American Songwriter Throwback: Music is First Priority for Dolly Parton

This article first appeared in the March/April 1999 issue of American Songwriter Magazine.

Songs Are The Door To Parton’s Dreams

The saying is that you can’t go home again, but Dolly Parton has proved that statement wrong time and time again, most recently with her album Hungry Again.

In fact, Dolly prefers to think that she’s never really left home but has taken a little part of her East Tennessee Appalachian life with her wherever she has gone, whether it was to Nashville in 1964 or on to Los Angeles and beyond in the mid-’70s.

Sure enough, Dolly returned to East Tennessee to open Dollywood in 1986. The amusement park provides numerous jobs in the area where Dolly grew up (“most of them for my family,” Dolly says with a huge smile), and it is home for the National Foundation To Protect America’s Eagles. Parton has also established a number of scholarships and incentives for teens to stay in school and continue their education to earn college or trade school diplomas.

And what, you might ask, does all this have to do with songwriting? When it comes to Parton, the answer is everything. Someone as steeped in the mountain life and a sense of family as Parton was while growing up never forgets that background. It creeps into everything she does, writing songs included.

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Early on, it was evident in her songs such as “Coat Of Many Colors” and “Apple Jack” or in the sweet melancholy of “Little Andy.” Later it came out in her acting roles in Rhinestone, Steel Magnolias, and even Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. It wavered in and out of her recordings, cropping up again in her trio recording with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt or her recording venture with Heartsongs Davis on the White Limozeen project. More recently, her Heartsongs project returned to her roots with previously recorded self-penned songs like “To Daddy” and “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” as well as songs she says influenced her career, among them “Wayfaring Stranger,” “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” and “What A Friend We Have in Jesus.”

Parton called that album “the album I’d always wanted to do.” If that’s true, perhaps Hungry Again is the album she had to do. It takes her straight back to her musical roots with lyrics like the title track, which cuts to the chase with lyrics like “Sometimes to know just how far you’ve traveled, you’ve gotta go back to where you began. Sometimes, to know how good you’ve been eatin’, you need to go hungry again.”

In order to write the 12 songs on this album, Dolly took the above message to heart. She returned to East Tennessee to draw inspiration from the beautiful Smoky Mountains where she grew up. “I prayed and fasted before I started to write the songs on this album,” Parton says, outlining an approach more songwriters might try before sitting down to write their next hit. “I didn’t know exactly what I was supposed to be doing in my musical career or in my life, so I asked for guidance. Through that experience, I got closer to myself and to God. It was painful and lonely but inspiring as well.”

“I knew in my heart that my music had always been my number one priority (she’s always maintained she’s first and foremost a songwriter). It was the songs that I wrote and sang that took me out of the Smoky Mountains and all over the world. My songs are the door to every dream I’ve ever had and every success I’ve ever achieved. No matter what else I’ve had the good fortune to do, my first love is still my music. I’m still hungry for hit records, still hungry to sing, and still hungry to write songs for myself as well as others.”

Parton says she stayed at the old home place (called Tennessee Mountain Home) and continued to ask for guidance, and when inspiration came, she started writing the songs that became the basis for the new album. “I went back and forth between my Tennessee Mountain Home and my lake cottage outside of Nashville, and three months and 37 songs later, I had enough material to do this album.”

The songs run the gamut, from looking at the “good ole days” in Hungry Again to coming to terms with a relationship in “The Salt In My Tears.” She tells the story of a young singer-songwriter in “Blue Valley Songbird” and draws deeply from her gospel roots in “When Jesus Comes Calling For Me” and “Shine On.”

“I’ve always been a writer, and everything I write is based on something in my life,” Parton says. “I’ve had so many experiences that I can draw from, and this is certainly the most personal album I have ever done. It’s almost like I’m starting over. My real first love is still in my music.”

There are, of course, stories behind each song on the album. “Paradise Road” is about a poor child’s vivid imagination and is the only song that was started before Parton actually went to her mountain retreat.

“Both ‘Blue Valley Songbird,’ which is about a struggling girl from the Smoky Mountains, and ‘When Jesus Comes Calling For Me,’ about an old man reflecting on his life, have special meaning to me,” Parton says. “I’ve always written songs like these. ‘Blue Valley Songbird’ is not a true story of me, but everybody’s going to say it is. I just made it into a movie because I’m a storyteller, and I think it would make a wonderful movie, so we’re developing it into a television movie of the week.”

The first single from the album, “Honky Tonk Songs,” was aimed straight at the female market. Of all the songs on the project, it is perhaps the one aimed most precisely at radio.

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“I got to thinking that you have all these good old boys singing honky tonk songs about their broken hearts, but women are never allowed to do that,” Parton says. “Women need a way to mend their broken hearts, too! I think women singing honky tonk songs is an idea that’s way past its time. We can’t go have a beer and cry in it. We can’t go pick up a cowboy and dance with him or take him home or whatever. Men don’t want us honkytonkin’. I think a lot of times, men don’t want to let women be themselves. So when I thought about it, I became very inspired, and I wrote the song.”

The opposite end of that spectrum, of course, is “Shine On,” which Parton says, “I wrote it to have an intentional gospel feel, like ‘Amazing Grace.’ I wanted to keep the same feeling in the record, so we recorded it in this old church in the Smoky Mountains where my grandfather, Jake Owens, was pastor. We used the congregation in the church back home, and then we added other voices in Nashville.”

There’s little doubt that Parton will not have to rely on songs she’s already written for support. It’s just not feasible to think that this talented woman will ever stem the flow of her creative juices and never write another song.

While Parton considers her greatest creative outlet her writing, she also considers it her savings account. “My songs are like my children, and I’m expecting them to support me when I’m old!” she explains. Certainly, songs like “I Will Always Love You” will do just that.