Why does everyone love Dolly Parton?

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and today we're gonna make some joyful noise together here on Stuff you should Know.

That's right. I just poured myself a cup of ambition.

Uh huh, I had a few of those this.

Morning before we dive into Dolly Parton land. We should talk about our tour really quick because we're looking to sell some more tickets specifically, well everywhere, but specifically DC and Toronto.

Right, yeah, for the whole shebang. We're gonna be in d C, Boston and then Toronto May fourth, fifth, and sixth.

Right, that's right, And there are plenty of great seats available. This is a really good show. I think one of the best ones we've done in a long time. And if you're in the Northeast, like, this is it. We're not doing New York this year.

Are you sorry?

New York?

But if you live the Northeast, this is this is your chance because we're doing the Southeast in the fall, and that's this is your opportunity.

I think that's a great angle for this marketing campaign here.

Chuck, Yeah, Northeast or bust.

Okay, So that's enough about us, everybody. We're here to really talk about Dolly.

Yeah. So Livia helped us with this one. And you know, we've remarked about how Livia is getting great at titling the articles even though she doesn't even have to, right she does it because she's creative and talented. And her title for this is why does everyone love Dolly Parton? And we're going to explain that, But I think the easiest thing to say is since the nineteen seventies, this is a woman who was basically just put goodness into the world at every turn.

Yeah, for sure. I was reading an interview with her in Rolling Stone from nineteen eighty, like nine to five had just come out, and you might as well have told me it was from twenty twenty three.

Yeah.

She just she's been the same way this whole time. Great. She she doesn't like get into any political stuff. She said, I'm not political. I won't talk about politics.

She doesn't.

She leaves hot button issues alone. But if it means something to her, it's really meaningful, she'll she'll come out on you know, in favor of it. Endorsing it, but she doesn't put anything down. She might support something, but she's not going to put anything down publicly.

Yeah.

So the other kind of funny thing about this one from Livia is she always includes her sources, and she may have broken her own source record.

Yeah, there's a lot.

Oh boy, there were probably one hundred sources. But we did want to mention one in particular because I listened to this from jad Abamrad, the great jad Abamrab of Radio ab Fame, m like four years ago put out the wonderful series Dolly Parton's America. Yeah, and Livia binged it and I listened to it back then, and back then I was like, oh man, I want to do an episode on Dolly Parton. But it's like Jad it like he covered it so well, like what's the point kind of thing?

Right?

But now four years on, I was like, well, we can give it.

The stuff you should know treatment, which is to say, not as not as deep a dive, but it's a great series. If you want to learn more about Dolly Parton, then check out Dolly Parton's America.

Very nice. And then just to button up, Chuck, we were trying to answer that question, why does everybody love Dolly? I came up with another hypothesis too, Okay, it's that you know, when somebody is like, they can be anything anybody wants them to be, Like, they're interpretable from all different angles, so everybody just assumes they're like them. Dolly is not like that. She is her own person who can't be pigeonholed into one box or another, right, but she's likable from all sides.

Yeah, Like, find someone that's gonna talk some Dolly Parton and then you and I really can a discussion in the parking lot with that guy.

It's a sad state of affairs, though, dude, because there's think pieces all over the internet about how it's just amazing that everybody doesn't hate Dolly Parton, and it's like, good God, like this is what we've come to, Like everybody hates everybody casually, so I mean, how has she escaped it so long? And it's just like such a sad state of affairs that that's normalized by even writing pieces like that. But they're out there for sure. But the upshot of it is people are amazed that people

Yeah, and she's she's someone that is so I think, kind of universally beloved and internationally beloved. That as you'll see later in this episode there, she's been studied by anthropologists and sociologists.

Yeah, which is pretty amazing. And so let's start at the beginning, shall we wait?

Hold on one more thing?

Yeah, more praise.

The other thing about her, I think that's so amazing and so remarkable is that she This is the reason why everybody's just so fascinated with her right now. She's maybe the one person who is straddling both sides of the political and social divide as wide as it is in the United States today and is not is not like hanging on by her fingernails. She's like, I got a foot here, and I'm not lying about it. Got a foot here. I'm not lying about that either. I'm

Basically, it's almost like being a genuine human who stays true to who they are is something we should all aspire to.

Sure, but it also shows she shows that that's such a rarity in this world that that you can be globally beloved by just doing that and also making like a ton of really great music too.

Well, yeah, I mean, come on, we're gonna talk about all this stuff, but can we.

Go back to the beginning now? Yeah?

