Dolly Parton is burning up, not burning out | from WorkLife with Adam Grant (re-release)

**Adam Grant** (0:00)
Hey, ReThinkers, I'm here with a special episode from the Archive today. This week, we lost the late, great Dolly Parton at age 80
I was lucky enough to interview her back in 2022 when I hosted WorkLife. Dolly transcended our divides by standing up for principles that unite us. She was a paragon of authenticity and generosity. I'm sharing our conversation as a way of honoring her memory and keeping her values alive.
Joining me today is the one and only Dolly Parton. Musician, businesswoman, actor, author, humanitarian, one of the greatest songwriters and most beloved humans in this galaxy.

**Dolly Parton** (0:40)
Well, thank you so much. I'm happy to be with you. Thanks for all those compliments. I don't think I deserve all that.

**Adam Grant** (0:46)
I'm pretty sure you've earned them all and it's an honor to have you here.
I'm very excited to talk about your new book and your album. But I just want to start with a quote of yours that I loved, Dolly, which is, you once said, after you reach a certain age, they think you're over. Well, I will never be over. I'd love to hear more about that. What keeps you motivated at this stage in your career to keep writing and working?

**Dolly Parton** (1:11)
Well, first of all, I love the music. I was born to be a singer and a songwriter, and it was a song that brought me out of the Smoky Mountains to Nashville. It was a song that has taken me everywhere I want to go. Out of that song, so many wonderful things have branched out for me. Even if I had never made it in the business, I would have continued to do my music because I can't help that. That's just inside me. Even if I'd have done nothing more than be a waitress, I'd have been saving them tips to go down, do a demo and try to get my songs still recorded and make an album, put them. Like I said, I'd sell it out of the back of my car. All us artists have done that at one time or another, but I would continue to do it. But thank the Lord, I'm not having to do exactly that these days, but that's how much I love the business and how much I love the singing and the songwriting.

**Adam Grant** (2:03)
That's beautiful. Well, you've also reinvented yourself very recently. Run, Rose, Run is your first ever novel, and of course, it comes with an album.
We'd love to know what motivated you to write fiction and why now?

**Dolly Parton** (2:16)
Well, James Patterson, one of the world's greatest writers ever, he contacted me and asked if I would be interested in writing a book with him. I thought, well, why me? You seem to be doing all right on your own. He said, I have an idea. I said, well, I'd love to hear what you got to say.
He flew to Nashville and we got together, and he told me that he had gone to school at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and had always loved it, and always wanted to write a book about Nashville. I thought, well, you've come to the right girl, because I know a whole lot about Nashville.
We talked about it and we came up with an idea to write about a young girl's struggles and you have to read the book. I can't tell you the ending, but she's running from something and running to something, the character Annie Lee, who will eventually become Rose when all the secrets are out. But anyway, we were working on the book, and all of a sudden, like a lock bulb went off in my head, I thought, well, duh, I'm from Nashville, I'm a songwriter. Why don't I just write an album to go along with it? It's almost like a soundtrack to the book. And I don't know that it's been done before, but it seemed to me to make sense.

**Adam Grant** (3:28)
We will have no spoilers today, but I would love to hear about the creative process and how the experience of telling a story with Patterson was similar to and different from working on a song.

**Dolly Parton** (3:40)
I don't have many co-writers when I write songs, very few actually, because I like the process of writing alone. It's a very sacred time to me, but I have written songs with a few other people.
It was like that, working with a co-writer on a book. But the process was pretty comfortable, actually, the way we decided to work. We would call each other, we'd talk by phone, e-mails, faxes, and then he would come down and visit every few months. I would send the lyrics to the songs, he'd send stuff back, and it was an unusual way to do it. But it didn't seem like a foreign thing to me, because I love stories, all my songs tell stories, and he's a storyteller, I'm a storyteller, so it seemed to work out really well.