Dolly Parton may be a successful country singer, successful and megarich, but she hasn’t forgotten her childhood in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. That’s the message she wants to convey in her music.
Dolly explained a little bit about how her songwriting process works. “You know,” she says, “When I was in my prime and hot on the country charts all people wanted to talk about was my boobs. Now that I’m eighty-five years old they don’t wanna talk about my boobs as much, thank God. So that leaves me free to talk about other stuff besides my boobs, and I can record important songs.
“My last record was a bluegrass record. Real austere, standards and all that. I record those for the critics. Nobody pays attention to critics anymore but I record ‘em anyway. I alternate, I do one the critics’ll like, for the prestige, and then my next record is always total crap, but it’ll sell a little better. Like, I just recorded a techno song with Billy Ray’s daughter, I keep forgettin’ her name. Miley. Real nice girl, she’s a lot like me if I had grown up rich and didn’t have no boobs. And it’s real bad. But my handlers keep tellin’ me it’ll sell a million copies. So maybe it will. But this new record’s a little bit of both. Got some pretty bad country music, but some of the lyrics are real serious. So I hope everybody’ll like it. I don’t write music no more, they just send me some canned crap. But I still write some of the lyrics. This is the best song I’ve wrote in a while.”
Dolly was kind enough to share with us the lyrics of her new song, “My Tennessee Home.” And here it goes:
My Tennessee home
We was quite poor
And we slept on the floor
Which was made of dirt
But we didn’t get hurt
Because we had Jesus
Yes, we had Jesus…in our hearts.
You know, you won’t ever roam
If you’ve got a home
That’s slightly less poor
Than my ole Tennessee home
Which was quite poor,
Oh I assure you it was.
Yes, I used to be quite poor
Though things are now quite sunny
But they want’t always sunny
And now I’ve got big money
But there wasn’t always money
Back in my Tennessee home
My Tennessee home.
Dolly was also kind of enough to explain her homespun yet culturally sensitive views on life in the modern world. She told us, “Even though I’ve had a successful career for fifty years, I like to keep things in perspective. I used to be a poor little girl, back ninety years ago. Now I buy poor people. I keep ‘em around the house, just to keep things colorful. Oh, I diversify. They’re not just White people, they’re from all over the world. A lot of ‘em are Black, some of them are Chinese. I’ve got a little Malaysian girl, she’s cute as can be. And half of ‘em are gay. Sometimes I have them do little errands, nothing too taxing. If you have some Asian people around you can learn a lot about them and then you feel good about yourself and then they can you cook you a real fine meal too.
“But I learn a lot from those people. The other day I was talkin’ to this one little old Asian girl ‘bout how when I was a little girl I had this little ol’ dog named Patches and how when I was little that little dog was the only entertainment I had and how I used to play with it. And she said, ‘Well, in my country we were so poor we had to eat dogs. Couldn’t keep no dogs around as pets.’ And I said, ‘Well, that sure is sad.’ So you learn somethin’ by listenin’ to people from other cultures. It’s very interesting and I hope people will open their eyes and their hearts to people like that. And I also hope they’ll open their eyes to Dolly Parton’s Glowing Pumpkin Christmas, which is opening next week. It’s open every year but this year it’s extra luminous. In fact they’re thinkin’ about changin’ the name to Dolly Parton’s Extra Luminous Pumpkin Parade, Pumpkin Christmas, somethin’ like that.”
Dolly left us with the following message: “Even though I’m now worth five billion dollars, and my theme park brings in about that much every year,I want everyone to know I grew up real poor. And I want everyone to know that Dollywood’s open year round. It’s the most visited attraction in the United States, and gay people are welcomed there, unlike ninety-nine per cent of Tennessee. So keep sendin’ me more money and I’ll keep writin’ more songs about how I used to be poor.”