Yeah, sorry, okay, Hey, never apologize about singing the praises of Dolly Parton.

That's a great rule of stuff.

You should, no motto.

And I just can't wait till we get to the Dollywood stuff, because you've been and I have not. All right, So she was born Dolly Rebecca Parton in nineteen forty six, in January nineteenth of nineteen forty six in rural Tennessee.

How do you pronounce this? Is it severe? County?

I think it's severe.

Oh, it's just severe.

I'm almost positive it's severe.

Okay, sev I e R and see immediately this is I'm sure Jad's episode pronounced it perfectly.

I bad. I don't remember.

Threw his face into us palm like these guys.

But she was born to a big family of twelve kids. And it's kind of fun to look up photos of Dolly and all her siblings because you know a few of her sisters look a lot like her.

All her brothers look.

Like you know, they should be like shooting pool down at the pool hall.

Yeah, you know, all the.

Just sort of genuine article smoky Mountain Tennessee foothills people.

Yeah, for sure. And there were twelve of them, did you.

Say, twelve sibs including her, And she was the fourth.

Yeah, the fourth of twelve. And all fourteen people in her family lived in a two room cabin. And I've seen a replica of this cabin, and it is no joke. A two room cabin and fourteen people lived in it in the Smoky mountains.

I mean two bedrooms with an office, right, right.

I mean two rooms my friend with the outhouse, no running water, no electricity, Like she grew up as Smoky mountain, as a smoky mountain person can grow up, like even people in other parts of Tennessee are like wow.

Yeah.

But she says she had a great childhood running around just being outside, and because she was the fourth of twelve, she wasn't particularly like paid attention to, so she could just kind of go off and do her own thing.

Yeah.

I get the idea that they were semi feral sort of mountain kids. Her granddad was a Pentecostal minister, very fiery in Brimstony, and she still, you know, mentions God a lot. I get the sense that she's a little less overtly religious, but spirituality still very much a mainstay in her life.

Yeah. I think it's more of a personal relationship between her and God.

Yeah, which is supposed to be.

So she really lucked out because she had an uncle named Bill Owens, who was a musician a songwriter who noticed that she wanted to get into music from a very young age and was maybe the only person in her entire life or her early life that noticed and then nurtured it. And she later said when he died a few years back at his funeral, like she wouldn't be here today if it wasn't him, Like she owed

Five, Yeah, little tiny tassel top about her homemade corn husk doll and she would pretend, you know, she would get a tobacco stick and a tin can and act like it was her microphone and Mike's stand, and she would sing for the chickens in her yard and had obviously a real talent from the beginning. If you listen to her very first recording, Puppy Love from nineteen fifty nine, it sounds like, you know, thirteen year old Dolly Parton. You know, you can hear Dolly in that young voice.

By none other than Johnny Cash.

Yeah, who was her first big crush, so it was even more amazing for unbelievable. Her family didn't get to see it though, because Dolly Parton was on TV before her family had a TV at home. Yeah, which is pretty cool. I believe there was a TV appearance, yes, noah, okay, and if it was, if that one wasn't the first whenever it was, she was on TV first, her family still didn't have a.

TV back, gotcha.

So thanks to Uncle Billy taking her around and banging on doors, she ended up making her debut on Mercury Records in nineteen sixty two, which is nothing to sneeze at. But I get the impression that it wasn't like her. It wasn't like a like a okay, this is a serious recording contract. It's like, okay, let's let's test this girl out. Back then, they called any woman in country music a girl singer, right, So she was a bit of a novelty, not just because of her age, but

Yeah, amazing, nineteen sixty four. And very soon after she moved there, she met a man that would become her husband and a mainstay in her life to this day, who is remarkably hard to find stuff about. His name is Carl Dean. They met it very famously at a laundromat when she was eighteen and he was twenty one. Married a couple of years later. And I think a lot of people that don't know a lot about Dolly Parton think she might be single or something. Because she

Yeah, I've read an interview with her somewhere and she said that in her opinion, if she's out in public, that time belongs to her fans, so she's not She doesn't have a problem with people coming up to her asking for autographs. She knows that she's out in public and that's a risk that she runs right. Sure, but her leisure time, her time away is like secluded off with Carl, just the two of them. Usually. Maybe she has a very close best friend I can't remember her name.

Yeah, and she's always been very her persona is very flirty, and she's always sort of flirted around with In fact, no friends that have worked on like commercial shoots with her and they were like, man, she's the biggest flirt you would ever know, and that's just her personality. And she said that Karl understands that, and that's just how she sort of has fun and relates to people, and it's always very innocent, and I just think it's kind

This this episode might be your big break, Chuck. Yeah, so would you just like turn bright red and like dig your the toe of your foot into this.

