else that came equally natural to her: she wrote a song. Called “When Life Is Good Again,” the new tune concludes with these lines: “We’ll make it through this long dark night / Darkness fades when faced with light / And everything’s gonna be alright / When life is good again.” For Dolly Parton fans, this book will be a light too. Rare snapshots of her life are interspersed with lyric sheets of 175 songs, lovingly linked by a running commentary that—like a Dolly song itself—is sometimes charming and folksy, sometimes poignant and poetic. Charles Bowen Marshall University Copyright © 2023 West Virginia University Press