Remembering Dolly Parton

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of maximumfun.org and is distributed by NPR.

Jesse Thorn (0:11)

It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn. By now you have probably heard the news. Dolly Parton died on August 25th, 2026 And in the days that followed, thousands of tributes to the late country singer poured out, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of words written about her work and her legacy. They wrote about her impact on country music, her efforts to promote literacy around the world, and what she meant to songwriters in Nashville and kids growing up in the mountains of Tennessee.

And perhaps most importantly, people wrote about the impact Dolly Parton had on them personally. I can tell you that there have only been a few people that have ever been booked on this show where when I heard we had booked them, I said, no, really? Dolly Parton was one of them. As incredible as the brand Dolly Parton is and was, I am such an extraordinary fan of her songwriting and her singing. I really think she might be the greatest American singer of the 20th century. I talked to her in 2012 It felt incredibly lucky that I got to do it. She had just written a book called Dream More, Celebrate the Dreamer in You.

Let's go to the tape of Dolly Parton.

Jesse Thorn (2:29)

It's really a pleasure to have you on the show, Ms. Parton. Thank you so much for joining us.

Dolly Parton (2:32)

Thank you so much. That took me way back there with Jolene. It's been around a long time, ain't it? Long enough to write a book.

Jesse Thorn (2:40)

The other day, I was at a thrift store, and I bought a Carter Family CD, and I was listening to it in my car.

And the thing that struck me about it was, you know, these songs recorded, a lot of them in the 50s, 40s, 50s, was how intensely sad they were, how this music was about, you know, there were songs about heaven, but heaven really just felt like a sort of a respite from the world. And I wonder if you grew up listening to music like that.

Dolly Parton (3:20)

I not only grew up listening to it, I grew up hearing it from my mother and singing it myself and writing that kind of stuff. I mean, I've written some of the saddest songs. Some of them say they're plum pitiful, as I always like to say.

But that's just the way it is in the country, because a lot of those stories are true, and it's just kind of embedded in your soul somehow. All those old songs and stories, they say that's how people used to carry the news about all those great old stories before the newspapers and all that write about the tragedies in their areas. So I think people really feel like it's happened to them or their family. But I love that old stuff. I've written some of the saddest songs when I was at my happiest.

Jesse Thorn (4:05)

You know, I grew up in the city in the 80s. I don't really understand what it means to have grown up in a family of 12 in, you know, a one-room house in the mountains.

What is it that someone like me maybe doesn't understand at first blush about that life?

Dolly Parton (4:27)

Well, I think when you grow up in the mountains like that, you know, I was born in a one-room house. As our family started to expand, we did have a couple more rooms. You know, we had, we always said we had three rooms and a path, for some have three rooms and a bath. We had the outdoor toilet and we had running water when we'd run and get it, you know, that kind of thing. But it was just the way of life back in the mountains, not just us, but all the people that had big families are just poor and you just make do. You don't think about it and I always tell, you know, people say, well, how did you have any privacy? See, there were six girls and six boys in our family. Of course, we started marrying off and stuff as we, you know, as the years went by. But people say, how did you have any privacy? I said, well, my favorite story is I said, well, we had a pan of water and then we'd had a little curtain that would pull and we would wash up as far as possible and then we'd wash down as far as possible. And then when the boys cleared the room, we washed possible.