I kind of am a little bright red. I thought it was the stuff you should know. Sign in here casting a red beam on my face.

No, that's you thinking about being flirted with by Dolly Partner. I know.

Well, dude, I grew up as you did, but I'm, you know, a little bit older. Like the heyday of early Dolly was when I was a kid, and of course my dad was in love with her, and you know, it was just she was one of the biggest stars in the world, and my parents were kind of into country music, so she was just sort of prevalent in our household somehow.

Yeah, my introduction to her was through nine to five. If my mom that that whole message and the idea behind it was right up my mom's alley, So she would watch it with her hands clasped together.

At the side of her face like that.

Just an editor adoration of everybody, including Dolly Parton too. I think my family was never really into country music, so I think that that was like a big introduction and probably a win over for my family. Was nine to five.

All right, Well, we'll talk about nine to five and crossover success more.

It's a good setup.

But how about we take a break, Yes, and we'll be right back with more Dolly parton.

Okay, So we're talking about Dolly becoming a star. Like she's had a couple of record contracts, nothing serious though, but then in nineteen sixty five she saw him with Monument Records. That was her big her first big record contract, I read. But they wanted her to be a pop singer, which is kind of ironic because she actually would kind of become a pop singer later on in her career, But at first she was like, no way, Like have you seen my house? And do you know how many

Yeah.

Nineteen sixty seven her first record Hello I'm Dolly, which is just great. How they used to do records like that in time like that when you like introduce her to the world. But you know, as would become a thing like in her career, most of the songs that she's well known for most of the songs she's recorded. She's done, you know, plenty of cup because everyone does that, especially in country music. But she is most well known as a songwriter, and we'll get into that more in

Yes, I was looking up Something Fishy and it's about a woman who's become convinced that her husband's fishing trips aren't actually fishing trips and that he's running around on her. So one of the lines is, I guess some large mouth bass left that lipstick on your shirt. I don't think you're a fisherman, honey, I think you're a flirt. That's like perfect debut. Dolly like at what age, like nineteen I think is how old she has? Yeah, pretty great.

And Porter Wagoner is someone that we talked about on our Grand ole Opry Show and he had the Porter Wagoner Show. He hires young Dolly to replace his other young woman sidekick singer, and basically she elevated the show to the point where it was a number one, the number one syndicated show in the country radio show. And they started doing duets together and albums together, including their first one, Just Between You and Me in nineteen sixty eight.

Yeah, and they started touring a lot too, and she learned a tremendous amount about touring, performing live, the music business. Everything she needed to learn early on came from touring with Porter Wagner. But he was also really well aware

Yeah.

But because she's Dolly Parton and so beloved. When they eventually broke up their relationship, I think it was kind of rough, and she ended up writing a song I Will Always Love You about that relationship, and ultimately they worked it out and she reconciled and was at his deathbed with his family, and it was kind of one of those no hard feelings kind of situations.

Oh really, I've read that his last dying words were, I'll never forgive you. That's what I'm gonna say on my deathbed. No, I'm just gonna like wave my finger around the room to everybody standing there.

And we're all gonna be like, is he talking about me?

Exactly? You guys can spend the rest of your lives figuring it out.

Of me able to just look at me and say, he's talking about you.

Totally.

Uh So, they while they were a duet.

Oh wait, wait, Chuck, wait, wait, hold on, one more thing you brought up I Will Always love You, which everybody knows one of probably her most one of her most famous songs, arguably her other most famous song.

Joe Lene great song.

She apparently wrote those songs on the same day. Start to finish. Isn't that amazing.

Yeah, I mean she she now says, like, you know, if it wasn't the same day, it was in the within a couple of days of each other, but like, either way, it's remarkable.

Yeah, and it's possible it was the same day. She just doesn't remember.

Yeah.

That really like kind of goes to show what kind of uh she she was drinking cups of ambition left and right, apparently, because not only does that story potentially true, she also put out twenty five albums yeah, both d us with Porter Wagner and then some solo albums in the five period between nineteen sixty eight and nineteen seventy three.

Yeah, I mean that's remarkable she started, and that's kind of where I was headed.

Anyway.

She kind of started recording her own solo stuff as she was. You know, it's kind of obvious she just had she was too prolific of a songwriter. I mean, she supposedly her quote is that she's written more than three thousand songs and three of them are good. She's

Right, but still under the tutelage of Porter Wagner.

