Dolly Parton Was Never Ours, But She Became Ours Anyway

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Rainbow Rodeo mourns the passing of Dolly Parton. This article was commissioned several months ago and was scheduled to run next week, but we can't think of a better way to celebrate Dolly's life than featuring her impact on the queer community. The article has been to edited to reflect Parton's passing – Rachel

Dolly Parton is a figure within country music that not only has been tied to feminism within the genre of country, but she's also inherently tied to the queer community. In the early days of her career, far before many others, Parton began to advocate for the community and have her music resonate deeply with their lived experiences. 

Having grown up in the era where she was heavily featured on Hannah Montana, she was a light in what seemed like the iffy genre of country music. Growing up as a Sapphic, country didn’t have to be chugging beers and sleeping with women but instead, it could be living authentically as yourself in whatever way you define that to be. She is so deeply embedded in culture that it is hard to point down where this feeling truly began in childhood, as it stemmed far beyond Disney Channel. 

There is something almost funny about how much Dolly Parton means to queer people. She was not queer. She never claimed to be. But somewhere along the way, Dolly became ours anyway. Not in the possessive sense, but in the way certain people become woven into a community simply because of what they represent to the people inside of it. She became the woman in rhinestones who somehow makes you believe there is room for you, too.

Dolly always had a particular affection for people on the outside of whatever society has decided is normal, and she writes about them without turning their difference into a punchline. “Coat of Many Colors” is about a poor little girl being bullied for wearing a coat made from scraps. “9 to 5” became an anthem about women fighting against a system designed to exploit them. Even “Jolene,” perhaps the song most famously reclaimed by queer listeners, is fascinating because Dolly spends the entire song speaking directly to another woman, fixating on her beauty and begging her not to take the man she loves. The song was never written as a queer text, but queer people have never needed a song to be written specifically for us before we could find ourselves in it. That's part of what Dolly has always understood: you don't have to tell people exactly who they are for them to recognize themselves in what you're singing.

In order to understand this intersection more clearly from someone that watched her evolve as an artist longer than I have, I sat down with Justin Hiltner, an expert on Dolly, to discuss the topic more in depth. 

[Editor's note: this interview occurred in July]

“I think it's multifaceted. Dolly is later in her career nowadays; she's much more overt, speaking outright about her support for the LGBTQ community. For many young fans, Millennials and younger, it feels like she's always had this overt support for queer folks. Even in the '90s and the aughts, when she was in the tabloids and on daytime talk shows, she was open about talking about how, once she moved to Nashville and was in show business, she was around queer folks on her teams, doing her hair and rhinestoning her costumes.”

“She talks about how meeting people other than those she grew up with was an important part of expanding her idea of who people can be and how they can be. She's always related that to her own experience with knowing who she wanted to be from a young age and seeing the town harlot walk down the street and thinking, 'I want to be like her,'" he explained.

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