Dolly Parton

About the book

More Music Stories: Dolly Parton takes you from a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains to sold-out arenas around the world. Not a fan tribute — an investigation of the true stories, the persistent myths, and the fascinating what ifs behind one of music's most enduring figures. Available now as e-book and audiobook.

Read an excerpt

For a writer not yet five years removed from singing on local television in Sevierville, hearing Elvis Presley record one of her songs was about as close to a dream as the music business had to offer.

It was Colonel Tom Parker on the line, Elvis’s manager, not Elvis himself. Parker’s organization had long pursued publishing interests in songs Elvis recorded, often seeking a substantial share as part of the deal, and this time his price was steep: Elvis would record the song only if Dolly signed over at least half of its publishing rights. Dolly said no. “I can’t do that,” she told him.

This was not Parker inventing a shakedown on the spot. Since the 1950s, Parker and the publishing house Hill & Range had built a company, Elvis Presley Music, Inc., specifically to collect a share of the publishing on songs Elvis recorded. In Dolly’s case, the demand was explicit: at least half the publishing, or no recording.

From Chapter 16 – “I Can’t Do That”

A red-haired little girl came to the stage after a show and asked Dolly for an autograph. Dolly asked her name. “Jolene,” the girl said. Dolly asked her to say it again, just to hear the sound of it a second time. “That’s pretty,” she told her. “That sounds like a song. I’m going to write a song about that.”

She did not write it about that little girl. The name was the only thing that came from her. What became the song’s actual subject arrived from somewhere else entirely. In Dolly’s later telling, a red-haired teller at Carl’s bank had developed what she called a terrible crush on Carl Dean. Dolly has said Carl suddenly seemed to love running errands to that particular bank, staying longer than any transaction required, coming home in an unusually good mood for a man who had just stood in line to deposit a check. It became, in Dolly’s telling, a running joke between the two of them — “you’re spending a lot of time at the bank.”

From Chapter 14 – “Jolene”

One Halloween, at a West Hollywood bar on Santa Monica Boulevard, Dolly Parton stood in a line of contestants waiting to hear who did the best impression of Dolly Parton. She had not told anyone who she really was. She took a number, like everyone else, and waited her turn.

She had, if anything, overdone it. “I overexaggerated my makeup,” she later wrote in her memoir Dream More: Celebrate the Dreamer in You, “but they didn’t know who I was. I guess they thought that this little guy just decided to walk across the stage.” The other contestants — drag queens who had spent weeks perfecting their wigs and their costumes — had studied her more carefully than she had ever needed to study herself. “All of these other beautiful drag queens had worked for months and weeks getting their clothes and all that, and they were dressed like me,” she recalled in a 2012 interview on ABC’s Nightline. “So, I just got in the line and I just walked across, and they just thought I was some little, short gay guy.”

From Chapter 19

Excerpt coming soon — being prepared for publication.