Right, yeah, I mean those are solo albums and I think I Will Always Love You. It was about them splitting apart, So it was sort of right there at the end.

I think it definitely was. And I heard a story of years back that he said, Okay, I'll let you out of your contract if you let me produce this amazing song, and she yeah, I will always love you, right, And then apparently he turned around and sued her anyway for breach of contract. But she she got out of it. She got out of this this this terrible contract, this exploitive contract. She got out from under a very domineering mentor.

Yeah, that's pretty great. She hosted a TV show for one season, just like us. It was called Dolly. You know, back then they had all those great variety shows. This was seventy six into seventy seven. And then a very important man comes into her life by the name of Sandy Gallen, who was a uber manager got the Beatles on Ed Sulimon would later manage Michael Jackson and marbar streisand and Cher and Sandy Gallen was a pretty instrumental person for a couple of reasons.

One is.

Kind of encouraging the crossover success. Like he booked her at the bottom line in the Greenwich Village. Who you know, everyone from Springsteen to lou Reid were playing there.

Like Andy Warhol came and watched her show. There's an awesome picture of them sitting together.

Yeah, talk about crossover.

Yeah, exactly. And she was nervous. I saw that she was nervous on the on the way to being scared.

I'm sure. Yeah.

He had her tour Europe, exposed her internationally. He took her to Studio fifty four, which is probably where she also hung out with Andy Warhol. But the other big reason is that Sandy Gallen was gay. He died like five years ago. And this was a very instrumental relationship. And I get the impression, you know, Dolly is very famous for being a sort of an icon in the LGTVQ community.

Yeah, from very early on.

Yeah, And it seems like this is kind of where it all started, was having this relationship with Sandy, and you know, just the gay community wrapping their arms around her early on, not necessarily because you know, she had a gay manager, but you know, I don't think it hurt.

Right, And The New York Times wrote that she got a warm welcome in San Francisco from transgender fans and quote other exotic urban cult audiences.

Well, Dolly's always said, you know, she's one of those love is love types, and you know, it's just like it's the way to live life. Like she doesn't judge people, and she never has, and she's always just embraced like whatever community wants to love her music, Like why would she? I never get it when people like intentionally sort of turn audiences off, right, you know.

Yeah, I know for sure, for sure, But also like it's that's so true and it's so prevalent when when you read about her, watch interviews with her, just listen to her talk, you're almost like, what's your angle, dolly, right, what are you really up to here?

Her big crossover hit was Here You Come Again, which was considered a pop song. I mean, I've always kind of thought it was a country song, I guess because her voice is in it and she insisted on steel guitar, so it still had.

A little country. But it's like a perfect song.

It's a perfect crossover, Like it's exactly perfectly balanced, Like there couldn't have been a better song to transition from full on country singer to country pop singer.

Yeah, And it went number one on the country chart, number three on the pop charts.

Album went platinum.

And this is you know, the late seventies when she really really really blew up.

Yeah, that was that. She just took off like a rocket from there. One of the things that she did very wisely in the late seventies early eighties, right around this time, was just hop on the TV circuit. Y She's been on at least a few hundred TV appearances, but a lot of them took place in the seventies and eighties when she was just making herself known, making

And that explains why as a kid growing up in the seventies, I saw a lot of Dolly Parton exactly.

She was everywhere Dolly wanted you to see a lot of Dolly Parton.

In the eighties is when she continued some of her collaborations with other artists, very famously with Kenny Rodgers with Islands in the Stream, huge massive hit, Haven't Heard It, And then nineteen eighty seven, my favorite collaboration at least came out and maybe my favorite Dolly stuff period, oh yeah, was the album Trio Yeah, that she recorded with Linda Ronstadt and Emilu Harris. Just three of the best voices in the history of music coming together to sing together.

She also released some bluegrass albums in the late nineties, The Grass Is Blue, Little Sparrow, Halo's and Horns, And then she released her first Christmas album in thirty years back in twenty twenty, A Holly Dolly Christmas, which is pretty good. It's cute, But I think the best Christmas album she released was Once Upon a Christmas in nineteen eighty four. There's a lot of Kenny Rogers on it.

I made a joke this last Christmas on Instagram. I think that like probably fifty percent of Dolly Parton's Christmas songs are about sex. It's true where there's like sexual overtones, right exactly.

Yeah, Yeah, it's good stuff.

But that nineteen eighty four album has hard candy Christmas on it, which is what I mean, you have it, maybe your best her best one, if you ask me.

Great song.

