Dolly Parton

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Terry Gross** (0:14)
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. No matter what their taste is in music, people love Dolly Parton. Musicians and singers from all different genres have covered songs she wrote or made famous. From jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins to Beyonce. And while politics divide our country, loving her is something that unites us. She died yesterday at the age of 80 Today, as we mourn her death, we're going to feature the interview I recorded with her in 2001
She's been on my mind for the past couple of weeks, ever since I heard one of her songs on the radio that I hadn't heard before. She didn't write it, but her voice is so gorgeous on it. I had to play it again when I got home and have played it several times since. It's called Old Flames Can't Hold a Candle to You. In 1980, it became one of her many number one hits.
Dolly Parton was a singer, songwriter, actress, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. She was successful enough and had a big enough personality to start her own theme park, Dollywood. She became a singer on country music star, Porter Wagner's TV show in 1967 She went on to have a solo career with many hits, including Jolene, which Beyonce recorded on her country music album Cowboy Carter, 9 to 5, and I Will Always Love You, which was later a huge hit for Whitney Houston.
When I spoke with Dolly Parton in 2001, her recording career had recently returned to the music she grew up with. Her 1999 recording, The Grass is Blue, won the International Bluegrass Music Association's Album of the Year Award. We spoke after the release of her follow-up album, Little Sparrow, that featured traditional mountain music as well as her original songs in that vein. We started with the title track, which she wrote.
That's Dolly Parton with the title track from her new CD, Little Sparrow. Dolly Parton, welcome to Fresh Air.

**Dolly Parton** (5:13)
Well, thank you. Ain't you glad we started out with something upbeat, like a broken heart. But anyway, I thought that would be a good one to start with, since it is the name of the album that I'm out trying to promote, because I need the money because you know it costs a lot to make me look this cheap. Ha ha.
But anyway, thanks for having me on too. I'm looking forward to spending some time with you.

**Terry Gross** (5:37)
This new CD and your previous CD, The Grass is Blue, they're both traditional music. I'm interested in why you're heading in that direction now, as opposed to a more almost like show business version of country music.

**Dolly Parton** (5:52)
Well, I have always loved this kind of music. I really think this style of music is more suited to my voice. It's the kind of music that I used to sing all my days growing up back in the Smoky Mountains. And this music is really so now, people are really into the simplicity of it. And so just for fun for myself, there was a poll in the bluegrass community of what person they'd like to hear most do a bluegrass album that hadn't done one, and they said me. So I won hands down with that. So I said to Steve Buckingham when we did The Grass is Blue, the album just before this one, I said, well, let's just do a bluegrass album.
Lo and behold, we won the bluegrass album of the year with that. So we thought, well, we need to do something along the same lines. But I didn't want to just do a full blown bluegrass album and try to just do exactly what we did with the other. So we wanted to expand it. So we did a little more mountain music. We added a little bit of flavors of some Irish sounds also. So I call this blue mountain music. It's like bluegrass and mountain music. So that seems to sum up what the style is, I think.

**Terry Gross** (6:55)
Now you were born in 1946 in a one room cabin in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. What was the music you heard as a child?

**Dolly Parton** (7:03)
Well, a lot of the stuff that we heard was that old porch picking music, old songs brought back from England and Ireland, that old Appalachian music and a lot of the stuff that people up in the mountains wrote. So my mother was, and all my mom's people used to always play and sing. Mom used to sing a lot. So we would sing like a lot of the old gospel songs. A lot of old gospel songs were written to sound old, like I say, by a lot of my own people.