All right, So now let's talk a little bit more about her songwriting. I think that's the thing that she's sort of most proud of. She said in a twenty twenty book, if I had to choose just one thing to be, would choose to be a songwriter. She's always said that she loves writing from the male point of view.

Right. She also plays a bunch of instruments. The guitar, she says, is her strongest, and there's a lot of other string instruments that she can play. I saw a video of one of her concerts. She's got a banjo slung around her, yeah, her like she's got a strap hanging from a strap while she's playing a fiddle really fast.

It is.

That whole show is a fun watch because it's you know, it's in It's at the Glastonbury Festival and it's like, I don't know, I think your legendary status just like grew with that appearance.

Oh yeah, Like she was, you know, kind of a cult favorite in the UK and then she became like a like a pop culture favorite after that show.

Yeah.

Nine to five, the movie that you mentioned before in nineteen eighty was when she got into movie making, and it is a movie.

Boy.

Not only does it hold up today, but it is that was ahead of its time and like even more relevant today than it probably was then.

Which is sad if you stop and think about it.

No, no, totally sad.

But it was based on an actual movement called nine to five, the nine to five movement from the early seventies that I guess Jane Fonda was aware of because she was one of the creators behind the movie nine to five, And that was an actual like movement led by Secretary starting in Boston and it spread around the country and they were protesting sexual harassment low p getting passed over for promotions. And they had a great slogan that I saw raises not.

Roses, raises not roses. Yeah, I love that.

I love it too, like your T shirt exactly.

But some money exactly. I buy my own.

Flowers, right, I can buy my own flowers.

Yeah, that's what the back of the T shirt said. And then parentheses quit pinching my butt.

Plus also, that's a Miley Cyrus song. Who is Dolly Parton's god daughter?

That's right?

Yeah, and Dolly credits that relationship with the fact that millennials love Dolly.

Yeah. I wasn't aware of this, so everybody knows. Even I know that Miley Cyrus was Hannah Montana on Nickelodeon from I think two thousand and six to twenty eleven, right, and she would have Dolly on here or there as

I love it.

She was in a bunch of movies over the years, Best Little Worehouse in Texas with Burt Reynolds of course part of the ensemble, and Steele Magnolia's. Very disappointingly, Olivia doesn't mention my favorite Dolly second favorite Dolly Parton movie, which was Rhinestone with Sylvester Stallone, one of my big HBO movies. Early on, I watched that thing over and over again. Stallone sings. Have you ever seen it?

No? I never have. I turned I turned the TV off after Life Force.

You should check out Rhinestone because still you know that the premises She's to make a country star out of Sylvester Stallone, and he has a song in there called Drinkenstein instead of Frankenstein, and the chorus is Budweiser. You've created a monster and call him drinking style.

Wow.

But still unreally sings, and it's.

Just I think it's known probably as a bad movie, but it has a very special place in my heart.

It sounds like the prequel to Tulsa King. So she also did you mention sand Dollar yet?

No.

She founded a production company with Sandy Gallan, her longtime manager and friend, and they went on to produce movies like Father of the Bride, Yeah, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the movie.

Yeah.

She also did a straight Talk which she was in where she plays a woman who accidentally becomes a radio host and of course just shoots into the stratosphere and popularity.

I never saw that.

Oh yeah it was. It was okay, okay, not her best work, but still she was amazing at Steele Magnolia's. I mean, like, if you if you go back and yeah, if you go back and watch some of those scenes between her and her husband in particular, it's she's a really good actress.

No, she's good and in fact, but the Shelby I just did was more Sally Field, not that I think about it.

I detected Hannah sally Field in there.

All right, I think let's take another break and then we'll This was going to go a little long, but that's okay because we're about to dive into Dollywood right after this. Shelby all right, my friend, here we are. I'll set it up with how it starts, and then you can just take over because you've actually been there. But in an interview in nineteen eighty two with Barbara Walters, Dolly Parton said something about being interest did in opening up a theme park back home.

And there was a theme park.

Silver Dollar City, in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and the owners, Jack and Pete Hershand heard this interview, gave her a call and was like, let's get together on this, and they did to great success.

Yeah, four years later Dollywood opened. It reopened as Dollywood. I should say, just that first year they doubled their entries to one point three million people coming. And that's not just a full year, Like it snows and everything kind of shuts down in the winter time in Pigeon Forger and the Smoky So I'm guessing they crammed a lot of those people in in a very short amount of time, probably summer. I don't know why I'm going off on this tangent, but it just seemed to work.

They close in the winter be.

Quiet too, So it was a success right out of the gate, I should say. And a little known fact or it's a rumor that a lot of people don't realize as actual fact. They period a time capsule there on opening day and it contains an unreleased Dolly song No Way that is not to be open until I think she's ninety nine years old?

Wow, which is what is she now? Seventy six, seventy eight?

I think?

Okay, so it's it's close.

Yeah, we can wait.

She sees it yet, Oh we'll wait. So tell me about Dollywood. I want to I want to know more.

So it is a you can definitely believe that it used to be a silver dollar city. They preserved a lot of stuff. There's a coal fired train that kind of takes you around on some neat vistas and everything. There's We went and we went around Christmas time, which kind of undermines my argument about being shutting down in the winter. We went for Humi's birthday actually like one year, and there was like a Christmas show where there was

When she was a kid, right out of all rags that.

She sang about in that Coat of Many Colors and it's what a great song. But then just just to love that song and then see the actual coat and then just see how dinky it is. It was just amazing. Those lists I told you she used to keep, she kept those, Those are on display, wigs, rhinestones everywhere. But it's not just like this odor tribute to Dolly. It's a genuine, like curated look into her whole career, and it's it was one of the best museums I've ever been to in my life of any kind.

Why didn't you guys ride the roller coaster?

We're both scared of roller coasters.

Oh, I don't think I remembered that.

Yes, I've been scared of roller coasters for decades, but I feel like I'm starting to come out of it. Okay, And I might go challenge myself and ride a few roller coasters this summer and see if I'm correct or if I'm really really wrong.

Well, you should go to six Flags with Ruby and I, because there's nothing like getting your courage worked up than a seven year old who will ride anything, okay, staring you in the face.

Okay, all right, I may use that. That's just the elixir I'm looking for.

Yeah, yeah, she'll go on whatever. And she's just like she wouldn't understand. She'd be like, why don't you want to go on it? What do you mean you're scared?

I don't You're of ruining things for me.

Uh, well, I want to go to Dollywood, so maybe we can go to six Wags and then Dollywood and just do a theme park round up.

I strongly recommend it because there's like all sorts of stuff in nearby Gatlinburg and Pigeon Ford, Ripley's Museums and just all sorts of just cool, super kitchy touristy stuff. I think, Oh, what's his name? Uh, the guy who sings Proud to be an American?

Lee Green Greenwood.

There's the Lee Greenwood Cafe where they no joke, play those song oh no, loop over and over again. The whole time You're like, where's the next song? They don't play the next song.

I heard that song every night of the summer for like five summers when I worked at the Stow Mountain laser shop.

Oh yeah, I'll bet I.

Got my fill of it.

Yeah.

Uh, So we can talk a little bit more about her politics she's and this is where the sociologists and anthropologists come in. There's a sociologist named Treci McMillan Cottum that has written about how black women have always looked up to Dolly Parton as a role model, even though she is like it's a very specific sort of white Southern thing that she embodies. Again, just you know, testifies to her crossover appeal that she is to be admired by anybody.

Her Q score.

If you don't know what a Q score is, it's a marketing tool that basically there's a bunch of things that go into your Q score, but it's basically how how much people like you, how much they recognize your name. And her Q score is like legendarily one of the top Q scores of all time celebrity.

Was she has a high positive Q score. They also do a negative Q score and she's a very low negative Q score, So she's among the most beloved and among the least disliked people in the entire world.

Yeah. I don't want to know my Q score.

I looked it up. We don't have one yet.

Okay, good.

But I was reading this article on the Conversation and these two Australian marketing people were trying to figure out who would have been Australia's Dolly, and they landed on Hugh Jackman. And I'm like, I can't disagree with that.

He's pretty likable.

Sure everybody likes Hugh Jackman. Yeah, I would agree with that, even though he did the Greatest Showman, right people still like Hugh Jackman.

The anthropologist comes in.

A man named Jonathan Zilberg in nineteen ninety five talked about how she was loved in Zimbabwe, of all places, and again it's just like, you know, pick a country and chances are people there love Dolly Parton.

And in Dolly Parton's America. And then they talk about how Nelson Mandela, while he was in prison in South Africa, got his jailers to play Joe Lean for the whole Yeah, holds in jail basically all Shawshank redemption.

Uh huh, pretty cool, Pretty cool. And like you said earlier, she basically just avoids politics. She doesn't let any politician on either side use her music. If a Democrat uses it, she shuts him down. If a Republican uses it, she shuts him down. She just sort of side steps all that stuff. She's always been, you know, growing up. Of course, in the seventies there were a lot of playground jokes about Dolly Parton's breast size.

She was very well known for.

It, and she's always been the first one to jump in and joke about it herself. Instead of being like the butt of the joke, she can just go along with it, and that's just that's another really likable quality as someone who can and can laugh at themselves and not take things too seriously.

I also saw it put that she she knows that these jokes are going to be made anyway, so she can diffuse them by getting out in front of them and topping, you know, the lame jokes that like old talk show hosts would make.

Yeah.

I saw once she said that she burned her braw and it took the fire department three days to put it out, like that kind of stuff. That's hilarious. That was her joke.

Yeah, that's good, that's very funny.

So I think we mentioned this before. Do you know that Dolly the sheep, the first cloned animal on the planet, was named Dolly because she was grown from a mammary gland. So yeah, I can't remember where we talked about that, but it really just goes to show like that's how ubiquitous Dolly Parton's boobs were in the twentieth century, Like they were as big as she was. Basically, Yeah, they were definitely part of her intended they were definitely part of her brand for sure.

Yeah, you know, she was smart enough to lean into it. Another thing that she had done over the years is there are a lot of really dark songs that she's written about. Even though she's never kind of outright considered herself a feminist, she very much is and a lot of the songs she's written over the years have been very dark songs about women who are either abandoned or suffering from sexual double standards.

Or there's one brutal song.

From nineteen seventy called Daddy Come and Get Me about a true story of a relative in her family that was basically institutionalized by her husband. So she's never been afraid to go down sort of in the tradition of the old sort of dark country murder ballad thing, go down these darker roads with some of the songs she's written.

Yeah, I saw that she considers herself not a feminist, but in favor of all women. She's for all women. So it's like she doesn't subscribe to the movement part, but what the movement's ultimately about, she's totally in favor with, and that's super her. She made a very rare, overt statement when she came out in support of Black Lives Matter, and at a time where it was like, you're casting your lot one way or another, and she stood up for it, which is pretty.

Cool she did.

She also in twenty eighteen that was at Dollywood, the Dixie Stampede, she changed the name to Dolly Parton Stampede after people complained about the whole Dixie connotation and Civil War theme.

She changed that up, and she was.

Just like, you know, I never really thought about, you know, the Confederate imagery, meaning what it meant to people, and so she was happily changed it. And that's just the kind of person she is, I think.

And she got gufh for that, and she got guff for supporting Black Lives Matter from some of her her right leaning fans. But she can always explain herself, you know, and she does so in such a great way that you're just kind of like, well, fine, it's hard to be you can't keep a grudge against her, even if she goes against you politically, but she just so rarely does it.

Yeah, agreed, she is.

We're gonna wind it down with her business in philanthropy, very savvy business person from the very beginning. She was smart enough to hang on to her the rights to her own music and never give him up. Even when Elvis Presley came Colin and wanted to cover I Will Always Love You. He wanted half the publishing rights, and she was like, no way, He'd take a walk Elvis Presley.

He didn't. Apparently, Colonel Tom called her up on the morning of the scheduled record varing session and sprung that on her, and she turned him down. And she was hoping that Elvis was as disappointed as she was. But that took a lot of gumption, especially to have it sprung on you like that, and she said, Nope, not doing it. But that's one of the things that made

She has done quite well for herself.

Yeah, she I mean these days she's she's not stopping either. She's she's on Duncan Hine's buttermilk biscuit mix with her little cartoon face. They have fragrances branded by Dolly. They have pet clothes that she's branded with, Like just all kinds of things. She's not afraid to license her image for sure.

We've got that the Duncan Hines frosting in our pantry. Do you the chocolate chocolate cream frosting. And then one other thing I saw, chuck. She wrote a book. Co wrote a book with James Patterson, one of the best, one of the most favorite novelists in the entire world. It's called Run Rows Run, and it's a thriller based kind of loosely on Dolly's story of making it in the music basins. Oh wow, yeah, I think it just came out.

Okay, let me have to check that out. Yeah.

She is very charitable as well. She started the Dollywood Foundation in nineteen eighty eight just to get literacy going in her home county, and it grew and grew and grew to the point where it is now in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, and Ireland, and to date the program has given out more than two hundred and four million books may across these countries. And you know she'll build a hospital in her county. Anytime there's like wildfires nearby, she's

Well.

Yeah, she also was like everybody go get jabbed.

Yeah.

There was a video at one round of her getting her own vaccine, the first one, I think, and she was singing vaccine to the tune of Joe Lene and.

Sing pretty nice die in.

Yeah, exactly. It was great. So one other thing though about her foundation. One reason she got into literacy programs was because her father never learned to read, and apparently he told her just before he died that he was most proud of her for that work that she'd done with promoting literacy around the world. It's pretty cool. It makes it even neaterer.

And in addition to the vaccine Jolene song, she also did a version of I Will Always Jab You.

It was less popular. Less popular sounds a little aggressive.

She's been nominated for fifty three Grammys. Fifty three she's won ten, which I think that number should be higher, But you know, they have given her Lifetime Achievement Awards and Joelene and I Will Always Love You were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, so they have like heaped awards on her even when she has not won the actual Grammy. And she's also won an Emmy, right yeah.

She was also up for two Oscars for Best Song for Traveling Through for trans America and I think two thousand and six and then.

Nine to five not win.

No, it was beaten by Fame.

Oh boy, tough year.

Traveling Through was beaten by hard out There for a Pimp from Hustle and Flow.

That's a good song too.

Are you gonna top that?

It's really hard. I was getting getting ready to trash whatever beat out nine to five? But yeah, Fame is a great song.

That's a tough year.

That's a very tough year. But she also has two Guinness World Records to her name, one of which is Most Decades with the Top twenty Hit, which really just goes to show how long she's been around it, how long she's been.

Huge you know what else?

She has two of what stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, DOWO.

I know, is there anybody else who has that?

I think so people in different media, although probably not a lot of people.

I bet it's a pretty short list.

One in nineteen eighty four and then one in twenty eighteen, when I guess the final Trio of Trio albums came out.

So if you think Dolly's slowing down, friend, you are dead wrong. Yep, she's got a new album coming out. So she was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite her protests. She's like, I'm not a rocker. Apparently she's like, all right, well I better go be a rocker and earn that honor. She's so, her next studio album, her forty ninth, is coming out I think this fall, and it's called rock Star. And she's going to be singing with some other rock stars too.

Yeah, Stevie Nick's, Paul McCartney share, I love it. Yep. Vince Neil, No, not Vince Neil.

That's correct, Not Vince Neil.

No, just kidding, that'd be pretty amazing.

Actually, you got anything else about Dolly Parton?

Oh?

I've got one other thing before you answer. She wakes up at three am every day.

Oh and just daughter of a sharecropper. Yeah, I guess that's amazing.

Okay, you got anything else?

I got nothing else?

Okay, I don't either. I don't think, but I'm gonna think of ten things after we're done recording.

I know I'm gonna I've been listening to Dolly Parton all day, so it's gonna continue on.

Yeah, it's not hard to do. If you want to know more about Dolly Parton, friend, go listen to Dolly Parton. Go watch videos of Dolly Parton, Go read interviews with Dolly Parton. She was once described as a black belt interviewee, so you'll never be disappointed with a Dolly Parton interview. And since I said you'll never be disappointed by a Dolly Parton interview, that has opened up listener mail.

I'm going to call this great email follow up from Arcades. Hey, guys, want to tell you a story of my very traditional grandmother. She was very traditional in the Midwestern sense, and she was a homemaker. Oh yeah, have books for my grandfather's iron working concern. She didn't tolerate cussing or fussing, and was a conservative dresser.

She liked the calico.

She didn't have any obvious vices save one. Pac Man.

Oh yeah, to hear her tell it, there was a time where she would wake up before her husband and five children, power up the atari, and start a pac Man game. After thirty minutes or so, she would get breakfast on the table, get her family out the door, and do the books, clean the house, and then finally get back to her paused pac Man game, which she would play until it was time to start dinner when her family came back home.

That's awesome. She had pac Man fever.

That's good.

It wouldn't be much of a story, guys, except here's the thing. She was really really good at pac Man. She once told me she had the first forty something levels memorized and could use them to rack up points and then thus extra lives. She got to a point where she could play the same game all day long. Eventually, she would describe getting to a high enough level where

She just rolled the door be like somebody, anybody come look.

It was until many years later that I saw King of Kong and saw the footage of the kill screen my grandmother had described. Couldn't believe my eyes or the fact that my conservative grandmother was such an early skilled gamer neat. She since passed away, But every time the subject of pac Man comes up brings a smile to my face.

And I remember her and her high scores. That is from Aaron Miller of Kansas City, that Kansas.

Oh, that's rare. You don't usually hear from those people Kansas side. Well, thanks a lot, Aaron, that's a fantastic story. I'm glad you could smuggle that message out of the Kansas side of Kansas City to us. And if you want to be like Aaron and get in touch however way, you can try putting it in an email sending it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,